I think I was channel surfing one afternoon and landed on the Food Network Channel, Guy’s Best Bite was on. The concept of the show is a group of Food Network celebrity cooks go from town to town to sample what was recommended as the “best bite” in town. They were talking about the best bite of Joplin, Missouri.  Since I have family there, I decided to watch it to get ideas of places to try on my next visit to Joplin. The winner of the Joplin Best Bite was Ghetto Tacos, a local food truck that sits along Main Street in Joplin, Missouri and their winning dish was the Quesabirria Taco.  The owner and chef Marco said he used this uncle’s secret ingredient, cinnamon to make the beef and birria sauce taste so good.

Well, I have seen a lot of claim to fame locations that when I tried didn’t live up to all the hype, so I was determined to get to Joplin to sample this “best bite”.  I planned a mini vacation to Oklahoma that routed us through the Joplin, Missouri area.  While traveling to Oklahoma we stayed overnight in Joplin, but unfortunately it was on a Sunday and Ghetto Tacos and a lot of other recommendations were not open.  My heart and stomach were sad.

But, on our way back from Oklahoma it was a Tuesday and Ghetto Tacos was open.  I was excited, I just needed to convince my husband it was worth the quick detour to sample what they had to offer.  My belly still full of breakfast from that morning, but still I wanted to stop.  Fortunately, it was not a hard sell for my husband, and we stopped at The Ghetto Food Truck location on Main Street in Joplin, Missouri.

The food truck was in a gravel lot and the parking lot had a few dirty picnic tables with no shade in the hot heat of summer, but that did not deter me.  There was not much parking for cars, but we found a place.  So, we stood in line and waited to order the famous “best bite” Quesabirria Taco.  The tacos are served with a green or red sauce to dip in.  The Quesabirria Tacos were 3 in an order, I ate one and my husband ate the other two.

All I can say is I am extremely glad we stopped and suffered the heat to try them.  The beef of the Quesabirria tacos is extremely juicy and tender and falls apart in your mouth.  Plan on using a lot of napkins.  Which was a great surprise as I find beef in tacos can be tough to eat, but not this.  The marinating and slow cooking of the beef in the birria sauce had created a pull a part fall in your mouth tenderness.  My husband who has eaten a lot of tacos in his days said it was the best taco he has ever had.  The secret ingredient of the cinnamon not only in the marinade, but in the birria sauce imparted a warm and woody flavor to the meat.  The development of flavors from the slow cooking of the meat in birria sauce for 4 hours imparted a deeply developed smokey flavor from the chiles, but they were not hot spicy.

Because this was such an awesome taco experience, my husband wanted me to try to recreate this at home.  So, I started out doing my research on what makes a birria sauce and watched the episode of Guy’s Best Bite Joplin with Ghetto Tacos over and over to try to figure out how Marco made it and find a way to make it at home that would not take as much cooking time as the 4 hours chef Marco cooked his beef for.  So, I developed an Instant Pot Recipe that cuts the cooking time and is a very close representation of what we ate with that same warm, woody flavor of cinnamon to the beef and the birria sauce.  My home version I served with my homemade red salsa.  The picture on the left is my homemade version and the right is what we got from the food truck in Joplin.  I am sharing my version here.  Enjoy!