Taste Test: Taco Bell's New Smothered Burrito ⋆ BYT // Brightest Young Things

Smothered burritos. A dangerous enough gambit at a respectable place, but at Taco Bell, you are putting yourself in very real and very immediate danger. We decided to save you from a night of potentially fiery regret by doing taste test of Taco Bell’s latest concoctions, the chicken, steak and beef smothered burritos. We, your proverbial poison testers, have returned with the best reviews our primitive palettes could muster. Take these reviews with a grain of salt. Better yet, avoid the salt. We’re almost sure the sodium levels in these bad boys are sky-high anyway.

Alana:

Truthfully, they really aren’t that bad. Once you get past the whole 40% meat deal, its actually almost decent. The chicken ones are the best tasting, as the chicken is the only one that holds a similar consistency to the animal it’s meant to resemble. The steak comes in a safe second with the separate flavors (rice and beans, cheese, meat and mystery sauce) being a lot harder to discern between but still blending in a manageable manner. The beef? Balls to the walls worst. It is inexplicably soggy and dry at the same time. The “beef” breaks down as I assume chalk would, but instead of being outside on a sidewalk, it’s inside your face hole. The flavors then proceed to separate into four very terrifying elements. The beef burrito was the only one that made me actively aware I was eating Taco Bell. You never want to be actively aware of Taco Bell. That is rock bottom.

Slutty zen wisdom

Jenn:

First of all don’t call something a smothered anything unless you are trying to kill it in a Lifetime movie. That being said, I am not very good at food-related things because I have a very unrefined palate. I genuinely enjoy places like TGIFriday’s and Friendly’s (ICE CREAM). Taco Bell is usually my go-to fast food place so I HAD to try their new Smothered Burrito. It comes in 3 “delicious” flavors: animal, another animal, and a third animal.

1. Beef: This was by far my favorite. It’s what’s for dinner, lunch, breakfast, 2 a.m.

2. Chicken: Tasteless, sad…my high school diary in food form.

3. Steak: Sophisticated, tangy, South America without the drugs.

All in all I would readily eat an entire Smothered Steak Burrito with extra smothered sour cream. #smothered

Olivia:

Taco bell was spot on when they decided to name the “Smothered Burrito.” I started with the “seasoned” beef and was instantly disappointed. With every bite I could feel each tiny piece of moisture-less meat rolling around in my mouth. Fortunately, the “red sauce” (that is the official name) and sour cream picked up the slack. I moved onto the shredded chicken with very low expectations and was pleased when I found myself enjoying the flavors. The “premium thick-cut” steak, although not premium, was also a step up from the beef. Moral of the story is meat matters and the beef is not the way to go. Personally, I will be sticking to my 1am Crunch Wrap Supreme, but the Smothered Burrito is worth a try.

Brandon W.:

Taco Bell’s newest line of food will please anyone who currently patronizes Taco Bell and confuse anyone that doesn’t. The steak Smothered Burrito doesn’t taste like steak. It has the idea of steak. It does have rice. The chicken Smothered Burrito tastes like shredded chicken. It’s salty. It has rice. It’s the most like a ‘real’ burrito. The beef Smothered Burrito doesn’t taste like meat. The rice doesn’t taste like rice. It’s the most unlike ‘real’ food. In other words, the smothered burritos tastes like most everything else on the fast food chain’s menu.

They’re all fantastic. It’s not Mexican food. It doesn’t pretend to be Mexican. Taco Bell is science and commerce making love and its products are our children. This is one of food science’s finest hours. This food questions your decisions. This food will satisfy your hunger and punish you for having hunger. This food is the high school gym teacher that makes you dress for class even though you fucking hate gym class. This food is meant to be consumed while wearing an American flag shirt, in the passenger side of a car from the late 90s, smothered in sauce packets asking for your hand in marriage.

Verdict: Stick the with the Crunchwrap Supreme, nearly the same ingredients but with an extra layer of crunch that makes things supreme. Also, the Crunchwrap is served in paper. The paper wrapped Taco Bell products are way better.

Stephanie:

Slick yet grainy across the tongue and delightfully uniform in both flavor and texture, all three of Taco Bell’s new Smothered Burritos left me with a sense of impending death, in addition to awe and wonderment of the true paramount of mankind’s capability.

The steak, a bit rubbery in texture, bounced back with small bites of seasoning that only the drunk should enjoy, but there we were, (moderately) enjoying it in full sobriety. The ground beef was all at once chalky and moist, wet with the sauce of kings and dry with pebbles of meat sticking to a near-mushy tortilla. The chicken burrito, smothered outwardly with enchilada sauce, a three-cheese blend and “light” sour cream, was additionally drenched inwardly with a sour-cream concoction–but was it “light” as well? These are the questions only The Bell can answer, while we lie awake at night questioning the origin of man and the ceaseless existence of a “new” menu containing only five-or-so of the same ingredients.

In the end, if it’s 4am and you’re blindly staggering home from a night of hard core partying, these foodstuffs could almost pass for real, live, almost-meat product. The beer shits and burrito runs will fuse together into a single regrettable, albeit awesome, blur anyway.