What is the greatest burrito ingredient? [Think Tank]

An army, Napoleon observed, marches on its stomach.  The Overthinking It army, on the other hand, rolls along on cylinders of fresh flour tortilla, stuffed to bursting with a delicious melange of beans, rice, meat, salsa, pico-de-gallo, sour cream, and who knows what else.  Today’s Think Tank will attempt to answers perhaps the most important question facing our society today:  what should I get in my burrito?

We are very pleased this week to welcome a very special celebrity judge!*  Based on your feedback, we may invite** more celebrity judges in the future, so sound off in the comments and let us know, y’hear?

* Note:  no real celebrities were harmed, or involved, in the creation of this blog post.

** i.e. impersonate.

Barbacoa (shredded, spicy, barbeque beef)—Lee

My mouth is literally watering as I write this.

I was unaware of barbacoa until Chipotle introduced it as a menu item a few years ago. Barbacoa blows away the other meat competition (chicken, pork, beef) for two important reasons: 1) it’s packed with crazy spices (chipotle adobo, cumin, cloves, garlic and oregano) and 2) it’s tender and moist beyond my ability to describe in written words. Notice the pool of grease juice in which the meat resides. That’s concentrated awesomeness.

As if I needed any additional proof of barbacoa’s superiority, I brought the statistics with me. Read ’em and weep. For a single 5 oz serving, barbacoa packs the following:

Calories: 285

Calories From Fat: 143

Fat: 16g

Barbacoa is the leading meat on all three statistics.

But perhaps more important than barbacoa’s standalone prowess is how its abundantly flowing grease juice affects other ingredients. Just like a superstar athlete who makes his/her teammates play at a higher level, barbacoa enhances the other ingredients with its flavor and moistness. It kicks the entire burrito up a notch. Barbacoa. It’s the LeBron James of burrito ingredients.

Sour cream—Perich

The basic burrito contains refried beans, Mexican rice and meat of some sort. That’s all a burrito needs to be a burrito by definition. These three ingredients are enough to make the burrito a culinary masterpiece, appealing to such a wide variety of tastes and textures that it becomes baroque. You can dial up various settings on the tri-cornered Spicy / Hearty / Chewy spectrum by adding salsa, additional meats or guacamole.

The genius of sour cream, however, is that it steps entirely outside of the paradigm. You wouldn’t think that a burrito needed something cool, sweet or colloidal in texture. But without sour cream, a burrito’s just mindless indulgence. It lacks the descant, highlighting it at the top of the scale. No burrito is complete without an ingredient that is not spicy, hearty or chewy. And only sour cream fits that mold.

A burrito can be assembled without sour cream. But it’s never truly perfect without it.

Carnitas (Basically like the Barbacoa except it’s pork and trust me it’s better)—Stokes

The greatest recipe in the world has three ingredients, which I will share with you now.
1) Pig.
2) Salt.
3) Time.

The third one is, perhaps, the most important. There are cuts of pork that you can cook quickly.  Chops, loins and the like.  But these are all lazy, flavorless muscles, weak and coddled, responsible for things like maintaining the pig’s posture.  I ask you, does this guy look like he spends a lot of energy on posture?

Then there are the go-out-and-get-stuff-done muscles.  These take time, no matter what else you do. But no matter what else you do, it will be time well spent.

Oh, for a Bavarian hog shank, robed in a sheet of crackling rind, roasted for hours on a spit!  Oh, for a pulled pork butt, baked all afternoon in a smokey North Carolina barbecue pit, until each — individual — fiber — falls melting off the bone!  Chinese “red cooking,” Filipino adobo… it’s all the same thing.  And lest we forget, bacon, which seems to fry up so quickly, spends hours or months in a brine or a smoker before you ever get your grubby little hands on it.  Pig + salt + time.  The regional variations are just icing on the, uh, the meaty, porcine, cake.

But hey, icing is pretty delicious too.  And Carnitas, Mexican cuisine’s particular version of the porky golden ratio, deserves special recognition.

Carnitas. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth — Car. Ni. Tas.  My sin, my soul!  The procedure is similar to American barbecue:  take a hog butt, salt it, and cook it until it loses structural integrity.  The mexican version loses the smoke, and thus, one would imagine, a lot of flavor, but it makes up for it through the judicious application of LARD.  The meat is cubed, seasoned with cumin, pepper, and salt, and then baked in a pig-fat bath. Think slow roasting brings out the flavor?  How about you reserve judgement until you’ve tried slow-deep-fat-frying, because that is really what the process entails.  The result, carnitas, may just be the least healthy, most tasty, substance on the planet.

Now some might claim that I have basically hijacked the Think Tank here.  “Okay, carnitas is delicious, fine. You’ve made your point. Is it really the single most important ingredient in a burrito?”

Well pilgrim, if you put it in a burrito, then yes.  Yes it is.

Cilantro—Mlawski

Sweet, a little tangy, leafy but not in a bad way… cilantro truly is the king of herbs.  By adding a burst of flavor right where it is needed, cilantro (to paraphrase The Big Lebowski) really brings a burrito together.

Consider a burrito from the best of the burrito franchises, Chipotle.  Although cilantro, on its own, is not a choice from one of those silver bins at your local Chipotle store, it is nevertheless a vital ingredient of both the guacamole and the cilantro-lime rice.  What would cilantro-lime rice be without the cilantro?  Lime rice?  Ese, please.

