For all our obsession with Mexican food in Southern California, I gotta hand it to Texans–they're even more obsessed. They're the people, after all, who historically have contributed more to the combo plate of Mexican food in this country than any other region–including the combo plate. In San Antonio, the mascots for the local minor-league baseball team is a puffy taco and something called the “Ballapeño“; in Houston, they nearly start riots if you dare question their city's Mexican-food history.
But no place takes the taco for Mexican-food obsession like Austin, where they think they invented the breakfast taco, the dish that sums up Tex-Mex food perfectly: only Texans give a shit about this dish, and they treat it with the same reverence they give their state's lack of income tax. And toward that only-in-Texas/God-bless-Texas/Texas-does-it-better Freudian exceptionalism comes news of the world's first taco cannon.
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The bible of all things Texas, Texas Monthly, wrote up the story last Friday, and it's understandably going viral. So what is a taco cannon, exactly? Exactly what it sounds like: a Gatling gun-esque contraption (12 chambers!) powered by CO2 that fires chicken tacos wrapped in a bandanna at a length of up to 200 feet. The tacos come from Torchy's Taco, an Austin institution that in the city's cosmology is mostly favored by recent hipster arrivals but does make good breakfast tacos.
“The taco has a a greater carrying capacity than a hot dog,” a taco-cannon technician told the magazine. “The cylindrical shape of the tortilla provides a stabilized cartridge for a more advanced trajectory. The caliber of a taco is simply superior.”
And here, I always thought the burrito would serve as perfect mortar…anyhoo, here's a brief clip of people going crazy over the cannon.
Pinche Texans…all right Orange Countians: who among you will develop a breakfast burrito bunker buster?
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