The fast-food gimmick that became an unlikely muse for chefs ...Middle East

By Luke Fortney, The New York Times

In 2020, Fernando Strohmeyer was scrolling through Reddit in the back of Aunt Ginny’s, a dive bar in Queens, New York, when a video of someone making a homemade Crunchwrap Supreme caught his eye.

It didn’t matter that he had never tasted the Taco Bell original. Recipes for the fast-food staple have spread online like open-source code. Soon, he was making one, too.

From his small kitchen at Aunt Ginny’s, Strohmeyer serves six-sided wraps that are browned on both sides and filled with the 14-hour pernil he learned to make from his Puerto Rican mother. His version — “the Crispwrap Ultimate” — is considerably thicker than the source material, with a cross-section that looks more like your actual aunt’s seven-layer dip.

“As long as you have that crunchy thing in the middle and you know how to fold it, you can put anything in there,” said Strohmeyer, 44.

Introduced by Taco Bell as a special on June 22, 2005, the Crunchwrap Supreme wildly outperformed company expectations, becoming the fastest-selling menu item in the fast-food chain’s history. Twenty years later, it is as much a novelty food as a playful framework for chefs. They reinterpret its nostalgic layers — ground beef, nacho cheese, a tostada shell, lettuce, tomato and sour cream enrobed by a 12-inch flour tortilla — with ingredients that are deeply personal.

At Cariñito, a pop-up taqueria in Manhattan, owners David Verástegui and Joaquin de la Torre stuff Sichuan-spiced ground beef into a miniature Crunchywrap. At Kim Jong Grillin in Portland, Oregon, “Chopped” competitor Han Ly Hwang folds bulgogi and pickled banchan into a Munchwrap Extreme.

Chefs Oliver Poilevey and Marcos Ascencio bathe their Chingón Crunchwrap in buttermilk crema and chile de arbol salsa at Taqueria Chingón in Chicago. And Ali Elreda, the owner of Fatima’s Grill, fills his Crunch Wrap with chicken shawarma and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at six locations of the restaurant across the country.

These chefs have just as much fun coming up with recipes as they do trademark-skirting names. When Ali Zaman, a first-generation Afghan American, opened his restaurant Blue Hour in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the menu had to have a Crunchwrap.

Sowwy — a Cwunch Wap. “Our big fear in the beginning was we were going to get sued,” said Zaman, 29. Zaman and his business partner Mohamed Ghiasi made several upgrades to the classic: halal ground beef, homemade queso, a better flour tortilla.

“Being raised by immigrant parents, my introduction to American culture is associated with fast food,” he said, adding, “In high school, Taco Bell was my diet.”

The fast-food chain, founded in 1962, played a complicated yet pivotal role in popularizing Mexican dishes, like crunchy tacos, among the American public. But with the Crunchwrap Supreme, it ushered an original dish into the culinary canon. Strohmeyer of Aunt Ginny’s no longer views the Crunchwrap as a gimmick owned by Taco Bell. “It’s an acceptable form of selling food, like the burrito,” he said.

The Crunchwrap Supreme spent more than a decade languishing in the mind of Lois Carson, a longtime Taco Bell product developer. “In the beginning, there were people who didn’t like the idea,” Carson told the New Yorker in 2023.

Her bosses believed it was too slow to fold and too strange to market. But her design addressed a long-standing problem: Taco Bell didn’t sell sandwiches, and its crunchy tacos were challenging to eat in a car. In an abandoned 2007 patent application for a “comestible wrap product,” Carson noted that “customers eating traditional tostadas are generally forced either to use eating utensils or to contend with beans and cheese on their fingers.”

It is nearly impossible to patent food recipes in the United States, allowing indie Crunchwraps not only to exist, but also to flourish. And while Taco Bell maintains a trademark on the name, it rarely enforces it when it comes to independent restaurant operators.

“Times have definitely changed,” said Liz Matthews, the chief food innovation officer for Taco Bell. “In the past, you would develop things and you would keep it secret and you would launch it.” Now, the imitations are essentially free advertising.

The Crunchwrap’s runaway success was about more than convenience, said Gustavo Arellano, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times and author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.”

When the menu item debuted in 2005, Americans were starting to embrace fusion dishes like Korean tacos and sushi burritos. “You’re seeing a culture and a consumer base that’s more than happy to take on a culinary mash,” Arellano said. The Crunchwrap “really captured what people were wanting to eat at the time.”

