Fried Avocado Tacos

the only thing you’ll eat this summer

A couple of years ago, some friends of ours in our small mountain town started a taco truck. It sits in front of the gas station that carries everything from Bluebell ice cream, which you buy from a walk-up window, to Harry Potter butter beer, which is so sweet it’ll make you feel like you got knocked on the head with a bludger.

The centerpiece of one of the tacos was a delicately breaded and fried avocado that my mom and I couldn’t stop thinking about for an entire summer. All of the tacos at this particular taco truck could be accurately described as heavenly. But the fried avocado one was to-die-for.

Every day at work, we’d talk about whether we were getting tacos for lunch that day or not. There was never a discussion as to which taco we would get. It was always and forever assumed that it would be fried avocado.

It was this magical and mysterious thing to us. Fried avocado? How on earth does one go about frying an avocado? We didn’t care at the time. We devoured them blindly. No questions asked.

In our small mountain town, produce can be tricky. By the time non-native fruits and veggies make their way to our store, they are often at that precarious stage of “use me today, or I’ll be rotten by tomorrow.”

So the wonderful woman at the taco truck decided that the fried avocado taco would not make an appearance on the menu again after that summer. She just couldn’t count on the avocados being good enough to fry.

My mom and I were crushed.

Ever since then, we’ve thought about fried avocados, talked about fried avocados, and looked for fried avocados at restaurants and food trucks. But we’ve never found them again.

Frying an avocado seems like a tricky thing. And as desperate as we got for the taste of the hallowed fried avocados, we were never brave enough to try it out.

Until now.

At the end of last summer, when avocados were selling at 2/$1 and I had more of them in the fridge than I knew what to do with, I decided that I would finally do the unthinkable — I’d fry an avocado.

And after a period of rather messy (but still delicious) trial and error, it worked great!

The method I settled on in the end was breading them and baking them. The texture and flavor comes out beautiful and absolutely addicting.

Be advised that the texture of the avocado is very important when choosing which ones to fry. You want to choose avocados that are just the slightest bit underripe. They should be easy to peel and slice, but a little difficult to squish up into something like guacamole.

Here’s my recipe for fried avocado tacos. I hope you spend the summer thinking about them, making them, and sharing them with your friends.

Fried Avocado Tacos

Preparation time: about 30 minutes

Serves: 3-4

You will need:

For the Fried Avocado

2 avocados, ripe but firm

1/4 cup flour

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon chili powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (1 lime)

1/3 cup olive oil

1 cup breadcrumbs

For the Tacos

1 (15-ounce) can black beans

1/2 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon chili powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 head of romaine lettuce, thinly chopped

1 cup Pico de Gallo

8 flour tortillas

What to do:

To make the fried avocados, preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Add the flour, oregano, garlic powder, chili powder, and salt to a bowl. Stir to combine and pour it onto a plate. In a separate bowl, stir together the lime juice and olive oil. Add 1/2 cup of the breadcrumbs to a separate plate. Line up the plates and bowls of ingredients left to right ordered plate of flour, bowl of lime and olive oil, plate of panko breadcrumbs.

Cut the avocados into slices about 3/4 of an inch thick. You should end up with about 16 slices total. Coat each slice in the flour mixture, then dip it in the olive oil mixture, gently press it into the breadcrumbs, coating it well on both sides. Lay the slices on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake them for 12-15 minutes until they’re golden.

While these are baking, drain and rinse the beans. Mix them with the cumin, chili powder, and salt. Thinly slice the romaine. Warm the tortillas in a pan or in the oven. Assemble the tacos by topping the tortillas with the lettuce, beans, fried avocado, and Pico de Gallo.

That’s it for this week! As always, I am so thankful for the support that you all have shown for this project. Thank you for reading! If you’re a paying subscriber, check back in next Sunday for another story-recipe.

And don’t forget to check out my book, “No Regrets!”

Thanks,

Juliana Nicewarner