5 Ordering Tips To Get The Best Taco Bell Burrito

I proudly count myself a Taco Bell fan. As a child, I rode for the chain's classic beef tacos, the 89-cent price of which made my parents more apt to stop the car. In my 20s, during the COVID-19 pandemic, my housemates and I would frequently drive two dozen miles to a Taco Bell drive-through, where we'd order endless iterations of our longtime favorites. It was then that I learned any Taco Bell item can be ordered "Fresco Style," replacing the dairy items with fresh pico de gallo. I would often use this customization to mix up the Burrito Supreme, my then favorite.

Getting Taco Bell is decidedly about, dare I say, "living más." In that spirit, we searched the internet for tips on taking a Taco Bell burrito to the next level. Some of the best include improving the texture with Fiesta Chips, making the meal more filling with additional ingredients, and even stuffing your burrito with another iconic menu item. The trick is knowing what to request to achieve your desired effect and which upgrades require a little assembly of your own.

As the inventor of the Crunchwrap Supreme, Taco Bell knows about transforming food with texture. So why not add crunch to your favorite burrito order? As one Redditor commented on r/LiveMas, "Red strips add a textural improvement to nearly every item on the menu!" Now offered in a multi-colored form called Fiesta Strips, this add-on consists of crunchy pieces of corn tortilla roughly the size of a Frito chip. Perfect for balancing the soft ingredients of a Taco Bell item, they fit into a burrito in a way that larger tortilla chips can't.

Fiesta Strips (formerly red strips) have featured in Taco Bell items since at least 2003. Some offerings that have featured the strips include the Caesar Grilled Stuft Burrito and Cheesy Double Beef Burrito. However, you could use them to add crunch to any offering. Not everyone has had success doing this online, however. Back in the early 2020s, some customers began noticing that Fiesta Strips were no longer a possible addition within the Taco Bell app. If you happen to run into the issue, you may need to order at the register with employees. As one Taco Bell worker encouragingly replied in a Reddit thread on the topic, "All they have to do is charge you $0.50 at the window for a side of red strips and they should put them on the food for you."

Sometimes, the best food improvements are the simplest ones. For instance, Taco Bell made waves in 2001 when it debuted its Grilled Stuft Burrito. These days,, you can also ask for that toasted finish on your own favorite order. Grilling your Taco Bell burrito has two main advantages: heat and texture. 

Grilling leaves the tortilla familiarly soft while adding a nice crispy exterior, giving your burrito a renewed complexion. On top of that, it may provide much-needed structural integrity to larger, messier offerings. If you're someone who likes to double the meat on your Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, grilling helps to firm up the tortilla and might prevent catastrophe. Plus, it's exceptionally easy to request grilling. In the application, after you select your item, just open the modifications tab and click on "Make It Grilled" in the add-ons or special request section. While we can't guarantee that no Taco Bell locations charge for this, it appears to be a free customization.

There is a resounding sentiment among some longtime Taco Bell fans that the tacos, burritos, and tostadas of yesteryear were packed more generously than those of today. As one Redditor commented on a thread comparing today's Taco Bell servings with earlier ones, "They used to fill the gordita and all of their food items ... That was the golden age." 

Whether there is truth to this claim remains unclear, various posts on social media recommend the same thing: To get a burrito reminiscent of the good 'ole days, you have to double some of the ingredients. One Redditor suggests adding extra red sauce and extra cheese to the classic bean burrito, saying this makes it taste the way it did when they were a kid. On another thread, a commenter advocated adding both extra beans and cheese. They called it "the only way to get an original 'Glen Bell, Downey, California' proper Taco Bell bean burrito" (a reference to the person who founded the chain in 1962). Doubling up on ingredients will undoubtedly drive up the cost of your Taco Bell order, but given the nostalgia many of these fans have for the "better days" of Taco Bell, it's worth seeing what all the fuss is about.

If you're not concerned with customizing your burrito to mimic ones from decades past but still want to make it more filling, consider adding just one ingredient: potatoes. Costing around 95 cents as an add-on at most locations, potatoes provide affordable density to any burrito. That's not to mention the fact that they're also delicious. Taco Bell coats its potato chunks with a blend of spices, including garlic, paprika, and onion powder. The bite-sized shape of the pieces means that they can be evenly dispersed throughout the burrito, giving you potato in every bite.

You could try all sorts of burritos with potatoes, but some aficionados especially recommend the add-on for items that tend to be soupier. This makes sense when you consider that the starchy vegetable may absorb excess liquid. For example, the chili-cheese burrito, which is made with a tasty but sloppy mixture, can be fortified and kicked up a notch by the addition of potatoes.

Another thing to consider is that Taco Bell allows customers to swap any meat with potatoes for no extra charge, a policy that squares with their reputation as being a particularly vegetarian-friendly fast food chain. So if you don't eat meat, it doesn't mean that burrito combinations that include meat can't be for you, so long as you embrace the potatoes.

This final tip is a bit unhinged — so much so that we couldn't help but include it. If you're looking to notch up the flavor, texture, and size of your burrito, it could be worth following the lead of this Redditor, who posted their creation on r/tacobell this September. Order a Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito and a Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco, then open up the burrito, put the taco inside, and rewrap it. The final combination — a sort of turducken of Taco Bell cuisine — gives that sought-after crunch of Fiesta Strips with the bonus of being blasted with Doritos flavor. Unfortunately, it's not an order that Taco Bell employees will make for you, but the upside of that is that the taco goes into the burrito right before eating, which gives it a higher likelihood of being crispy.

The poster said the idea came to them when they were running late for work and needed to eat their Taco Bell meal as quickly as possible. But the last-minute concussion turned out to be so good that they wanted to share it with the world. The thread included mixed reviews, but as one supporter of the idea astutely commented, "the line between genius and madness is a thin one."