Tacos Al Carbon
107 Peach Street
Hammonton, NJ 08037
One
day while in Hammonton, my buddy cancelled on me when we were supposed to try a
new taco truck together. I didn’t want to try it without him, but it happened
to be on the day that the Tacos y Tortas truck was closed, so I didn’t really
have much of an option. So I headed over to Tacos Al Carbon to see if their
tacos matched up to the tacos I had experienced the week before at Tacos y
Tortas. The truck is quite a bit smaller than the other, and the menu is as
well. Each day they have a new menu that they write on a white board in
Spanish. Aside from tacos they also offer tortas, tostadas, and a delicious item called chilaquiles. I
opted for two tacos de chicharron and two tacos de carnitas, as well as a mango
jarritos. Since it was February, you can imagine how cold it was outside. All
of the seating is outside, so I sat down in the wind and waited for my tacos to
be ready. They have a bottle opener attached to the truck for the Mexican
sodas, so I popped mine open and took a sip. Holy deliciousness! The mango
jarritos was the best one I had yet. It was sweet, but it wasn’t overpowering,
and the carbonation really was spot on. If you have never had a jarritos
before, you really should try them.
My
tacos were ready soon thereafter, so I took them and sat down. I was a little
disappointed by the lack of filling in them. There was of course double
tortillas, which I love, but the filling was minimal. They skimped on the
cilantro and onion, and didn’t offer up a lime wedge. It was a little
disappointing. I dug into the chicharron tacos first, and I was again
disappointed. They didn’t have the texture I was looking for. To me,
chicharrones are crispy fried pieces of pork skin, and these were not crispy at
all. I am not an expert, but that is what I have come to expect from
chicharrones, so I was pretty disappointed by the lack of texture. The sauce
they were dressed with was very nice, a combination of peppery and creamy. I
definitely was looking for that textural difference, as well as more cilantro
and lime juice.
The
carnitas were very tasty, but disappointing in terms of texture as well. I
don’t know much about carnitas, but I know that I like mine to be a little bit
crispy. These were definitely rendered down as if they had been cooked all day,
but they didn’t have that little bit of crunch that I would have liked with
them. As with the others, a little bit more of the cilantro, onion and lime
juice would have gone a long way to kick these tacos up into another gear. The sauces
that they have sitting on the truck are really phenomenal. They were very
spicy, one an orange sauce in a bottle, and another green sauce in a molcajete.
I doused one of each kind of taco in the sauces to give them a taste and they
really heightened the flavor of the tacos. I finished up my tacos and my
jarritos and I paid the man in the truck. It was also very reasonably priced. I
think it was $8.50 for four tacos and a soda, so a pretty good deal as well. It
just didn’t live up to the tacos at the other truck.
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