Realfoodology - 13: Organic for Everyone: The Cheesy Gordita Crunch Edition

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Welcome to our new segment "Organic for Everyone," where my producer and I break down the cost and ingredients of popular food chain menu items. Our goal is to then recreate them with organic food for cheaper! Or at the very least very close in price.We take you to well known grocery store chains and give you options to order things online if your local grocery store doesn’t carry the items. Our first mission, the Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch.  Sources: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/trans-fat https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/trans-fat https://www.who.int/news/item/09-09-2020-more-than-3-billion-people-protected-from-harmful-trans-fat-in-their-food https://www.tacobell.com/food/specialties/cheesy-gordita-crunch https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/monoglycerides#takeaway https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/grocery-warning-seven-most-dangerous-ingredients-conventional-foods

Hello? Is this thing on? from a national food chain and try to recreate it for the same price using organic, real foods. This won't be easy. And we are going to run into obstacles, whether it be accessibility or affordability. But there's always a solution because organic is for everyone. Trying to recreate a cheesy gordita crunch, organic, for cheaper or at least comparatively in price to talk about gordita crunches. Do you want to hear the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging? Of course you do, because all of us are concerned about aging. There is a class of ingredients called senolytics that were discovered less than 10 years ago,

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We're going to do our best to figure out how to make it for the same price or even cheaper. Before we get to our challenge, you're going to hear Courtney and I breaking down the ingredients in a Cheesy Gordita Crunch that you can find at any Taco Bell near you. So inside of a Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch, it is a hard shell taco filled with seasoned beef, lettuce, real cheddar cheese, and spicy ranch sauce, all tucked in a piece of flatbread with melted three cheese blend. So just to clarify, it is a taco inside of a flatbread. I'm going to read the nutrition facts of a cheesy gordita crunch from Taco Bell. It's 500 calories, and this is just for one. For one? For one. It's 28 grams of fat, 10 of which are 10 grams of saturated fat, and then a half a gram of trans fat. Oh, trans fat. So trans fat's what I'm worried about.

I'm not worried about saturated fat. What's the difference? Trans fats are man-made fats. They are usually called hydrogenated oils. Does it have hydrogenated oils on that list? Let's see here. Well, there's about 100 ingredients. Oh, my God.

It's disgusting. So, yeah, essentially trans fats are manmade fats. And what they do is they heat it up to such a high temperature that it changed. It changes the molecular structure of it. I'm really surprised that trans fat is even on that ingredient list because a couple of years ago, the FDA actually announced that they do not, they're not going to allow artificial trans fats in food anymore because they're not generally recognized as safe. And the reason for this is because according to the World Health Organization, consumption of industrial produced trans fats are estimated to cause around 500,000 deaths per year due to coronary heart disease. Trans fats are not good

for us. So just doing a quick little Google search, I went on the FDA website and it says that in 2015, the FDA determined that PHOs, which is the major source of artificial trans fat in the food supply, are no longer generally recognized as safe. So since this was in 2015, this ruling, they wanted to give food makers three years to eliminate that from the food supply, which was June 18th, 2018. Then the FDA decided to extend the compliance date for these foods to January 1st, 2020. So why does Taco Bell still have this in their food? So upon further investigation, I can't really tell where these hydrogenated oils are coming from in the cheesy gordita crunch. Generally in the past, they were very easy to spot, the artificial ones, because they would be listed on the ingredient label as hydrogenated oils or partially hydrogenated oils. But I went and I looked at the ingredients

online and there are no hydrogenated oils listed on the website. And if they are compliant with the FDA regulations, which I'm assuming that they are, then they probably are not using hydrogenated oils and I don't see them on their website. So it could be coming from the disgusting soybean or cottonseed oil that they use, or it could just be naturally occurring trans fats, which are ones that I'm not worried about. So they could be naturally occurring either in the beef or the dairy. This is a very important thing to differentiate between. Naturally occurring trans fats, we are not worried about. It's the man-made artificial trans fats that we need to be concerned about.

