When you're in a Mexican restaurant, if a taco salad, the kind served in an edible deep-fried flour tortilla bowl, is one of your favorite menu items, or, if you prepare taco salad at home often enough to merit wanting to serve it restaurant-style, in an edible bowl, you should know there is an alternative to deep-frying them. A small investment of about $15.00 will get you four fluted bowl molds that will enable you to bake professional looking tortilla bowls in the oven.
Not a fearless fryer? Baked is the way to go.
Serving taco salad in edible bowls is mealtime fun. While they lend a festive, impressive "you cared enough to make the bowls" touch to the meal, they allow family and friends to add crunch to their salad as they work their way down, through and around all the goodies in the bowl. By using a set or two of tortilla bowl molds, the bowls all bake at the same, at the same rate of speed, and emerge uniform in color and shape -- they can even be stacked like plates for a party.
Fold & place 1, 8" flour tortilla in bottom of each mold:
Open tortillas & gently press into the fluted perimeters:
Place molds directly on center rack of preheated 350º oven:
Bake until lightly & nicely browned, about 10 minutes:
Cool in pans 5-6 minutes, remove from pans & use:
Making Baked Restaurant-Style Taco Salad Bowls: Recipe yields instructions to bake as many taco salad bowls as you want to.
Special Equipment List: 4-8 fluted bowl molds
Cook's Note: I am a fearless fryer, and, while deep-frying tortilla bowls is admittedly a little harder than baking them, nothing compares to a tortilla bowl fresh out of the fryer. That said, once again, a small investment, $15.00-ish, in a metal, one- or two-piece fryer-basket will make this task easy-as-pie. Learn ~ How to Deep-Fry Restaurant-Style Taco Salad Bowls ~. Your family and friends will thank you. Each bowl, from start to finish, only takes 2 1/2 minutes, and, they can be made 1-2 days ahead of serving too.
"We are all in this food world together." ~ Melanie Preschutti
(Recipe, Commentary and Photos courtesy of Melanie's Kitchen/Copyright 2019)
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