Navajo Taco (Arizona)
Perhaps one of the most divisive topics plaguing the world today is what qualifies a food as a sandwich. At its core, I’d argue that a sandwich is two slices of bread with something in the middle. So, by that definition, I’m a believer that burgers and hot dogs qualify as sandwiches. Perhaps they’re not the purest form of the craft, but they sneak in under the umbrella.
On the flip side, I don’t think that tacos or open-faced “sandwiches” qualify as a sandwich. I’m not going to get into a big, well-thought-out argument about this. Just know that if you think that those things are sandwiches, you’re wrong. It sucks to be wrong, so I feel for you. Go make yourself a nice PB&J — something we can all agree classifies as a sandwich — and eat your feelings. It won’t make you right, but it will maybe help regulate your blood sugar so you don’t feel so hangry about my telling you that you’re wrong.
I say all this because last night was week three of Sandwich Sundays. That meant, according to the list-that-started-it-all, Arizona was up to bat with the Navajo Taco. Much like Alaska’s sandwich, the definition for the Navajo Taco was rather vague: “This open-faced sandwich is a fried flatbread with meat, beans, cheese, and lettuce.”
Right on the outset, things aren’t looking too sandwich-y. First of all, is it a taco? Or an open-faced sandwich? Buy me some margaritas and we can debate all day long about the qualities that may-or-may-not qualify a taco or an open-faced sandwich as a sandwich, but a taco can never be an open-faced sandwich and an open-faced sandwich can never be a taco.
Don’t @ me. I will die on this hill.
I did the quickest of quick Internet searches to see what was really up with a Navajo Taco, and found out that it’s traditionally a fried bread topped with ground meat, beans and traditional taco-like toppings. So, it’s taco fillings on top of a fried disc.
Still not a sandwich.
However, I did read a few things that said you can top it with whatever meat, beans, and toppings that you want. It feels like the thing that makes it a Navajo taco is the bread at the bottom. So, in a fit of “we fannnnnccy” we decided to make a slow-roasted pork Verde as our meat topping. We also saw no way around making the flatbread on our own, so we made the dough and fried up those puppies all by ourselves.
By the time dinner rolled around, elements of this sandwich had been at work for a solid six hours. Plus, we never fry anything at home; it’s generally too messy and at the end of the day, if we want something deep-fried, it usually tastes better if we go get that thing from a place that knows how to fry things well. That said, we fried up the frybread all by ourselves (read: my husband did it while I kept our kiddo away from the bubbly-hot oil). So we were pretty excited to dig into this not-a-sandwich bad boy.
It was….“meh.”
First, I think we should take a little bit of blame. The bread was tougher than we expected and we needed a fork and a knife to get cut into it. This makes me think we didn’t do the best job with the dough. This is why we typically leave fried-anything to the experts.
The meat alone was really good. It was very tender, had that “cooked all day” quality and the Verde sauce gave it a nice kick. But I think I could have done a little better with it. I think next time I’d be more liberal with the spices and I also feel that using my crockpot would have been a better choice than doing it stovetop.
But even with my faux pas accounted for, it still 1) isn’t a sandwich, and 2) wasn’t my jimmy-jam. Even if the bread wasn’t tough, it still wasn’t something you can pick up easily with your hands. And, let's be honest, unless you own a sandwich shop with a neon sign that says “we proudly make our own bread!” one of the perkiest-perks of making a sandwich is buying the bread.
I mean, just because you like lettuce on a sandwich doesn’t mean you have to grow it all by yourself in your garden, right? Or make your own mustard or raise your own chicken. It’s more about pulling the ingredients together in an artful way than it is about making them yourself.
So, sorry Arizona, your sandwich is an early favorite to be least-favorite on the list. At least you still have, um, lots of cactus and desert, I guess?