Kris Yenbamroong, an owner and the chef of Night + Market in Los Angeles, added a Thai Crunchwrap to his menu in 2023. Even before rapper Action Bronson called it one of his “favorite things on Earth” last year, it was a hit: The restaurant sells as many as 20 wraps a night, and it’s not uncommon for a table of four to share two.

His Grapow Crunchwrap Supreme replaces the tostada with a fried wonton wrapper and the ground beef with pad grapow gai. These ingredients don’t appear together anywhere else on the Night + Market menu. But wrapped inside a flour tortilla, they make a whole lot of sense.

“Fast food menus are designed around a finite number of ingredients,” said Yenbamroong, 43. “As long as it has that pleasure quotient, it’s easy to swap things in.”

Arellano, 46, has long resisted the original’s charms. In a 2018 episode of the David Chang show “Ugly Delicious,” he ordered one for food critic Jonathan Gold, but refused to try it himself.

To prepare for an interview with The New York Times, he finally caved. “The tortilla was gummy,” he said of the Crunchwrap he ate early this month. “The beef was salty. The lettuce and tomatoes were limp.”

Still, he understood the appeal.

“You see the possibility of something great there.”

RECIPE: Copycat Taco Bell Crunchwrap

A wildly popular novelty snack from Taco Bell, the Crunchwrap Supreme combines elements of a burrito with the tidier portability of a sandwich, in a stacked, layered and wrapped tortilla package. It delights for two practical reasons (low cost and convenience) and two culinary ones (crunch and cheesiness). An at-home version is a fun party trick — and it is endlessly customizable. Once you cook up the assertively spiced ground beef, the rest of this recipe is basically assembly: Start with the largest flour tortillas you can find, then layer on the meat (or crispy tofu, or refried beans), cloak it in queso, stack a tostada on top, pile on some chipotle sour cream, lettuce and pico de gallo, then fold and sear. Would you spend less buying just one at a Taco Bell? Yes, but your ratio of filling to tortilla will be paltry compared to this homemade version, which cheaply and happily feeds a crowd.

By Alexa Weibel

Yield: 4 servings

Total time: 45 minutes

Ingredients

For the filling:

For assembly:

Preparation

1. Prepare your filling: In a large nonstick skillet, heat the oil over medium-high. Add the beef and onion, season aggressively with salt and pepper, and cook, breaking into tiny pieces, until the beef starts to brown, about 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste, then the cumin, paprika, ancho chile powder and garlic powder, and cook, stirring occasionally, until fragrant and any excess liquid evaporates, about 3 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a medium bowl. Using a paper towel, wipe out the skillet.

2. Prepare the spicy sour cream: In a small bowl, mix together the sour cream and adobo sauce; season to taste with salt and pepper.

3. Prepare the assembly line: On a large flat surface, set out the flour tortillas. (You’ll need your tortillas to be pliable without tearing, so if need be, you can warm them directly in the skillet over medium heat to soften just until soft and pliable.) Add 1/2 cup filling to the center of one tortilla, flattening the filling into an even, 4-inch circle just a bit smaller than the width of your tostadas. Spread with 3 tablespoons queso over the filling. Top the mixture with a tostada, pressing it slightly to make sure the meat mixture is evenly distributed. Evenly spread 2 scant tablespoons of the spicy sour cream on top of the tostada. Top evenly with a heaping 1/4 cup shredded lettuce, then 3 tablespoons drained pico de gallo.

4. Enclose the filling by folding over one flap of the tortilla “border” to cover the filling, repeating the pleat every inch or two. The tortilla should fully enclose your filling, but an opening smaller than 1 inch at the center is just fine. (You can also use slightly less filling, or add a piece of tortilla to cover the gap; see tip.)

5. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in the skillet over medium, then carefully add the wrap, setting it seam side down. Cook until golden and crisp, 2 to 3 minutes per side.

6. Serve immediately, with hot sauce and the remaining spicy sour cream, for dipping or slathering as you eat, dousing the wrap bite by bite. Repeat with remaining wraps, adding oil as needed to the pan before searing.

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Tips

If you can’t find 10-inch tortillas, opt for the very largest ones you can find. Ideally, you want the tortilla to fully cover the fillings. If you’re having trouble, cut (or tear!) 2- or 3-inch pieces from another tortilla and set it on top of your salsa, in the center, before folding over the tortilla to fully enclose.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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