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There are some food styles that I can’t easily replicate at home without making them from scratch. I’ve struggled to find store-bought Chinese food, for instance, that mimics what I can get even just from my local takeout. I can’t easily find Indian food that impersonates what I can get from my local Indian restaurant, no thanks to Aldi.
Other styles, I can do better. I can make decent Americana: burgers and fries or ribs aren’t too hard with the right tools. I also feel like I can make a decent Tex-Mex dinner — yes, restaurants are better, but the gap is closer here than with other kinds of food.
Aldi keeps a pretty good Tex-Mex — or what Aldi and most grocers would call “Mexican” — selection in store. Soft tacos. Hard tacos. A few varieties of salsa. Tortilla chips. And the fixings.
Of late, we’ve also noticed an interesting new entry in the Aldi Tex-Mex lineup: a kit. It’s a clear attempt to imitate the ubiquitous Taco Bell kits, giving shoppers a few of the things they need to make crunchy tacos.
We grabbed one of these Aldi kits.
The Casa Mamita Crunchy Taco Dinner Kit is an Aldi Regular Buy. You can find it in stores all the time, in the room temperature shelves next to the other Tex-Mex-style foods. At the time of this post, the kit comes with a pack of mild taco sauce, powdered taco seasoning, and 12 crunchy shelves.
The Casa Mamita kit costs $3.09. How does that price compare to other alternatives?
Well, for starters, our Aldi currently sells 12 crunchy shells for $1.50 and the seasoning for 50 cents, adding up to $2. Aldi doesn’t sell the sauce in the kit as a standalone item, so the next best option would be salsa, which costs $2.50 or more but also is a lot more salsa than the amount of sauce in this kit, and of course is a chunky salsa rather than this more Taco Bell-like sauce. It’s up to you whether the kit is superior to Aldi’s in-store alternatives.
As for Taco Bell? One of those crunchy taco kits at Walmart currently runs $3.24, which is only 15 cents more. However, the Taco Bell kit advertises a marginally smaller weight of 8.85 ounces versus 9.4 ounces with the Aldi kit. It appears you get a little more for your money with Aldi.
Nutrition, ingredients, and instructions. (Click to enlarge.)
In addition to the kit, you’ll need the following additional items to make these:
- 1 pound of lean ground beef
- 2/3 cup of water
- Any additional fixings you might want to put on the tacos beyond the enclosed sauce packet
These tacos cook up like taco meat and shells would if you bought them separately.
To cook the beef, you first brown it over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Then, drain oil drippings. Next, add water and the seasoning packet contents, stirring them into the beef and bringing it to a boil before reducing heat. Simmer for 3-4 minutes until thickened.
The taco shells can be warmed either in the microwave or oven. To microwave, remove the taco shells from the package (including plastic), place on a microwave-safe plate, fan out in a circular pattern with overlapping edges slightly, then microwave for 45 seconds or until warm. To bake, preheat the oven to 325 degrees, remove the taco shells from package (including plastic), pull stack apart nd place them on a non-stick baking tray overlapping edges slightly, then bake 6-7 minutes or until crisp.
A note: we cooked our shells 4-5 minutes. Your mileage may vary.
A taco shell, beef, and sauce. It was a little messy.
Rather than go all-in on presentation, I figured I’d show you what my plate looked like after I made my first taco. The shells are a little narrow and getting the filling and sauce in took some practice. But beyond that, these tasted about like what we expected. We’ve had Aldi hard shells before, and these had the familiar texture and salty taste we’ve come to expect. We’ve had also Aldi taco seasoning before and liked it, and the seasoning here appears just about identical. The sauce was new, but more or less similar to what you would get in one of those mild Taco Bell sauce packets.
The Verdict:
Overall, our testers liked these kits. They seem to be a decent value for the price and the contents are easy to make. If you want more than just a Taco Bell-style sauce you’ll need some additional fixings, but as a starting point we think these are solid and worth picking up for your Tex-Mex fix, especially if you like Taco Bell kits.
