Kyle Nabilcy
A burrito with beans and cheese on a plate.
The White Trash burrito in 2007.
On New Year's Day 190 years ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published. In 1927, Kraft Foods of Northfield, Ill. purchased Emil Frey's Velveeta Cheese Company. On July 5, 1937, Hormel Foods (then of Austin, Minn.) introduced SPAM. And in early 2007, a new pseudo-Mexican restaurant on Brearly Street in Madison called Burrito Drive began selling something called a White Trash Burrito.
These are all related, trust me.
It is perhaps testament to the American spirit of innovation, ingenuity, and a ferocious hatred of perceived inconvenience, that many iconic American foods are not delicate baked goods, elaborate soups or obscure cuts of meat prepared for days at a time. Instead, we have hot dogs. Twinkies.
We also have Boston baked beans (incidentally, invented by the original Americans), Tater Tots, SPAM and Velveeta cheese product. And while that same spirit of invention has led to incongruous food items being combined into one concoction (corndogs, deep fried Twinkies, and nearly any other food found at state fairs), few would suggest putting those four items in one overstretched flour tortilla.
It is Burrito Drive, then, which has earned the culinary equivalent of the title "Dr. Frankenstein."
Burrito Drive's monster can call at least four states in the union home. Tater Tots from Idaho, Boston baked beans from Massachusetts, and SPAM and Velveeta from our next-door neighbors to the west and south, respectively. There is, however, no allegiance to the cuisine of any of those areas. The White Trash Burrito is very simply an All-American monster.
The White Trash Burrito (WTB, if you will) is born of that school of burrito thought which is sponsored and funded by the aluminum foil industry. Going even farther than the paterfamilias Chipotle, Burrito Drive used two sheets of foil to contain my WTB. It wasn't enough. Multiple beans made a break for freedom before I even cracked the outer wall.
Burrito architects know that a stable burrito requires some sort of dry substrate onto which the gloppier layers should be laid. Burrito Drive does not adhere to this theory in constructing the WTB. A thick goo of melted Velveeta and baked bean sauce create the impression, upon the first bite, of eating a large, very salty grub. Grubs are not known for standing upright; nor can this burrito withstand its own internal gloppiness.
Without rice, the intrepid diner might hope that the Tater Tots would suffice to absorb some of the moisture. Unfortunately, they only add to it. If the tots had been crispier going in, they'd hold up better in the preparation. It's sad, because Tater Tots are usually so crispy and satisfying. To see them so disrespected is almost tragic.
The most gastronomically ironic element of the WTB is what the Burrito Drive menu refers to as spam carnitas. This conjures the image of a large stew pot full of slow-cooking meats finished in an oven and pulled apart by fork and knife. In Burrito Drive’s reality, “carnitas” means “pan-fried to middlingly browned doneness.”
It is my belief that SPAM (which is capitalized, in case you were wondering, upon the request of Hormel Foods in order to distinguish it from the email junk of the same name) is a food that should not be seen when eaten. Imagine my horror, then, to pull back from a sloppy bite of burrito to see a cube of SPAM staring back at me. Hot pink, as a food color, does not inspire my appetite.
You have arrived, then, at the end of my encounter with the WTB; I am sure you are convinced by my description that it was a truly horrible experience, devoid of any chance of redemption. I must close with some words of moderate praise.
The flavors, odd as they are, are not awful. The texture, size, and sodium level are all quite, quite awful, but the flavor has potential. I would recommend cutting the size in half (say, Taco Bell bean burrito-sized), adding some sort of texture (potato chips? Fritos?), and grilling it. The SPAM was all right, so long as you're willing to eat in the dark.
My WTB was not unlike an entire Super Bowl party buffet crammed into insufficient layers of foil. But it's still a pretty hideous conglomeration of American convenience food. In this format, at this size, the White Trash Burrito just should not exist. Food science hath wrought a monster.
To quote Mary Shelley, "Man, how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!"
