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Steamboat Springs, Colorado (CNN) – Taco trucks. You imagine them on the beach or street side. But pouring?
It has everything that a typical tacos truck must do to make tacos; specialty meats, hot corn tortillas, coriander, grated cabbage, pickled red onions and queso fresco. It offers four different tacos on the menu, as well as Mexican street corn, soda and beer.
The only difference is that it's not a truck.
It's a kitchen built on the back of a working silver snowcat – one of those giant crawler machines that you've seen maintaining the tracks in major ski resorts around the world .
"When I shoot the beast, I have the impression of flying a spaceship," said Dan Luchs, operator of Taco Beast. "It's still dark outside, you press a button and you light up the sky."
Every morning, Luchs and Chef Sean Hengstler get to work several hours before sunrise – around 5 am in the winter – and before anyone has left tracks on the fresh snow.
They take the gondola and head to the Taco Beast docking station, where he is hooked up every night at the Rendezvous Lodge, racking himself up the snow (using the snowman's plow) and getting himself lead to the new location of the day.
When they find a good location. they groom and fix a place on the side of the mountain chosen for the day.
Skiers and snowboarders enjoy Taco Beast Steamboat's street tacos during a bluebird observation day.
Steamboat Ski & Resort
"About when the sun comes up, we get ready and we prepare the day, we build our fence and we prepare the kitchen while Sean gets ready in the kitchen," said Luchs.
Hengstler prepares some ingredients in a commercial kitchen complex, but all the cooking is done at the back of the beast.
"How many people can cook in the middle of nowhere? Few people," says Hengstler. "Cooking outside, it's fun, it's different, it's more different from everything I've done before, you're not in the kitchen."
It's almost all about the sight
Hengstler has been cooking at Steamboat for 30 years and says that he has opened his doors to many restaurants in town.
He used to work in fine restaurants to snatch Wagyu beef and now he was taking out tacos from a truck. (He says his fellow local chefs are jealous of his current job.)
"I have the best view of offices in the world, of course.We look at the flat tops every morning.This is not a bad day," Hengstler said.
He cooks on a tray with the Flat Top mountain range and the state forest on one side and the slopes on the other; that is when they park at the bottom of the Sunshine Express chairlift.
A view of the taco beast at the bottom of the sun lift.
Steamboat Ski & Resort
This is the favorite place of Luchs on the mountain. It's also the first area of the mountain to have sunshine, he says.
"It's at the bottom of what we call Wally World, and it's a great funnel for many different tracks, from powder ski to lovely groomer wheels and from everyone, everything." Four tracks converge in one at the bottom of the Sunshine lift. "
Although sight is an advantage of the job, Hengstler considers that food is the most important part.
"You have to worry about food." Serving tacos, it's like serving the net, you must always worry about it.
He prepares tacos in four streets during the inaugural season of Taco Beast.
- Beef Barbacoa – Seasoned ground beef at ancho
- Elk Chorizo – Mix of ground elk and pork, seasoned with chorizo spices
- Pollo Asado – Chicken with black meat seasoned and grilled
- Tres Hermanas – roasted butternut squash, black beans and corn
Elk are common in Steamboat Springs and are a must-have recommendation for Taco Beast, as are Mexican street corn.
Taco Beast from Steamboat serves typical street tacos with a local twist.
Steamboat Ski & Resort
"I'm a guy of elk chorizo," says Luchs.
Hengstler says that he loves them all.
"I cook them, I would not do it well if I were not happy with them."
Open for lunch, weather permitting
The truck is only open for lunch and while supplies last.
It's a crowd when they open, says Hengstler.
Luchs says, Hengstler "take off the fence, we open the doors and I blast the horn on the Taco Beast and it's a bit, I like to see it like a beach, we have the colored undermines around it."
It's a good place to eat tacos on a bluebird day. On days when snowfall gets too intense, they close because not many people like the snow in their taco.
"You're serving a hot taco to someone and they're going to eat it in snowy conditions, they're not really happy," Luchs says.
They also close the temperature drops below 12 degrees Fahrenheit. It is at this point that the kitchen pipes begin to freeze. But most Thursdays to Monday you can find them somewhere on the slopes.
Weather permitting, they plan to run until the end of the winter season, which ends on April 14th.
"People really like what we throw away," says Luchs.
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