Fast Food Review: Taco Bell 1/2 Pound Beef Burritos

Some of you may remember — actually, I hope most of you will, or else you might have a brain disorder — about two years ago when Taco Bell revamped its value menu with a bunch of new items. One of them was the double beef and cheese burrito, made with ground beef and nacho cheese, sold for 89 cents with the idea being that it was competing with basic cheeseburgers sold elsewhere for a similar price. And it had double the beef of a regular beef burrito!

What you may not have noticed is that it recently, quietly disappeared from the bargain menu. And shortly thereafter, these showed up:

The same burrito, with one or two added things from the existing menu, justifying a price hike. I’d love to tell you how much of a price hike, but Taco Bell’s infuriating website only gives prices for the value menu, and not regular items…as far as I can tell. Search for yourself to try and prove me wrong if you wish. My recollection is that these are about 50 cents more. And yet they’re not better.

Half a pound of food sounds like a lot. A half-pound burger is big, right? Yeah, but that half-pound is just the meat in the burger. These burritos weigh half a pound TOTAL. They aren’t actually that big for burritos, even fast-food ones. Think about Del Taco’s half-pound bean and cheese burrito. It only feels big because there’s only so much bean paste a guy can eat at once.

I’ve now tried two of these three new ones — the combo burrito seemed superfluous, since it’s just a slightly bigger version of a beef and bean burrito, and anyone who has eaten at Taco Bell in the history of the chain can easily imagine what it will taste like.

So I’ve had the nacho crunch burrito and the cheesy potato burrito, and both have the same major deficiency – not enough nacho cheese. This may be in part because I don’t like sour cream, and order the burritos without it. But in doing so, the final product becomes too dry.

Especially the potato one, good lord. It’s been years since I’ve had a Taco bell breakfast burrito, but I recall it having tater tots inside. I was hoping they still used them, but like everything else at Taco Bell over the years, the chain is cheaping out. These are just square cuts of frozen potato covered in seasoned salt. because the beef and the nacho sauce are not salty enough, apparently. And like your average pre-frozen steak fries, they have a texture like ashes and sand. And they appear to be the primary ingredient, at least in the one I had.

Mileage may vary, a lot…because looking at the picture, I see that the nacho crunch burrito looks to have tomatoes in it. Mine didn’t. So maybe reviewing it isn’t totally fair, but service is a part of the deal. Tomatoes would have added some needed texture and moistness. The red tortilla strips are the opposite of something for nothing — nothing for something. A tasteless, pointless addition to any menu item except as a means to pointing out that something has a lot of ingredients.

I ordered a volcano burrito not long ago and they didn’t put any volcano sauce in it. It occurs to me that overall, the Bell has not been exceedingly competent lately in the training of employees. But at least they don’t use those oval, easy-to-drop trays any more.

I can’t recommend these burritos, mainly because I think Taco Bell’s ground beef is so cheap and nasty that it needs to be consumed with ingredients that sufficiently disguise the flavor…like volcano sauce. But if they want to put together a chicken burrito with nacho cheese — and given that in time, Taco Bell inevitably comes up with every possible combination of its core ingredients, this is an inevitability — I’ll be all for that.