What’s In the Middle of the Dough?

Every time I experiment at Taco Bell I feel like I take my life into my hands. Okay, that’s a bit overdramatic, but the fact is that the Bell does some stuff really well, but when they get off track from their basics – their tacos, their nachos, their burritos – things can get pretty weird, and not always in a good way. For every Doritos Locos Taco, which is amazing, you get a Cantina Chicken Avocado Sauced Coleslaw Chicken Gordita Sandwich, which is something I admit I made up but you have to admit that it sounded real, sounded awful, and you still wanted to try it.

Such was the case with their Steak Cheesy Street Chalupas, taco-like creations that apparently were fan-favorites when they debuted last year. “Fan favorites,” you say? Those sound like a guaranteed winner right there. And yet, after getting the two-pack of fatty tacos (because they come in pairs and not singular), I’m still not certain what the fans of these were thinking. In some ways they’re okay, but there’s a lot wrong with this gordita duo and I have no clue why they managed to achieve “fan favorite” status.

As per Taco Bell, the Steak Cheesy Street Chaulpas are cheesy street-sized chalupa shells filled with marinated, grilled steak, Jalapeño Ranch sauce, and an onion & cilantro blend. In essence what you get is a double-layered gordita shell, bound together with melted cheese, and then that shell is wrapped around the other ingredients, like a very fat, very doughy little taco wrap. I went with the steak version instead of the cantina chicken because I’ve already tried their cantina chicken for this site in the past and I frankly wasn’t impressed. I figured steak was a safer option. Now I wonder if I was wrong.

In theory there’s nothing specifically wrong with any of the ingredients included in this meal. In practice, though, everything was wrong. For starters, the double-wrapped gordita shell was too much bread for this little meal. When I bit into the street chalupa all I ended up with was a mouth full of dough. It was very chewy, very soft, and essentially covered over the texture of everything else. Since the shell was soaked in the ranch sauce that comes in the chalupa, I ended up with very thick, wet bites of dough that felt very unpleasant in my mouth.

Then I tasted the ranch. It’s very sweet, lacking that tang I expect from ranch. I know it says this is jalapeño ranch, but I totally didn’t taste any heat from the sauce. It was sweet, almost sickly so, but lacked any kind of spicy bite at all. I was able to improve that by throwing diablo sauce onto my taco, which kicked it up nicely, but on its own there is no actual heat to this jalapeño ranch, which is disappointing. Sweet and not spicy is even worse than just a gross, sweet ranch.

I think the steak and onions were fine, although I will admit they were largely lost in the texture of the shell and the sweetness of the ranch. The few bites I got of steak were good, although the onion was completely lost. But I will also admit that these chalupas were criminally understuffed. I want to blame my restaurant, but I looked at pictures and it seems like these are always understuffed, so the real fault is on Taco Bell. This is how these things are supposed to be made, and they’re awful.

So now, I will not be getting these again. They’re too soft, too sickly, and pretty underwhelming. Frankly, they were really gross and I regretted getting lured in to try these (even if it did prompt a review for the site). I will do a lot for this site, including trying things I will regret later from Taco Bell. I won’t, however, get these again. I can’t do a second article about them, so there’s no incentive to eat something this gross again, especially not of my own free will. I have no clue why these are fan favorites since they’re one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten from Taco Bell, and that counts just about everything else on their menu.

Fact is I went there to try the new Mountain Dew Midnight Baja Blast that Taco Bell is now offering and I couldn’t even do that. They’d run out of the new flavor a day before I even got there (since it is what everyone wants to try) and the lady at the counter didn’t even know when they’d get more. It sounds great, a kind of tropical Dew with passion fruit flavors. I guess I’ll just have to wait a month or two for the next time I feel like eating something disgusting from Taco Bell to see how it tastes. I’m a little sad about that.

Still, whatever you do, avoid the Steak Cheesy Street Chalupas. Maybe the Cantina Chicken version is better, although I do have my doubts. I can just confirm that these chalupas are very, very gross. If you have to try toe Midnight Dew for yourself, stick to the basic tacos to pair with it.