Try ordering a breakfast burrito in Austin, and people will look at you like you’re talking smack about Willie Nelson. As ubiquitous to Texas as the bagel is to New York, the breakfast taco is sacred here.
Smaller and simpler than burritos, breakfast tacos are typically made with just two or three ingredients: egg, cheese, and potato, or a meat like chorizo or bacon. Burritos are prone to additions like veggies, beans, or rice. Tacos took hold as a breakfast food over a hundred years ago in Northern Mexico. But the version Austinites know and love—made with fluffy scrambled eggs and melted cheese—is pure Tex-Mex: a blend of Mexican and Anglo-German ingredients that really caught on in Corpus Christi in the 1950s. Despite its perfection, the cuisine hasn’t taken off outside the Lone Star State.
“The breakfast taco is more localized to Texas,” explains Jeffrey Pilcher, food historian and author of Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. “By the time people started finding out about it, the burrito had already filled the Mexico breakfast category for most people in the U.S.” That dominance likely stems from its flour tortilla, which is more readily refrigerated and distributed than its corn counterpart…