Bacon Weave Taco With Mac And Cheese Filling Recipe

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The bacon weave taco shell is quite the invention. But even harder than creating the shell itself (and let me tell you, it ain't easy!), is figuring out what exactly should go inside the shell. Let's face it, tacos and bacon don't really go together.  Taco Bell tried bacon on tacos and it failed spectacularly. Do you know what goes great with bacon? Macaroni and cheese! But we're not going with any old boxed mac and cheese, we're giving you a mac and cheese just as spectacular as your bacon shell: Beer mac and cheese.

We're going for a cheesy and gooey mac and cheese. If you really want to hit on the cheesiness and you have the time, the slow cooker is your weapon of choice. Seriously.

To answer your question, no the milk will not curdle. The heavy cream and condensed milk will help stabilize it. Besides, our secret ingredient contains enough starch to keep it from curdling.  

Beer and cheese go together like peanut butter and jelly. I often use beer when cooking, and different styles bring different flavors. To bring a bit of bitterness to the dish and balance out the cheesiness, you can use an IPA. You can make it as bitter as you want, but a slightly fruity IPA would also work here.

Add milk, condensed milk, heavy cream, and half a can of your beer to the slow cooker with the rest of the ingredients.

Now it's time for the cheese. Add grated cheddar cheese — I grate my own because blocks of cheese are generally cheaper than grated, but it's up to you — along with Monterey jack and mozzarella. Why mozzarella? Two reasons. One, it's very stringy, and will help give the cheese an extra gooey finish, and two, it has one of the lowest salt contents for cheese, and this thing is going to be swimming in salt. Any place we can cut a corner on salt is a good thing.  

Oh, and the half beer you have left? That's for you. Enjoy!

It's just bacon! It shouldn't be hard, but it is. Let me tell you, it took four attempts to get this thing right. The first one fell apart when I tried to get the shape right. The second one was under-cooked, the third one fell apart and looked very very sad (as boldly depicted above), and we finally hit pay dirt on attempt number four. There are some foods that simply don't want to spend their last moments woven together, and bacon is one of them. The combination of fat doesn't play nicely together when stacked on top of each other, and for some reason, bacon doesn't exactly like cooking in the shape you want it to. Just like when you put it in a pan and it curls up, it'll do the same to your shell.

If you choose to make a bacon weave taco shell, don't be surprised if your first attempts are... let's just say... bad. But on the bright side, all those failed attempts are still bacon, so you can totally dispose of the evidence. No one will ever know. 

The key to cooking — after numerous trial and error — is to get your bacon cooked more than halfway through, but to still be able to cut a shape out of it without it falling apart due to being too crispy. If you go too long, as soon as you cut it the bacon will fall apart. If you don't cook it long enough, the bacon will be difficult to cut — because it's basically raw. So temperature management and a keen eye are the key.  

The target will be a bacon weave somewhere in the medium to medium-well range. On my oven that's 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes. After that, remove the weave and create the shell. And kill the heat on the oven. This will be important for step two. The size of your shell is up to you, so find a bowl you like the size of, and trace around the bacon weave with a pizza cutter or knife to cut out a circle. You might need both — the pizza cutter works well for most of the cut, but you may need to get all surgeon-like and really get in and cut the lessor cooked parts to end up with a good circle.

Take the beer mac and cheese and stuff it into the shell. The advantage of leaving it in the oven whilst off and coasting to the finish is you won't burn the shell, and more importantly won't burn your hands in delicious bacon grease. If you hit the right temperature, you should be able to put the mac and cheese right in the middle, complete the fold and consume!  

So your first question is the obvious: How did it taste? Actually, pretty darn good. The mac and cheese is incredible — just a hint of the IPA beer to give it a bite, and the cheesiness really hits on every chomp. And of course there's bacon, which goes with the beer-cheese flavor. 

Are there downsides? Oh yeah. You're holding bacon in your hand — it's greasy. If your shell is too well done, it sort of falls apart on the bite, but if it's too soft it's basically limp bacon flopping all over the place. If you followed my steps, you should hit the proper shell texture, and eating this will be a breeze.

Life is a series of lessons, and there are many takeaways to the bacon weave taco shell. The obvious is — we buried the lede! The beer mac and cheese is fantastic. That's the dish you should be making. 

The other takeaway is that some things just don't like to be woven. You know why they don't make leather sweaters? Because leather doesn't like to be woven. You can read all the funky, crazy recipes you'd like, but some things are better left apart — bacon and weaving is at the top of that list.