Wow. Yeah. So the flatbread has sodium, steroid, lactolol, mono, and diglycerides. Is that- Gross. Yeah, that's- Diglycerides. I always forget. Those are- This is disgusting. I believe those are like dough conditioners. I'm looking that up because I can't even remember, but it's... I'm on the Healthline website right now, and I'm looking up monoglycerides. And there's three different forms. There's monodiglycerides and then triglycerides.

And so basically they are, they're not dough conditioners, but they are emulsifiers, which means that they kind of help keep certain products like bread, tortillas, etc., like baked goods that gives them a certain texture and like pulls them all together. Essentially, they help oil and water blend because those don't typically blend together. But when you have an emulsifier, it brings it all together. There are additives commonly found in fast food and processed food. Oh, it says monoglycerides contain trans fats. We may have just found our trans fat connection here. It says here that mono and diglycerides contain small amounts of trans fats, but since they are classified as emulsifiers and not lipids, the FDA ban does not apply to them.

Okay, so according to the FDA and the Healthline website, they are saying that mono and diglycerides are generally recognized as safe, but it also says here in this article that doesn't necessarily mean they're good for you. And I'm going to leave it at that. What? Are you ready to hear what's in the seasoned beef? Oh, my God. Yes.

Gross. Which is going to be awful because I've had so many Taco Bell tacos. So we have beef. We have water. We have seasoning, which is cellulose, chili pepper, maltodextrin, salt, oats, oats soy lecithin spices tomato powder sugar onion powder citric acid natural flavors including smoke flavor torula yeast torula yeast i think that's msg i'm gonna i'm gonna double check that though cocoa interesting in the seasoning oh i was wrong what wrong. What is it? It is a, hold on.

It's some sort of mushroom or fungi. It's a single-celled fungi edible, grows on wood alcohols. Oh, wait. Okay. So actually I just found this on organicconsumers.org. Oftentimes food companies now hide MSG in safe sounding ingredients like yeast extract or to really yeast. So I wasn't totally wrong. And why is this such a problem? Well, because foods like MSG are things called excitotoxins and these are neurotoxic chemical additives that directly harm nerve cells, overexciting them to the point of cell death. They're found in diet soda, canned soup, salad dressing. Basically, they're added to add flavor to over-processed, boring foods

that have had the life cooked out of them. Cool. That is so dark. I know. It's gross. Processed foods, man. They are completely devoid of any nutrients or taste, and then they have to add in all these artificial ingredients to make up for it. Gross.

If you have to Google it to understand what it is, not always, not always, but the majority of the time, probably doesn't belong in our body. This is still going on, by the way. Dextrose. By the way, really quickly, it says that tarula yeast is a yeast species of candida. And candida feeds on sugar. Candida overgrowth is a really big problem, especially here in the U.S., because we eat so much sugar. And you can get like a candida overgrowth in your body, and then it results in rashes and sugar cravings.

Okay, continue. Dextrose. Dextrose. Dextrose is a corn-based sweetener. Lactic acid modified cornstarch. And so those are all the ingredients of just the seasoning. And then you have salt and then sodium phosphates. And that's just the beef. That's just the beef.

Oh, and you know, okay. That label should literally say, think, let's just think about this for a second. Beef, the ingredient label should literally just say 100% beef. I would argue grass fed beef, but, and then if you want seasoning in there, okay, fine. So like paprika, cumin cumin like real seasonings and a little bit of salt also i want to note there that there was sugar in that can we see how many grams of sugar is yes gordita crunch the sugar is so it's 41 carbs dietary fibers five grams and then four grams of sugar okay it's not as bad as i was expecting four grams of sugar. Okay, it's not as bad as I was expecting. Four grams of sugar is... But still, sugar in your tacos.

