What is a Navajo Taco?
The Navajo taco, voted the State Dish of Arizona in a 1995 poll conducted by the Arizona Republic, is an amalgamation of beans, chopped lettuce, sliced tomato, shredded cheddar, and an optional green chile sitting atop a piece of crispy frybread and eaten open-faced. Frybread cooked on the Navajo Reservation simply must be made with Blue Bird Flour from the Cortez Milling Co. to be considered authentically Navajo. The precise reason is ineffable, but it’s believed its higher gluten content holds the dough together better than other flours when flipped between palms to achieve the round, tortilla shape for cooking. Then the dough is fried in Crisco or lard in a heavy iron skillet. Now thought of as a “traditional food,” frybread actually came from the Bosque Redondo era, when some eight thousand Navajos spent four years imprisoned and were given little more than white flour and lard to eat.
