Panuchos Yucatecos, sort of…

We love making tostadas around here. We always seem to have some extra lettuce, tomato, onion, cilantro and maybe a bit of leftover grilled chicken or taco-seasoned meat and some refried beans and cheese. All you have to do is fry some corn tortillas until they’re crisp and then augment them with your choice of the above toppings (the kids love any opportunity to “build” their own dinner, buffet-style). If you have a little sliced avocado or sour cream, you’re golden. So, when I saw this recipe for Panuchos Yucatecos on Serious Eats, it looked so good, I knew we needed to try it. I mean, really, the beans INSIDE the tortilla? how cool is that? Then you’d have the top completely free to add all kinds of things.

The problem is, though, that when I fried the tortillas, they didn’t puff up and create a “cavity” like the ones in the panuchos recipe, so we ended up pretty much just having our standard tostadas (or chalupas, or whatever you call them in your neck of the woods…) Still tasty, but not exactly the original plan. Contributing further to the failure of this experiment, I made up the pickled onions in advance, but forgot to get them out to serve with the dinner…they were very tasty, but we got about as far away from this original recipe as possible (even though what we did make was quite good), so will definitely have to try again. I’m wondering if the tortillas that I had weren’t fresh enough and if maybe some fresher ones might puff better? I’ll keep you all posted…