So here's the three cheese blend. Low moisture part skim mozzarella cheese, cheddar cheese, pasteurized processed Monterey Jack and American cheese with peppers. And then in that particular part of the cheese, the American, it's cultured milk, cultured part skim milk, water, cream, salt, sodium citrate, jalapeno peppers, sodium phosphate, lactic acid,

sorbic acid, color, annatto, and paprika extract blend, anti-caking agents, which are potato starch, cornstarch, powdered cellulose. That's just the cheese. Oh my God. And cellulose comes from wood shavings. So you're eating wood essentially. Yeah. It's a common food filler. So cellulose is a filler and it's commonly found in shredded cheese. So it's not found in wheels of cheese or blocks, but it's only found in the shredded cheese. So it's not found in wheels of cheese or blocks, but it's only found in the shredded cheese. And it's used as an anti-caking agent. It basically keeps the cheese products from clumping. According to the FDA, products are allowed to contain up to 4% of cellulose. And they also say that it's not necessarily harmful, that you'd have to eat a lot of cheese

for it to actually affect you. In addition to the cheese, anything that is labeled with the term added fiber most likely has cellulose in it. J.D. Hansen, who is part of the FDA, said that in his opinion, it's not necessarily harmful. It's just a cheap way to make a product appear to be healthier than it is. He then says, but you probably want to get your fiber from something like whole wheat instead of whole wood. So you're probably wondering, does sawdust-enhanced processed cheese affect the body differently than maybe, say, wheat or beans? At the basic level, yes. Hansen quotes, whole wheat has other vitamins

and other chemicals that are good for you, says Hansen. What happens is that cellulose just passes through your body. It doesn't give you anything other than bulk and it gives the company a higher profit. That's great. Well, you know what's not listed on there because it's not grass fed or organic cheese. It means that it also comes with a healthy dose of antibiotics and hormones, growth hormones that they inject the cows with. And 55 milligrams of cholesterol. It says the cholesterol in there. That's crazy. 850 milligrams of sodium. This is for one thing. Most people eat two or three of them, right? Yeah. And then you think about that's one meal and you've already gone over your daily dose of sodium for one meal. Then what are you

just supposed to starve yourself the rest of the day? Which I don't recommend. So most people eat probably what, two? I would assume so, yes. All right. So one of these is $3.59. That's going to be hard to beat, Courtney. Two of them is $7.18. But if you're cooking for two people, that means that's going

to be four of them. That's about 14 bucks. I bet you could get pretty close to that. So I'm doing that right now. I'm adding my cart. So basically I'm online right now looking to see. So on this show, it's our goal to go to national grocery stores that can be accessible by everybody in the United States. Today, we are going to Vons. So Vons is owned by the Albertsons Corporation, which is Acme Markets, Hagen, Jewel, Osco, Lucky, Pavilions, Plated, Randall's, Safeway Inc., Shaw's Install Market, Tom Thumb, and United Supermarkets. Chances are if one of these stores is next to you, they're going to have all the same stuff as the Vons that we're going to in Los Angeles. Okay, I'm at 1446 right now actually and let's see what I have in the cart. So I have ground beef, grass-fed organic, organic sour cream,

organic yellow corn taco shells, and organic tortillas. But we also need we need cheese. That's kind of the main deal. So here's the thing. You're buying so much of this that you're going to have a lot left over. So either you can make more cheesy gordita crunches the next day. Or you can use the leftover ingredients to make something else. So then the next day you could do tacos. Imagine having a metabolic coach in your pocket that you could access at any point, any time in the day, whenever you want. That's what Lumen is. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workout, sleep, and even stress management.

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huge fan of Organifi and most specifically because every single product that they make is glyphosate residue free. So you know that you're going to be able to give these powders to your kids and know that they will be able to consume them safely without any glyphosate in it. So let's break down each one. The Easy Greens is a nourishing and delicious blend of superfoods and veggies that provides essential nutrients, probiotics, and digestive enzymes to bring balance to kids' growing bodies without fillers, additives, or junk. It helps to fill in nutritional gaps, aids in growth and development, supports digestive health, has a rich micronutrient profile, and includes digestive enzymes. This would be a great way to sneak in greens for your little one without them actually knowing that it's

