Our relationship with El Monterey is complicated. We appreciate the fact that when we were broke college students, their frozen burritos allowed us to eat fast and on the cheap. On the other hand, we also recognize — as folks who have reviewed countless frozen foods at this point (well, not countless, as the current number is close to 1,700) — that El Monterey doesn’t aspire to make high-quality products. Still, whenever we crack open one of El Monterey’s offerings, we feel a tinge of nostalgia.
All that said, we’re looking into the El Monterey Beef & Cheese Taquitos today, which actually weren’t part of our college diet. In fact, we don’t think we’ve ever eaten these at all, so they’ll be new to us (we have reviewed plenty of El Monterey’s other taquito options, of course).
While the official El Monterey website claims there should be 20 taquitos in a box, ours had 21. Curious.
These aren’t difficult to cook. Simply preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, spread out some taquitos on a baking sheet, and pop them in for about 12 minutes. You can also use the microwave if you prefer to cook them that way, but we used the oven for the sake of this review. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review).
After 12 minutes in the oven, the shells end up slightly crispy, though not entirely. We’d say these are crispier than a tortilla, but less crispy than a hard taco shell — in fact, these are maybe like a hard taco shell that was reheated in the microwave, so it retained some of its crispiness while developing some sog factor in the middle.
The shells aren’t that good though. They have a generic corn chips flavor to them, and they’re kind of salty. They’re not terrible, but they’re kind of generic-tasting.
The filling, though, is surprisingly good. It’s a seasoned beef and cheese blend that tastes better than the sort-of-average beef that we typically expect from El Monterey. It’s unfortunately scant here, barely breaking through that corn-chip flavor of the shells. But when it does poke through, it’s quite delicious. We would love to see El Monterey do a version of their beef burritos that had this exact filling instead of the generic beef that they normally use.
The box claims that three taquitos is a serving. If you’re only planning these as a snack or appetizer, that’s probably a decent serving size. If you’re looking to fill up on taquitos, though, you’ll be eating more than that.
If you can stick with the recommended trio of taquitos, you’ll be consuming 220 calories (90 from fat) and 290 mg of sodium. Those numbers aren’t actually that bad, but they can still multiply quickly if you eat multiple servings at a time.
The El Monterey Beef & Cheese Taquitos are better than we expected, but still not amazing. They’re a bit too shell-heavy, but the filling is actually really good. We can definitely see ourselves returning to these occasionally as an easy snack, though we don’t recommend that you fill up on just taquitos. Mix it up a bit!
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen taquitos, check out our package scans below.
