Copycat Fiery Doritos Locos Tacos Recipe

There are guilty pleasures in life, and then there's Taco Bell. Taco Bell is that place that people love to trash and swear off eating, yet there it sits comfortably in the top 10 ranking of quick service restaurants. The Bell has tried a few different gimmicks in their many years, but nothing has quite taken off like the Doritos Locos taco. It's simply a Doritos shell taco, but by combining two forbidden fruits into one tasty treat, Taco Bell saw increased sales across the board — with over $1 billion in sales in the first year of the Doritos Loco taco alone. 

The one that packs the most punch of the three flavors is the Fiery Doritos Locos Taco. Can we make one at home? You bet we can. And it's much easier than you'd imagine — or pretty difficult, depending on which path you take.

Besides the greatest thing ever, what exactly is a Dorito? Doritos actually got their start at Disneyland — the quick service Casa de Fritos opened in Frontierland shortly after Walt opened the doors at his California theme park. The Dorito was a big hit, mainly because it hits all the basic desires that people love in food; melt in your mouth taste, stick to your hands goodness, and a flavorful cheese. Simply, Doritos are programmed to be irresistible, and of course they are. The trick will be creating a dusting to go over a shell and provide the flavor we're looking for from a Doritos chip.  

Doritos are just tortilla chips sprinkled with the kind of spice mix that can bring unity to the galaxy. Yea, it's that good. The big difference is the heat, obviously, between a regular Dorito and the Fiery one. Doritos doesn't make a Fiery Dorito, per say, but they do make things in the family of hot stuff. The Fiery Dorito has a bit of a chili-lime flavoring. Conveniently enough, Cholula makes a chili-lime hot sauce, and it tastes remarkably like a Fiery taco shell. There's more to it than that, but the key is "fiery flavors in a shell."  So why is the shell red?  Because it's hot! And it has a lot of "fire" flavors to it.

First we need to build our dry rub for the shell. In a bowl, combine chili powder and smoked paprika. To that, add Romano cheese — the dry kind you find in the Italian section of the grocery store, along with onion powder, garlic powder, and Accent.

As mentioned, there are two ways to make a Fiery Dorito Shell; the "from scratch" way, and the "I'm not making a taco shell" way. If you've never made your own shells, it's not super difficult, but can be a bit of a pain. The easiest easy way is to simply purchase hard taco shells and add the seasoning. That's not cheating at all — no need to feel shame. If you're going all out, you need to pick up a bag of masa — that's the stuff you'll use to create your own shells.

If you're traveling down the easy path, here's what you need to do: Open the box of shells — that's it for now. Doesn't get any easier than that, does it? If you plan on making your own shells from scratch, we'll talk about that later.

You're not really ordering your taco with just meat and cheese, are you? What are you, 6? Taco Bell doesn't reveal exactly what kind of tomatoes, lettuce, or cheese they use, but a standard mild cheddar, a head of lettuce, and a vine ripe tomato tastes exactly right. So shred some lettuce, dice a tomato, and shred some cheese.  

There are some of you out there who will insist on making your own shell from masa and water, I mean how hard can it be? Maybe harder than you think.

The major challenge here is getting your shells red — you need to build your shells just as you normally would, with masa and water. However, we need to add our fiery ingredients to the dry — that'd be chili powder, smoked paprika, Romano cheese, onion powder, garlic powder, and a Accent — to the masa.  

As for the wet side, masa takes a two to one ratio of masa to water — that means a half cup of water, but in addition add 3 ounces of Cholula Chili Lime hot sauce, and a few drops of red (or pink) food coloring.  

You want your masa to have a dough consistency. Make the masa concoction into four or five small balls, and rest them under a damp tea towel or wet paper towel for 15 minutes. After the rest, press them into flat tortilla shapes. Before you even begin pressing, get some plastic wrap and wet it a little bit to help ease the tortilla separation, and do the same for the top. Getting the tortillas flat without them ripping is a fine skill. My trick is to get a good sized pot and press the living daylights out of those dough balls.  

Regardless of which method you choose, you're going to be pleasantly surprised that you actually just created a Fiery Doritos Locos Taco.  The easy method is a little messy, but the shell flavor is right there. The masa method is cleaner to eat, and packs just a little less punch as the real thing. There's two ways to adjust it; you can dump an entire bottle of Cholula into the masa (which seems a bit much) or hit it with one more dab of sauce on the inside of the shell — this way no one will see it.  

The most shocking part of this copycat is how much the meat tastes like Taco Bell's — it's almost exact. 

For my money (and time), I'm just as happy dipping a pre-made shell in the hot sauce and rub, as blasphemous as it seems.