Where to start

I am given a couple of obvious places to start:

1. Nutrition Facts – This will give me the actual weights of various parts of the formulation
2. Ingredient Statement - This will tell me the relative order of ingredients by weight Combining these two alone can sometimes give away almost all of the formula if it is simple enough.

Nutrition Facts

I found a table on Papa John’s website that lists nutrition information for their Garlic Sauce. Much of this information I can ignore – things like cholesterol, sat, trans fat. This is not important to me. I am interested in the information that I list in the table below:

A meat emulsion is just a mixture of ground meat (in my case, mostly beef and lamb) combined with ice water, fat, and other mystery ingredients which I cover later, which form a homogeneous “emulsified” mixture. These are the same properties of many processed meat products like sausage, hot dogs, and salami. Technically, or in other contexts, an emulsion describes a stable mixture of two liquids that normally do not mix. Whether the meat mixtures I describe above ought to be considered emulsions is apparently controversial but I am not interested in this trivia. I will refer to the mixture as an emulsion.

I have many jobs on a server that run on a schedule using cron jobs. I would like to be notified when these jobs succeed, and especially when they fail. I will send and receive these alerts through email.Since it is impractical to run one’s own email server in 2024, I am using AWS SES (Amazon Web Services - Simple Email Service) to send the emails. I do not write anything about this here.

This is not traditional or authentic pita I made this bread to be strong, pliable, and soft so I can stuff it with fillings or deep fry it to use it as a chalupa shell. During the baking process the disc should formed a void or a pocket that can be filled. Pita is baked at 500° F on a thick 3/8" A36 steel plate then wrapped, and finally frozen after cooling to ~90° F. Like most bread products, these thaw / reheat with no discernable loss in quality. After baking, they should be used right away because they become dry quickly. If they are to be frozen and later stuffed, is not recommended to stack them. The layers will compress and stick together under the weight and make it impossible to separate after a freeze / thaw cycle.

Labor is expensive and tools are cheap. These are the premises upon which I figure I should change the oil and oil filter myself. And I like to do things myself sometimes, it is not always about the cost savings. Maybe one day my body will fail me or I simply will not want to do it anymore. I am not totally committed to doing everything myself all the time.

About this post

This is shallow dive into the mass production of homemade burritos. This recipe is designed to achieve a pareto-optimal mix of taste, simplicity, and cost-efficiency. The ingredients are few, the measurements exact and scalable.

Not Reinventing the Wheel

I used Taco Bell’s ingredient labels and nutrition information to derive my own bean, rice, and beef recipe, mostly because it is fun to reverse-engineer foods that taste good. Taco Bell’s success and veritable midwestern monopoly on Mexican-style fast-food is evidence enough of them having found their own kind of optimum. Yes, they have far more considerations than I do – supply chains / logistics, storage, shelf life, labor efficiency, ingredient availability, and profitability – so I may have reverse-engineered this burrito that exists in its particular form for reasons beyond my comprehension or utility, and in a manner much like a cargo-cult, but I have nothing better to aim at as I love their burritos.