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>>HILAH: Hey everyone! Welcome to Hilah Cooking. So thanks to everyone who bought the breakfast
taco book on the Kindle which we just released recently. That’s been really cool. Looking
back over the book I realized that a lot of time vegetarians kind of get the short end
of the stick when it comes to breakfast tacos because they get stuck with like potato and
egg, or like bean and cheese, and like, those are great, but sometimes you get a little
bored. So, it just so happens my buddy Eric has this
food trailer called The Peached Tortilla, and while they make a lot of delicious things
like sliders and possibly the best sweet potato fries I’ve ever had, they also make some
breakfast tacos that are really good and really creative. One of them is a sweet potato hash
taco, so I thought it would be really fun to go over there and cook in a food trailer
and see what the inside of that looks like, and then eat some delicious vegetarian breakfast
tacos, and so let’s go!
[MUSIC]
[Sweet Potato Breakfast Tacos Recipe]
>>HILAH: All right, now we’re inside, so this truck you can see it’s very efficiently
designed with lots of little cubby holes or trap doors if you will. Where do you keep
stuff?
>>ERIC: Well, like I was telling you earlier. This truck was built specifically for the
purpose of being a catering truck, so it’s pretty efficiently designed, you know, every
square foot is utilized really well. It’s like over here we’ve got our freezer, and
then this is our, basically our cold table where we keep mise en plas, all of our topping
for our tacos. Obviously this is sort of our prep station, and any sort of chopping we
need to do on the fly. Our fridge is down here, and I’ve showed you this earlier there’s
an ice block back in here.
>>HILAH: Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool.
>>ERIC: It basically forms into an ice when charge overnight and it keeps everything cool
in the fridge.
>>HILAH: Yeah.
>>ERIC: Back here we’ve got our steam table so that we don’t have to make everything
on the fly. It’s kind of like the Chipotle model where you see everything is kept hot.
>>HILAH: Uh huh.
>>ERIC: This keeps all our meats and proteins hot, and some of our veggie products. Then
we’ve got our grill, our fryer, and we don’t, we just use this to store our slider buns
and stuff, but this can also be used as sort of like an oven or like a mini oven.
>>HILAH: Like a proofer or something?
>>ERIC: It just keeps stuff hot.
>>HILAH: Okay.
>>ERIC: Yeah, but we don’t. There’s a pilot at the bottom.
>>HILAH: Wow!
>>ERIC: And then this is our expo window, and then all of this space over here is basically
storage.
>>HILAH: Awesome. Well, let’s, let’s start making some tacos. So you’ve got a vegetarian
taco, a vegetarian breakfast taco that we’re going to do today.
>>ERIC: Yeah, we do a, we call a sweet potato hash taco. We utilize, you know, diced sweet
potatoes, onions, poblanos, and corn with their all on the flat top.
>>HILAH: Sounds good. I actually had it the other day. It’s really good.
>>ERIC: Sort of veggie taco with it.
>>HILAH: Yay!
>>ERIC: Yeah.
>>HILAH: Cool. We’re going to make that one then. Okay, so we’re going to cut this
stuff up, and so you used to be, you were a lawyer, and then you were like f this noise,
I am going to move to Austin and start a food truck.
>>ERIC: Yeah, I quit my job in July. This has been a project I was working on for a
while. Originally I wanted to open a restaurant, and at the time when I was an attorney I was
going after a lot of, a lot of, you know, restaurant owners who’d flaked on their
leases or weren’t paying.
>>HILAH: Oh, wow!
>>ERIC: So, basically I kind of got scared out of opening a restaurant. I raised a bunch
of money and I said, “Look, this is what I am going to do. I am going to open a food
truck.”
>>HILAH: Nice, good compromise.
>>ERIC: Yeah, I mean working in a food truck is just not like working in a restaurant.
I mean I’ve worked in restaurants before and it’s just, it’s totally different.
>>HILAH: Yeah, yeah, I know I mean it’s tight quarters, and you have to. I imagine
you have to do a lot more like planning ahead.
>>ERIC: Yeah, you do and you have to think about, you know, a lot of stuff. I mean basically
I had restaurant people working in the truck with me early on, and I mean I still do, but
just because you work in a restaurant doesn't mean that working in a food truck is a seamless
transition.
>>HILAH: Right.
>>ERIC: Our pilot lights get blown out of the grill. You run out of, you are worried
about running out of propane. You got to make sure your steam table is hot. I mean nothing
is electric, so there’s just a lot of things you’ve got to keep tabs of.
>>HILAH: Yeah.
>>ERIC: And if you’ve never worked in a food truck before, you know, you’re kind
of at the mercy of the food truck initially at least. Once we got our head wrapped around
it, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but I would say it’s easier than it was early on.
>>HILAH: Right.
>>ERIC: But now, you know, we just got through like a brutal summer with the heat and everything.
>>HILAH: Dude, I was going to ask you because you got these vents here and it’s really
nice right now, but *** if it was 108 degrees outside, how hot, I mean.
