This Doritos Taco Salad Was the MVP of Every 1980s Church Potluck

A summertime potluck in the mid-1980s treated me to Doritos Taco Salad for the first time. On a humid summer evening under a picnic shelter near the shores of Lake Okabena, a shallow prairie lake in the center of my southwestern Minnesota hometown, the communal dinner included salt-sprinkled tomato slices, refrigerator pickles, carrot sticks, and fresh sweet corn. Amid all of that garden-grown fare sat a big bowl of chopped iceberg lettuce and tomatoes, shredded cheese, and seasoned ground beef, all garnished with a generous helping of crushed tortilla chips. I heaped a spoonful onto my plate, thrilled to discover a dish in which a bagged snack played a starring role in an adult-sanctioned dinner. 

When Chips Hit the Salad Bowl

We’ve been putting crunchy things—nuts and croutons in particular—into salads for centuries (the French are credited with adding stale bread to greens as early as the Middle Ages). For taco salad, a circa-1960s Tex-Mex spin on Mexico’s glorious taco tradition, restaurants used a deep-fried tortilla as a crunchy bowl to hold a lettuce-forward deconstruction of a ground beef taco. 

Before that fateful summer evening in Minnesota, I had never encountered the bold swap-out of a taco shell bowl for a topping of crumbled Doritos. It was a revelation. But how did this brazen variation crop up in the stick-to-the-mild Midwest, and at a summer potluck, of all places?  

Tracing the Taco Chip Trail

I looked around for clues in contemporary versions of the recipe, which now seemed to call for a supermarket chip that’s even more Tex-Mex targeted: Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos. But these didn’t match my mouth’s memories. In search of that beloved junk food salad of my youth, I visited the Doris S. Kirschner Cookbook Collection at the University of Minnesota, where I perused enough community cookbooks to learn that the vintage key to 1980s flavor was Doritos Taco Flavored Tortilla Chips (which can still be found at specialty grocers). The trail was warming up.

The exact origins of the first Doritos chip are disputed, with some sources attributing the snack invention to Frito-Lay’s Casa de Fritos restaurant at Disneyland, and other accounts to a San Diego food shack. However, Doritos came to the snack stable at Frito-Lay, the company’s in-house recipe developers created a Mexican Chef Salad that appears in the“What Else Are Doritos Good For?” Cookbook, a promotional publication produced by Frito-Lay in 1972, perhaps the first salad to be garnished with tasty, taco-flavor-dusted tortilla chips. 

And while the original taco salad used a fried tortilla as the bowl, this Frito-Lay version featuring Doritos on top made its way to the Midwest by the 1970s. And apparently never left. A June 20, 1979, Minneapolis Star newspaper food column published a skeleton of a recipe from Park Center Senior High School, which calls for “Plain Doritos Chips.” Early 1980s recipes from North Country Cabin Cooking by Mary Brubacher and Margie Knoblauch, and a community cookbook compiled by parishioners of St. Bonaventure Catholic Church in Bloomington, Minnesota, refer to this crucial ingredient as “taco chips.” 

I found that most Doritos Taco Salad recipes call for mixing crushed chips in with the rest of the ingredients while issuing foreshadowing warnings, like “This salad does not keep well” and “Serve immediately.” Layered versions of the salad skirt the soggy issue, like “Taco Party Parade” from 1985’s More Recipes from Minnesota with Love Volume II by Laurie and Debra Gluesing. Researching cookbooks led me to passionate Minnesota home cooks like Mary Gunderson, who’s served her layered taco salad for holidays and family gatherings for decades, starting with a base of avocado, sour cream, and cream cheese. Gunderson now makes the dish with fresh avocado, but back in the 1970s, “We’d use the frozen avocado that came in a box with a little tin,” she says. After adding more taco filling layers, she surrounds the dish with whole tortilla chips. We Midwesterners are nothing if not inventive.

What Goes in a True 1980s Doritos Taco Salad?

Most versions of the classic call for ground beef cooked with a package of taco seasoning mix, although a couple of recipes I found add crispy, crumbled bacon to the beef mix. Shredded Cheddar prevails as the cheese of choice. As for vegetables, every Reagan-era taco salad recipe includes iceberg lettuce and tomatoes, meeting all the hallmarks of a Midwestern salad: calorie-dense, dairy-heavy, with fresh ingredients incorporated sparingly as more of a jolly companion to the vegetable food group rather than a fiber-filled commitment. Some recipes up the plant-to-animal ratio by adding cans of garbanzo or kidney beans, or diced green pepper and fresh onion. A few recipes include black olives. “Sliced black olives go on the very top, but only on half, so it’s kind of a funny-looking thing,” Gunderson says of her appeal-to-every-palate layered taco salad assemblage method. We Midwesterners are nothing if not nice.

Dressing Wars: From Taco Sauce to Thousand Island

How about dressing a taco salad? Here’s where things get wild, in the most mayo-based sense of the word. The 1979 Park Center High School recipe ends with a gruff lunch-lady directive: “Offer hot sauce for those who desire it,” while one St. Bonaventure recipe mixes equal parts Mild Old El Paso and Hot Ortega Taco Sauce, in a half-and-half compromise of major Tex-Mex brands and heat. A recipe from a 1979 cookbook by United Methodist Church parishioners in Deer River, Minnesota, calls for Thousand Island dressing, a cross-culturally confused choice.

And the “Taxco Salad” recipe in Kraft’s 1980 cookbook From Beginning to Endive goes decadently bonkers (and Kraft-forward) with a combination of Miracle Whip and Catalina French dressing. I found that a dressing made of half taco sauce and half French dressing, which I encountered in a 1983 cookbook compiled by University of Minnesota staff and faculty, landed squarely in the center of the spicy to makes-no-sense sweet spectrum and adequately captured the taste memories from my potluck-scrounging youth. Now I can recreate the magic any time I want, and so can you. 

How to Recreate the Classic 1980s Doritos Taco Salad

Ingredients

• 1 pound ground beef, browned
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 package taco seasoning
• 1 head iceberg lettuce, chopped
• 1 to 2 tomatoes, diced
• 1 avocado, diced
• 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
• 1 (9 1/4 ounce) bag Doritos Taco Flavored Tortilla Chips, crushed

Dressing:

• 1/2 cup French dressing
• 1/2 cup taco sauce

Directions

1. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook and stir ground beef in the hot skillet until browned and crumbly, 7 to 10 minutes. Drain and discard any excess grease.
2. Pour water and seasoning mix over beef; stir to combine. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer, uncovered, until mixture thickens slightly, about 5 minutes. Set aside.
3. Stir together French dressing and taco sauce in a small bowl for the dressing.
4. Toss iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, and cheese with the dressing. Mix in browned beef and chips.
5. Serve immediately