Norpro Taco Press

I thought this was really a goofy purchase, I mean it just looks like a gadget, but when I tried it in a DEEP saucepan of 350 degree peanut oil it worked GREAT!The size is right for the really small tortillas you can find at a tortilleria (WORTH THE TRIP BTW) but works with regular (US) corn (maize) tortillas. Obviously if your tortillas are cold (as in refrigerated) or stale (hello) they'll crack if you bend them too hard all at once. Try just holding them in the taco maker and lowering them into the oil. It'll soften in no time.I found that about twenty or twenty-five seconds was ideal. I tried one for a full minute and it was crunchy, good for chips but not what I want in a taco shell. You do want to use a deep saucepan so you can cook the entire tortilla/shell in a single pass. You want some headroom at the top so that when the water escapes the tortilla as steam that you're not caught in the angry bubbling. A works well here -- all the steam is also carrying microscopic bits of oil, which will eventually settle in your kitchen.Really the best homemade taco shells I've ever tasted. Much easier than artistically creating each taco shell with simple tongs and a pan of hot oil. It looks like a gadget, but it really works well!1. Use good oil (peanut oil is a good choice, expensive but worth it)2. Get the oil hot (use a probe thermometer like )3. If there's a tortilleria anywhere near you, check it out. The difference in flavor between supermarket tortillas and fresh (as in still warm) tortillas is day and night.

It is a little smaller than I hoped. It is more like it is for making half sized taco shells.I didn't get it to make normal taco shells, I learned to do that when I was 4. Grease is hot, kids learn that fast.No, I got this to make tacobominations, tacos that should not be.Why make your taco shell out of corn, when you can hammer a round steak flat, season and bread it, then put it in this and make it into a taco shell?A lobster roll with a roll? Why not pull the meat out of a lobster tail, flatten and bread it, put it in this thing and make a lobster taco shell to put your lobster roll on. That is twice as much lobster!Smash a chicken breast flat, bread and deep fry in this, then fill with BLT ingredients and ranch dressing! Your cardiologist would be mortified!Chocolate chip cookie dough rolled out into a disk and then deep fried in this is going to be a disaster!At this point the question is simply "What can I flatten and fry in this?".

As the tongs came there was a problem. They are way too wide. The have maybe a 60 degree angle. It took some pounding for about 5 minutes but I finally bent the tongs to an angle about the same as a taco bell taco shell of maybe 20 degree angle. Since then they are great. I have already used them 4 times and am heating up the fryer for another batch right now. The bottom of the shell is perfectly rounded. I do recommend if you use a deep fat fryer that you cook with the bottom pointed to the sky. The edges of the shell tend to bend upwards while frying and if you do top of shell upward it can bend slightly inward around the tongs making you have to pry the shell off. Cooking upside down does not seem to have this problem.I would have given a 5 stars except I did have to bend the tongs closer. I am not sure why they were made so wide. Maybe for some other dish that comes in that shape. The only other recommendation I would have to the maker of the tongs is to make them about a 1/2 inch higher per side. They fit a 5 inch tortilla perfectly and would not have the problem with removing regardless how you cooked the shell, but most of those I find in the store are 6 inches.I live alone so buying shells by the dozen is just not reasonable. This lets me fix as I want and need. It only takes about 15 seconds per shell to cook them. I use sunflower oil so I can set my fryer to max heat (it goes up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit) without smoking or chance of fire.

They worked great as intended. However, cooking one shell at a time was tedious and time consuming. In the future, I would cook all of the shells in advance so they are done when it's time to eat. I felt that the shell was too wide. Might want to put a squeeze on the tongs to make the shell opening smaller. The trouble is when the shell opening is too wide you have to squeeze it together after filling to get your mouth around it. This causes the shell to crack at the bottom and you can’t put your taco down or it falls apart. We attempted to try and not cook the shell too long and leave it a tad “chewy” but it was almost impossible to gauge exactly when in the cooking process this was ideal. The other problem will be, if you make the shell tongs too narrow and have to open them a little to fit your fillings in, it will again have the tendency to crack the shell. Will give them a 2nd try.

Works great. Washes easily. Sturdy

Worthless! Same your money. I thought it would work... but you can only fry one side... you would need to dip the entire thing in oil at once!

This is great if you’re making taco shells in a deep frying dish, but, not as useful for doing it in a frying pan of oil. We tweaked ours like someone else mentioned, by bending it on our vise in the garage. That helped it, but it’s still hard to get the bottom of the taco shell done in the middle outside.

This is one of those silly tools that's worth keeping around if you're into tacos. Yeah, you can use a pair of tongs and a spatula to do the same thing but after 20 minutes of that you'll be ready to buy some cardboard flavored boxed shells. There's a decent amount of tension on the hinge so it stays shut when you close it on a tortilla, and it's heavy enough that you can load it and let it hold the shell down in the oil. Keep in mind that it cooks the whole thing at once as opposed to doing half and half by hand, so allow more space at the top of your pot to keep the oil from boiling over when you first put it in.