healthy for them. And the second one, which is the wild berry punch similar to Kool-Aid is called Protect. And it is to support your child's daily immune health with food derived nutrients that work to strengthen their body's first line of defense. I know just through girlfriends of mine that have children that when your kids are going to school, going to daycare, they're coming home sick a lot more often just because they're getting exposed to different kids and different viruses when they're coming home sick a lot more often just because they're getting exposed to different kids and different viruses when they're out in the world playing with kids so this would be a great way to help to support your little one's immune health it's organic and it's also made with real whole food ingredients it has a delicious berry taste and it's low sugar and it's gentle enough for kids to take every single day and i really love the ingredients in this one it's orange and

acerol cherry which is a powerful source of vitamin C and antioxidants, astragalus, elderberry, and propolis. These are all really great for overall immune health. If you want to try the products that I talked about today or any of the Organifi products, go to Organifi.com slash RealFoodology and use code RealFoodology for 20% off. Again, that's Organifi. It's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash realfoodology. Or you could use the sour cream, you know, for the rest of the week, put it on your potatoes or whatever it is. So it's really about like stretching your dollar and getting creative and also remembering that you're going to have food left over in the fridge that you can also use to make other meals. Whereas when you spend that $7 at Taco Bell, then that's it. Like you spent that, you don't have any food left over.

So it may not seem like it upfront when you're paying for this, that you're spending less, but over time you're spending less because you're able to stretch that food out for longer. Because I think about this sour cream, you're not going to use all of it depending on how many people you're feeding. So this 1446, you could technically feed like four people with this. But I mean, I even think about like for myself, like let's say I was buying this for myself. Obviously in general, just spending money at the grocery store for one person is always going to be more expensive, but you find ways to get creative. And you have it for like three days. Exactly. And then you use that food for other stuff. So like I think about like, okay, so if I was buying all of this, then I would look at my

cart and be like, okay, so I'm going to, I'm definitely going to have ground beef leftover. I'm going to have cheese leftover. I'm gonna have sour cream leftover. What else, what are a couple of other things I could throw in my cart that I could make other meals with? So I could throw pasta in there and I could do pasta with ground beef, get some tomatoes and like make a tomato sauce or buy a cheap jar of like organic tomato sauce. And then that's another meal there. And that would be another, I don't know, $4 to $5 added on. And then that's a couple more meals. Do you have beans on there?

I do not have beans on there. So that's the other thing that I was going to say. So if you either don't eat meat or you're really, really on a budget, instead of getting the ground beef, you could just get a can of organic black beans. So I'm looking right now, one can of organic black beans is $1.50. So, okay. So we're looking at right now, we have organic beans, organic cheese, organic beef, sour cream, hard shells, and soft shell tortillas. So if I was to buy all of that, then I could also make bean and cheese tacos with that. I could get some romaine lettuce and do like a taco salad. So then you do beans, shredded cheese, sour cream on there, maybe a little bit of ground beef.

And right now it's 2045. Now, if we're really on a budget here, let's take the meat out. Oh, my God. And it's 1346. So we made it vegetarian. I mean, that's... That's pretty good. I feel like we've already beaten it right there.

Yep. We sure have. And, you know, think about it too. Like I, you can freeze the cheese if you feel like you're not going to use all of it right away because it's shredded. So it's easy to freeze that. You can also freeze the tortillas. That's a trick I do a lot is like, if I don't feel like I'm going to go through something in a week, I'll just freeze the rest of it and then use it another day. All right. Should we go to the store? Let's shopping all right let's do it all right oh my god should we make cheesy gordita crunches for dinner tonight yes are we recording is this thing on it's on hell yeah we're going to vaughn's to get shit to make can i say shit we're going to

vaughn's to get things to make cheesy gordita crunches. You can say shit. We can even bleep it out. Um, how do we get there from here? You're going to go straight. And just do beans? Yep. With the magical fruit. The more you eat, the more you do. Oh, there's these little buggy things.

So, what's our produce? Because that's the closest. We just arrived at the Vons near our house, and the goal is to remake a Taco Bell cheesy gordita crunch from scratch using only organic ingredients that you can find in any major grocery store near you. These are just a head of romaine. Well, this is green leaf lettuce. That'll do. any major grocery store near you. This is the head of romaine. Well, this is green leaf lettuce, that'll do. I'll have that.