>>ERIC: It gets to about 120 here.
>>HILAH: Good lord.
>>ERIC: The grill cooks, the line cooks get it the worst, you know, because the fryer
is on, the grill is on, there’s no ventilation. If there’s a wind right now, there’s a
breeze right now, so we’re okay.
>>HILAH: Yeah.
>>ERIC: I mean I would say like you know, two weeks ago on a Friday night, there’s
no mercy in this truck.
>>HILAH: No.
>>ERIC: The second you get in, you’re sweating and you’re hot, and it’s not the most
pleasant of environments, and I’ve had a lot of people working, I’ve talked to a
lot of people working these food trucks who worked in restaurants, and they are like this
is a little harder.
>>HILAH: Harder than any restaurant, yeah.
>>ERIC: You got to be, if you’re a cook, you’re also the dishwasher, you’re also
scraping the floors out.
>>HILAH: Umm hmmm
>>ERIC: If you’re the owner, you do the same thing, like, everybody’s got a hand
in everything. There’s no, we don’t pay somebody to wash dishes. We don’t pay somebody
to clean their truck, like, we do it all.
>>HILAH: Right, well, there’s only room for like two people in here probably right?
Or three?
>>ERIC: I mean, when we get busy we do like four.
>>HILAH: Wow!
>>ERIC: Yeah, and then some, on average we only run two because we have really good cooks,
but special events, three, South by Southwest, four or five.
>>HILAH: Wow!
>>ERIC: Yeah.
>>HILAH: Okay. All right, well cool. Are we ready to make some tacos?
>>ERIC: I think we are.
>>HILAH: Wooooooo!
>>ERIC: We’re going to put some sweet potatoes down. The sweet potatoes probably take the
longest to cook even though everything is cut so small that it’s really not going
to take very long. I am going to also put down some red peppers, some poblanos, diced
poblanos, some diced corn. If you want to get me some onions, I’ve got to get. . .
>>ERIC: A little spatula. And we’re just going to let it cook on the grill for a little
bit. You can kind of get that smell already.
>>HILAH: Yeah.
>>ERIC: A little salt and pepper mix. Just give it a little extra flavor. I mean this
is a really simple taco, but because it’s got a lot of different flavors you get a little
bit of a bitterness in the spiciness from the pepper, the sweetness of the corn and
the sweet potatoes, and then you got the onions. That sort of caramelizes. It’s really good
flavor all around.
>>HILAH: Yeah, and it’s so pretty.
>>ERIC: So you’re going to let that cook just for a little bit longer, and in the meantime
I am going to. If you want to hand me some eggs.
>>HILAH: Yeah. That’s fun.
>>ERIC: So we’re just going to scramble the eggs right into the mix. Where do you
normally eat your breakfast tacos?
>>HILAH: I make my tacos a lot.
>>ERIC: Oh yeah?
>>HILAH: I make a lot of tacos. Yeah.
>>ERIC: This is awesome. You’ve got to.
>>HILAH: I know, well, everyone should know how to make their own tacos, but I am going
to do something, yeah, this looks pretty.
>>ERIC: It looks pretty, and it tastes pretty good.
>>HILAH: Can I stir it?
>>ERIC: Yeah, absolutely have at it.
>>HILAH: Can I just do like that?
>>ERIC: Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of corn tortillas. We double wrap our tortillas.
>>HILAH: I like that. Okay, is that done?
>>ERIC: Yeah.
>>HILAH: It looks like it’s done.
>>ERIC: It’s starting to brown a little bit. Take the tortillas right off the grill.
They’re nice and hot, and then you can go ahead and plate it.
>>HILAH: Yay!
>>ERIC: That’s our veggie sweet potato hash taco.
>>HILAH: Are you totally jealous, but I am eating a taco and you’re not?
>>ERIC: I’ve never eaten our tacos.
>>HILAH: [laughs]
>>ERIC: I’ve never had it before. Is it good?
>>HILAH: Mmmmmm. Umm hmmm. That’s really good. Wow! Awesome! That is delightful man.
Well, um, thank you so much for letting us come in and check out your business.
>>ERIC: You’re welcome.
>>HILAH: Well, thank you, sir. And y’all move around town.
>>ERIC: Yeah, we’re always moving. We’ve got about eight different locations right
now. The easiest way to find us is to check out our website at www.peachtortilla.com,
or follow us on Twitter. It’s @peachtortilla, and we even have a hotline you can call on
our website. I don’t know the number off the top of my head.
>>HILAH: Wow!
>>ERIC: But it’s right there on the front of my website. You can call anytime, and we’ll
tell you exactly where we are.
>>HILAH: That’s awesome!
>>ERIC: So there’s no excuse for not finding the truck.
>>HILAH: And tacos. Yay! All right. See ya. I am going to eat this taco now.
>>ERIC: Thanks for having us to be on the show.
>>HILAH: Yeah, thanks for letting me eat this taco.
[MUSIC]