Taco Tico Meat

Everyone who grew up in a town with a Taco Tico will understand why I would go to the trouble to duplicate the meat. I've tried this before but recently I had a couple breakthroughs in Tico meat technology. I was at a graduation recently where the host bought 60 pounds of Tico meat and had it in a big vat. I got to see it in bulk up close and that really helped. The other thing I did was buy a Tico burger and bring it home for dissection. Here are the results:

There were 2 surprising conclusions from my dissection.
1) There is oatmeal in the meat.
2) There are NO onions in the meat.

Aside from that, one thing that I noticed was that the meat was pretty silky and gooey. It made me think that there was cream of mushroom soup or something in the mix, but there wasn't. I'll explain below. The other thing to notice about the meat is that it was broken up into very fine particles. I got pretty darn close with my attempt tonight. I got the color, texture and taste close enough that I couldn't tell the difference.

Taco Tico Meat
1 pound hamburger
1 cup water
1/3 cup oatmeal, briefly pulsed in the coffee grinder
2 T butter
1 t chili powder
1/4 t pepper
1/8th t MSG
1 t onion salt
1/2 t garlic salt
1/4 t ground cumin
1/2 t salt
1 t vinegar

To get the meat into really fine particles, put water and meat in the bottom of a skillet and stir up using a fork and a potato masher. Keep going until it is really well broken up. Next add the rest of the ingredients and brown the meat. As you simmer it the meat will get a little soupy and gooey like this:

Keep simmering, uncovered, until the meat is nice and thick like this:


Enjoy it in tacos or burritos or sanchos!