So, the whole plan is that we're trying to go really budget. So I wanna buy just the head of romaine lettuce. Oh, they have one here for $1.99, but they are out of it. So right off the bat, we run into our first problem problem which is they are all out of organic romaine lettuce so then i went and asked somebody and luckily they had some in the back and it was only 199. grass finished beef which i've seen actually gonz is really good about having grass-finished meat, and it's pretty cheap too, comparatively. So this is a, how much is this? 16-ounce pack of grass-fed Angus ground beef, and it's $8.99.

If you're really in a pinch, instead of doing ground beef, you can do black beans. You can also do refried beans if you want. It's a great source of protein. It'll be about a third of the price. So we have the beef and we have the lettuce, You can also do refried beans if you want. It's a great source of protein. It'll be about a third of the price. So we have the beef and we have the lettuce, but now we run into the biggest problem of our mission, the tortillas. Okay, for... I can't...

This is important to note. I can't eat flour tortilla because I'm gluten-free. This is a flour tortilla. It is. Okay. But here's the problem. The organic flour tortilla is $'m gluten-free. This is a flour tortilla. It is. Okay. But here's the problem. The organic flour tortilla is $4.99. Jesus. And the corn is $1.99. Oh yeah, I know those ones. Ooh, but the mission is not great. Mission just sucks. As you heard earlier, Courtney is gluten intolerant, so we needed to find something that she could have as well. In doing

this, we found a bunch of really misleading items, like the one that you're about to hear. Keto-friendly whole wheat. How is that? It's reading at carbs. I don't know. Because they added a lot of fiber to it, probably. Ew, ew! This has hydrogenated soybean oil. So this is a Mission carb-balanced whole wheat tortilla, and it has hydrogenated soybean oil. So this is a Mission Carb Balance whole wheat tortilla, and it has hydrogenated oils, which is trans fats, which are man-made fats, and they're essentially like eating plastic for your arteries. Gross. Okay, well, these are gluten-free.

Okay, wait, these might be okay. Okay, so we navigated the tortilla aisle for what seemed like 10 minutes, and it was a grueling process trying to find an organic tortilla that wasn't a bazillion dollars. We finally found one that was $4.99, and it was still flour, which means Courtney couldn't even eat it. But that's her problem because she's not eating gluten. But it's still expensive. Well, we've had our first kick up here. Okay, so the tortillas were way more expensive than you were expecting.

So what do we do? Okay, so these tortillas were $4.99. So way more than we expected, like you said. And I went to Whole Foods and I found organic flour tortillas for $2.99. So when you're really in a pinch, you may have to go to a couple stores or go to Whole Foods and buy all 365 brand. Okay. I'm going to play devil's advocate right now. We're in the middle of nowhere and all I have is an Albertsons or a Vons. How do we get them online? Ooh, that's a really good question. You know,

you can probably, I think you can order Siete Tortillas, but those are going to be expensive. You know, another option here is to Amazon. Yeah, but I don't know. I'm going to look it up right now. And this one, I'm looking at the target website and you can ship it. Okay. There you go. Well, free two day shipping on orders of $35 or more. So you budget, you plan it out ahead of time and you have to plan everything. But that's okay. It's what we have to do. It's how you save money. But again, you know, if this is really a problem where you don't have access, then you buy the flower, order that online, and then you make it at home. It's very, very simple. And hopefully most people have access to the internet.

And you look up a recipe and make it at home. I've made cassava flour tortillas at home, and I was apprehensive at first because I thought it was going to be really hard. And essentially you just make dough similar to like how you're making cookies and you roll it into little balls, flatten them out, and then you pan fry them. So you don't even need a lot of kitchen utensils either. It's super simple. What is cassava? Cassava is a root vegetable. And it's grain-free, which is why people are gravitating towards it more now,

