Smash Burger Tacos

I’ve seen these on TikTok and Instagram recently and they looked so good I had to give them a try.
Suitably impressed, I found these delicious tacos were quick to make and if I hadn’t thrown some chips in the oven too, they would have been on my plate in a mere 15 minutes. Even my nearly-18-year-old and 16-year-old were impressed, leaving the table with clean plates and smiles on their faces. Every parent of teens knows that’s a rare and definite win.
I have also added here my version of a burger sauce, but I’ve kept my ingredients to a set of
ratios instead of weights – that way you can make enough for two people or for 200 people, just keep the ratios the same.

Ingredients

For the burger tacos

• 500g 5% beef mince
• 1 small onion, finely diced
• salt and pepper
• Pack of 8 mini flour tortillas

For the burger sauce

• 3 parts mayonnaise
• 2 parts tomato ketchup
• 1 part mustard (slightly less if you are using a strong mustard)
• 1 part juice from the jar of gherkins.
• Finely chopped gherkins to taste

To serve

• Iceberg (or other) lettuce
• Grated cheese

Method

To make the sauce, simply add all of the ingredients in a bowl, season with salt to taste and give the mixture a really good stir. Set to one side.

To make the tacos:

1. In a bowl, add the onion and the beef mince and mix really well. Season with salt and pepper to taste and make sure the mixture is really well combined (I use my hands).
2. Roll the mixture into eight balls – each will be just bigger than a golf ball.
3. Squash (or ‘smash’) each ball into each of the tortillas so that it spreads over the surface, about 0.5cm thick.
4. On the hob, heat a frying pan until very hot. Add a little oil and place a tortilla on the pan with the meat side down. If you have a large pan you may fit two in! Press down with a spatula and hold the tortilla so that it sizzles in your pan.
5. Once you get a nice, deep brown colour to the meat, flip to the other side (it only needs a minute on the second side). Check to see if the meat is cooked – if it is still a bit pink, then turn it back to meat side down and press down firmly again until cooked. The meat is thin, so it only takes a couple of minutes to cook, especially when it is pressed into the hot frying pan.
6. Repeat this process for each tortilla: I used two frying pans and I kept the cooked tortillas in a dish in a warm oven until they were all cooked.
7. Once cooked, we filled these with lettuce, more gherkins and lashings of the burger sauce. If you want cheese, you can add this to the taco in the pan and let it melt.