Back in May, we shared the great news that Taco Bell was expanding its breakfast menu at some southern California stores with a test run involving a breakfast waffle taco. An important question at the time was, “How did it take so long for them to figure out that you could fold a waffle up like a taco shell?” but the most important question was, “When the fire sauce hell are those coming to my city’s Taco Bell stores?”
The answer, we now know, is 2014, but if you’re one of the lucky taco-and-breakfast-loving bastards living in Fresno, Omaha and Chattanooga, you’ll be able to try one of the waffle delights for yourself starting tomorrow. According to the Associated Press, Taco Bell is expanding the test run of the top-selling breakfast item to those cities and I couldn’t be any more jealous unless Kate Upton was serving them.
But the news doesn’t stop running for the border with just breakfast, as the even luckier people at the Huffington Post got their hands on the new mystery shells that are the next in line for the Doritos Locos Tacos series. Taco Bell didn’t tell them what the Doritos flavor is by name, but those smart kids figured it out with very little problem.
That said, once we unwrapped the tacos, we were pretty sure we knew which Doritos flavor their shells are based on: Flamas. The telltale bright vermillion color tipped us off — and the spicy taste, with a touch of lime that could only be detected when we ate the shell sans beef, all but confirmed it.
This did not come as a surprise to Doritos Locos Tacos devotees like us. Taco Bell had been testing the Flamas flavor in select stores for many months — very successfully, according to sources within the company. In December, David Novak, the CEO of Taco Bell owner Yum! Brands, told investors he expected a Flamas Doritos Locos Taco to be released in the middle of 2013. And our friends at FoodBeast wrote definitively that it would be Flamas at the end of last week.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t such a mystery after all. In fact, the only mystery remaining is why I had to find out from a surly manager at my local Taco Bell why the Volcano Taco was being cast into extinction. “We’re going to sell them until we run out of the shells,” she told me, as I bit into a shell that tasted like my own shoe.
There are few things that make me happy in this world full of misery, corruption and despair, and one of those things was Volcano Tacos.
Was.