because a lot of people don't digest grains as well. And it's kind of easier on the digestive system. And the reason why I love cassava flour for tortillas so much is when you make tortillas out of cassava flour, they taste exactly like flour tortillas. And I grew up in Texas going to Tex-Mex restaurants. We had like the best of the best flour tortillas that I grew up in Texas going to Tex-Mex restaurants we had like the best of the best flour tortillas that we would like dip in queso and I love flour tortillas I'm kind of a snob about them and the cassava flour tortillas remind me of the flour tortillas that I would get in like hole-in-the-wall Mexican food places so good so good. And one thing that we did figure out is, hey, if you can't find the tortillas, you can still have all the same ingredients

and make a salad. Exactly. There you go. And it's probably, I mean, you probably don't need two tortillas. You don't. That is one thing about fast food is it's like, okay, what can we stack on? Like a Big Mac is literally, you have the, and then you have the middle bun, and then you have the bottom bun. It's a lot of bread. You don't need that. No, and the same with the gordita crunch. So, you know, with this, we're trying to recreate people's favorite foods. But, again, you brought up such a great point.

We don't need to have all these tortillas. This is what I would buy depending on what's in here. Cassava flour, palm flower palm fruit oil organic honey yeah i mean out of all of them this is this is technically like the cleanest one this is like a grain-free cassava flower tortilla or you could just do a corn tortilla which is stone ground organic yellow corn organic guar gum and lime and that's it that one sounds the best this is the best ingredient wise so we're just going to go with that and then i'm going to say you can either make your own cassava flour

tortillas at home or buy flour tortillas that are organic because flour is going to give you more of that like it's almost like a pita bread that they use okay so we're going to just go with these tortillas that we found and they were $4.99 so we have meat, we have the flour tortilla, and then we have the lettuce. So all we have left to get is taco seasoning, cheese, hard shell tacos, and sour cream. Hard shell tacos. These are $2.49, organic. And then taco seasoning, where is that? Where is that? So instead of a taco seasoning packet, it's paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, lemon pepper, black pepper, ground cumin, dried parsley, dried oregano, and then some red pepper flakes. So if you don't want to buy the packet, you can just use some spices that you have in your pantry next to all

the oh here's the seasoning oh there we go okay so one pack of organic taco seasoning is 149. so it's a little bit cheaper throw that in the basket. I don't like that. There it is. Don't talk shit on cottage cheese. I don't like it. I know it's a fan favorite though. This might be kind of hard to find. Oh, there's organic. $2.99 for organic sour cream. Great. What kind of cheese are we going with? Okay, so I, for the sake of, again, trying to keep it as close as possible to the real thing, we're going to do cheddar. Now, if we're really on a budget here,

we can get a block of cheese, because that's always going to be cheaper than buying it shredded. But if you're not on a budget, you can buy the shredded. I'm going to get the mexican style shredded organic so cheese is going to be the highest price point on this besides the meat which is going to be 4.49 we're getting a mexican style o organics cheese so while we're in the cheese aisle courtney decided to just have a look at these store brand giant bags of cheese.

This is a four cheese blend, Mexican style. From, can we name the brand? Yeah. Put you on blast. Oh my God. It's a long list. I want to compare here. Okay. So it's not like a huge difference, but the most important thing here. Okay, so this has like, you know, the standard Monterey Jack cheese, pasteurized milk, cheese culture, enzymes, etc. And then it's the same with the cheddar cheese. There's a natto, which is a vegetable coloring. Okay, so another type of cheese, a fourth type of cheese. So this is all pretty standard. And then we have cornstarch and natamycin, which is a natural mold inhibitor. But then we look at this one.

The organic. The organic one. Thank you. So essentially, it's all of that without everything at the end. The anti-caking, there's no cornstarch in here. But to be honest, the most important thing about the difference between these two is that the organic cheese came from a healthy animal that wasn't injected with growth hormones and fed antibiotics. Now, the conventional,

this Lucerne cheese, came from a sick cow that was living in confinement, eating corn and GMO soy, was really sick, put on antibiotics, growth hormones to make it faster, to make it bigger faster. And so you're consuming everything that it was injected with and or eating. Now we were hoping to spend significantly less. I will say, though, that you can make at least seven gordita crunches at home with what we just purchased. But we're trying to get a much cheaper price point. So we went back to the studio to see if

we can find some of these ingredients for less at other stores. We did find organic grass fed beef for less than the $8.99 price point. Other places, if you feel like going to two stores and that you can. Yeah, exactly. So we found another one for $6.99. Actually, just add another Vaughn. So sometimes it depends on sales going on or it depends on the store that you go to. Trader Joe's is always a really good one, although I don't know if they have grass-fed beef.