Cilantro is arguably the most important flavor in both the Mexican and Indian food traditions, which themselves are arguably the two greatest cuisines the world has ever seen.  (French?  Feh.  Does French cuisine have a dish as beautiful as this:

Or this?

Or this?

I doubt it.  And what do these three dishes have in common?  Cilantro.)

Cilantro is also a common garnish in Chinese, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and African dishes.  So let’s be honest here.  Those of you who hate cilantro are probably racist.

But Overthinkingit.com is a pop culture blog, not a foodie blog, so let’s talk pop culture.  Lately, the Internet has come out AGAINST CILANTRO.  The second hit on a Google search of the word “cilantro” after the wikipedia article is a site called “I Hate Cilantro!”  (My antivirus program won’t let me open the site. Evidently AVG is another ticked off cilantro fan.  Here’s another cilantro-hating website that my computer will let me open.)  Lately, it seems everywhere I look, someone on the Internet is raging against cilantro.  Cilantro, possibly the best herb in the history of herbs!

I can’t believe that a majority of people on the Internet hate cilantro.  (Unless a majority of people on the Internet are racists.)  So I speak now to you, the silent majority, the cilantro lovers out there.  Let loose your song!  Let your words ring out from the rooftops and the Mexican restaurants: We Love Cilantro!  Cilantro is King!
Queso—Wrather

At its best, the burrito represents a synthesis of everything that is good in food and in society. It is both phallic and yonic, assertively thrusting into your mouth while tenderly enclosing its precious contents. It represents a marriage of primitive man’s earliest labors, both the hunt for delicious meat to roast on the fire and also the agriculture necessary to produce wheat or corn for the tortillas, as well as beans to accompany the meant. (Rice, I would argue, represents a turning away from the Platonic form the burrito, a dilution of its essential burrito-ness. Notice you don’t see anyone here sticking up for rice. It’s filler.)

Before the burrito is constructed, the ingredients are separate. Rice in one bowl, delicious delicious carnitas in another (sorry, I can’t stay impartial), cilantro on the cutting board, tortilla on the plate. But through an alchemical culinary magic, the finished burrito is a unified entity, its contents a heterogeneous melange but a melange nonetheless.

What, you may ask, what is the glue that holds these disparate forces of food and of culture together? What can unite the masculine and the feminine, the hunter and the farmer, the meat and the beans? What sticky, unctuous, ooze can overcome boundaries of cuisine and society to achieve the Epicurean harmony that has been the dream of right-thinking gastronomes since, well, Epicurus?

The answer? Cheese.

Cheese, itself a product of culinary alchemy, and itself an exemplar of balance and harmony—both a solid and a liquid, full of both fat and protein—is what gives the burrito its special, transcendent magic.

Don’t believe me? Just try to keep your mouth from watering:

Love—Fenzel

The greatest ingredient in a burrito doesn’t come from a beast of the field or a tree of the forest – or even from a corn processing plant in Iowa. No, the best ingredient in a burrito isn’t stocked in the walk-in or kept on the hot line behind the sneeze guard.

Every day, when that burritista looks him or herself in the mirror, groggy and hung over from a night of too many tequila shots or dollar High Life drafts, and imagines all the people he or she will make happy with the gift of burritti — the anger and hatred the customers bring into his or her place of work, and the mollified corpulence they take home when they leave — there comes from deep deep inside an upwelling of something special — that special ingredient, that secret sauce, if you will, that makes a burrito so much more than just a Mexican sandwich.

For no plant or animal but the human being can put in the burrito what really makes it turn your frown upside down.

The best ingredient is love. It always has been.

And pinto beans. Fuck yeah, pinto beans.

And now, the verdict, from our celebrity judge, Mr. Antonio Banderas!   [Cheers, crowd noise.]

¡No, no, no, no, por el ultimo tiempo, no! Es impossible.  ¡Ya basta!  No lo puede tolerar más.  Soy Español.  ¡No Mexicano, no Dominicano, no Puertoriqueño, Eeee-spaaaa-ñol! ¿Cómo puedo conducir esto a dentro de sus grosos, gringos, cráneos?

Tengo un poco de simpatía por ustedes.  Un poquito. Olvidamos, por un momento, de mi collaboración de cinco peliculas con Pedro Almodóvar (que es solamente, como, lo mas famoso director de cine Español en el mundo). Bueno, lo olvidamos.  Ustedes tiene razón: yo también he trabajado en muchas películas de Robert Rodriguez, y como sabe todo el mundo, todas las cosas que se toca uno Mexicano, se convierte en Mexicano. Estoy seguro que George Clooney tiene el mismo problema.  ¿Pero que? ¿Que me dices? ¿Robert Rodriguez no esta Mexicano tampoco, pero Tejano? (¿Ustedes tiene la sarcasma en los Estados Unidos, verdad?)

Sin embargo, yo comprendo porque estan confusadas. Al fin y al cabo, telaraña-gallo ducha-bolsas como ustedes estan muy tropo ocupados para, yo no se, buscarme en la putada Wikipedia. Caramba.

Todos los dias con esta chingadera.  Y ahora me preguntan que es lo mejor ingrediente para burritos?  ¿Para burritos? ¡PAELLA VALENCIANA, cabrones!