So currently, Trader Joe's sells both fresh and frozen organic grass-fed. I don't know if it's grass-finished. I don't know that. But it's $5.99 per pound. There you go. And also, I'm looking on the Walmart website right now. You can find cassava flour for $9.99. It's a one-pound bag.

So think of all the tortillas you can make with that. And you can also make other things with it too. Okay, so we were able to shave off a total of $5 by getting cheaper beef and cheaper tortillas. So this brings our total down to $22.93, which is the equivalent of six Taco Bell cheesy gordita crunches. If you don't feel like going to other stores, you can do organic beans for about a buck 50. You can also do chicken or ground turkey, which at this particular Vons was only $4.99 a pound. But because we wanted to really create this exact gordita crunch, we decided to go with the beef. So essentially,

you'll be able to make six gordita crunches and you're probably going to have leftover beef. You're going to definitely have leftover romaine, leftover taco shells, and sour cream, and probably cheese too. So then you can use those ingredients to make another meal. Quesadilla. So it actually makes it cheaper. Yep, exactly. You can make quesadilla. You could also make a taco salad like we mentioned. You could get a can of beans for $1.50 and then do bean and cheese tacos, which are one of my personal favorites. Well, this is going to be so good. Screw Taco Bell. So while Courtney's cooking this stuff up in the kitchen, I'm going to read a fun little thing from the Taco Bell website. It says, warning, sodium icon indicates that the sodium content of this item

is higher than the total daily recommended limit, which is 2,300 milligrams. High sodium intake can increase blood pressure and risk of heart disease and stroke. So this is just 100% grass-fed organic meat. There's no fillers in here as we found out earlier on the Taco Bell website that they have a bunch of fillers in their meat like oatmeal and they use that to bulk it up. So essentially like you're not even getting beef or you're I mean you're getting a little bit of beef but I would argue that you're probably getting more oats than you are getting

beef in that mixture because they're just trying to cheapen it up this is going to be real 100 beef this smells so good do you guys smell that all i'm doing here is sauteing the beef with a little bit of water a little bit of avocado oil and one packet of the O'Organics taco seasoning. Super simple. It's done really quickly too, like this is already done. So I'm gonna set this aside and then I'm gonna start melting the cheese onto the tortillas. Okay, so now I have a little bit of avocado oil in this pan

and I threw a tortilla down. I'm sprinkling just a layer of organic cheddar cheese on it. And we're essentially gonna just melt it almost like we're making a quesadilla. Ooh, yum. Okay, so the cheese is melted on this. So I'm gonna plate it. Oops, ouch.

And then on top of the melted cheese layer, we add in a taco shell. Okay, so after I throw the hard shell taco into the tortilla, you wrap it up and then you throw a little bit of ground beef in there, add a little bit more cheese, put sour cream on top, and then add your shredded lettuce, and then you're done. You got a cheesy, ready to crunch, organic, same price. In my opinion,

it tastes better. All right, we're going to try these out. Drake. I'm so, I'm so hungry right now. How is it? And now for the ASMR portion. Oh, my God. This is so good. My turn. Mmm. Why buy Taco Bell when for the same price you can make it at home for organic? Or you can make it at home with organic or you can make it at home with organic food. Oh, my God.

This is so good. Oh, my God. Mmm. It tastes pretty much like the real thing to me too. Mmm. Because it's pretty much the same stuff, you know. It's really simple. Ground sour cream cheese two kinds of tortilla and you're not gonna have like a food coma i'm guessing after Wow. Also, if you have a little extra time, please give the show a rating and review. It helps us out so, so much.

If you have any suggestions for what we should make next, or if you decide to make this cheesy gordita crunch at home, please send us your stories to realfoodologypodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear how it went. See you guys next week. Thank you. Bye.