Nevari Fry Bread - Indian Tacos

[00:00:00]Bobby's Vegas.

[00:00:02]I don't normally do food trucks.

[00:00:05]It's not a thing that I do.

[00:00:06]But, many of you know, maybe actually most of you probably don't know, but the people who watch my regular channel know.

[00:00:13]It's a long story.

[00:00:14]See, my mom was married to an American Indian, a Sioux.

[00:00:17]We used to live on an Indian reservation, South Dakota, Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, and Rosebud, you know.

[00:00:25]And to make money, we would make and sell Indian tacos and corn soup at local powwows and festivals.

[00:00:34]And eating fried bread was this um ritual just daily.

[00:00:40]A lot of American Indians are really fat because they eat a lot of fried bread.

[00:00:44]This guy set up right here. This is their uh their little setup. And uh they're here at Normally, I don't I don't go to the food trucks. But, I want you to I'm going to take a picture of them any of you want.

[00:00:57]This is um Let's freeze that.

[00:01:03]So, yeah, I'm making an exception today.

[00:01:04]I don't normally do food trucks.

[00:01:07]But, this is a real novelty because most people just never heard of an Indian taco. They don't know fried bread.

[00:01:14]This is kind of I mean, maybe it's known in Arizona or New Mexico, but I think this is more known.

[00:01:20]This is going to make a mess, I can already tell.

[00:01:22]This thing is huge.

[00:01:24]But, growing up uh when I was little on the reservation, South Dakota, the Indian taco was an everyday thing.

[00:01:32]Now, this is a little bit different.

[00:01:35]This is a lot different than what I'm used to seeing.

[00:01:40]This thing here is very, very thin and very crispy. I asked them to do it extra crispy.

[00:01:46]It's a little bit different. The the the ones that we the that the Sioux would do, they would be very thick and fluffy.

[00:01:52]It would be like a almost like a pizza, you know?

[00:01:57]And um This is designed, I guess, to eat like a taco.

[00:02:03]I got to be I got to be honest, it was it's a little it's a little sparse.

[00:02:06]There's no tomatoes, there's no sour cream.

[00:02:09]Um >> [laughter] >> I don't want to criticize them cuz it looks good.

[00:02:16]But it's kind of Well, you know what?

[00:02:17]It's my fault. I told them I said, "Don't um This is my fault. Let me take it back. I said, "Hey, make it really thin for me.

[00:02:24]I don't want a lot of stuff. I don't want to make a big mess." So, they did that on purpose. This is my fault.

[00:02:30]So, they probably pile a lot of stuff on cuz what I found is a lot of times when you get one of these they just pile it on.

[00:02:37]And then trying to eat it, you got to eat it outside.

[00:02:41]Because you try to eat in your car, you're going to make a mess. I'm going to make a mess in here.

[00:02:45]So, I asked him purposely, I said, "Make it really crispy and make it small."

[00:02:52]So, that's my fault.

[00:02:55]I shouldn't have done that. I should have just told them to make it regular.

[00:02:59]The fried bread um I don't know how to describe fried bread. It's fried bread. It's like donut bread.

[00:03:09]And people will often ask like, "How do I eat this?

[00:03:12]Do I fold it?"

[00:03:15]But this is different than the Sioux bread.

[00:03:17]Sioux bread is really thick.

[00:03:20]Same kind of flavor, though. It's just a lot thinner.

[00:03:26]Mhm.

[00:03:29]Now, growing up at my um living with my grandma, my unci, as she would say in Sioux Indian.

[00:03:37]Um and in Oglala Sioux, fried bread was made every morning.

[00:03:43]There'd be a separate pot sitting on your This is making such a mess. You'd have a pot of uh burning sage. You'd always have burning sage in the house.

[00:03:53]That's the thing in the Indian to do.

[00:03:54]They like to burn sage.

[00:03:57]And um fried bread.

[00:04:00]And you would sit there in the morning, you'd have some fried bread with like honey, syrup.

[00:04:08]I just nibbled on it all the time.

[00:04:11]Now, the thing is is I don't want to get offensive here, but all the Indians were on government assistance, you know, basically.

[00:04:22]Back in the '80s, you had what was called the government cheese.

[00:04:26]For those of us that are old enough to know, the 5-lb brick of cheese in the cardboard box.

[00:04:36]And the cheese was hard.

[00:04:38]And you would grate this cheese.

[00:04:41]And everybody used the government cheese for everything.

[00:04:45]It didn't melt very well, either.

[00:04:52]You could try to fold it, but the eating it off the edge of the plate is how I always did it.

[00:05:00]Now, even back in the '80s, one of these was $5.

[00:05:11]$15 now.

[00:05:14]That's probably an acceptable inflation rate, the way things are.

[00:05:20]Um Another thing we used to sell was a corn soup, which was actually made of hominy.

[00:05:26]It was very annoying because people would get it and go, "There's no corn in this corn soup."

[00:05:34]I'm going to make a mess.

[00:05:36]These are meant to be eaten outside while a pack of wild dogs would sit at your feet wagging their tails waiting for you to drop some.

[00:05:48]It was in my living on the reservation?

[00:05:53]It's a weird thing when you grow up poor.

[00:06:00]You don't know you're poor when you're poor.

[00:06:07]I mean we didn't know we were poor.

[00:06:12]We knew that we had food in our belly.

[00:06:16]We had a lake to swim in.

[00:06:20]You know.

[00:06:22]We had a place to live.

[00:06:29]And when I would watch um TV you you you'd see people living in big houses and things.

[00:06:38]To me that was fantasy just like when you watch Batman. Batman lived in a a cave, you know.

[00:06:47]King Arthur lived in a castle or whatever.

[00:06:50]And when you would watch Home Alone you saw Kevin living in that giant house in Chicago. It was just as much fantasy.

[00:07:05]So these really simple foods like this were the everyday food that you would eat, you know.

[00:07:17]The real luxuries back then were just fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, you know.

[00:07:26]Cuz things would come to you um like for instance uh Why does this make a mess?

[00:07:40]A memory that I had living on the reservation.

[00:07:45]Every so many months these missions would come with U-Haul trailers or U-Haul trucks.

[00:07:51]They would go to a cul-de-sac or an area and just dump all the stuff that they had, donations.

[00:07:57]Clothes, furniture, appliances, whatever it was.

[00:08:01]And people would just pick through it.

[00:08:03]They would calmly They wouldn't freak out and run over there like you know, sometimes they treat it like a piñata, you know.

[00:08:11]But people weren't rude or greedy about it, you know.

[00:08:17]We would stand there and pick through all the clothes, the shoes, all the donations.

[00:08:27]And this would go on for about a day.

[00:08:30]And then whatever was left that nobody wanted, the clothes, furniture, whatever it was there that nobody wanted, they would set on fire.

[00:08:48]There wasn't really any industry or business.

[00:08:52]There wasn't a lot of people doing anything for money.

[00:09:00]Maybe you did odd jobs and things, but there weren't a lot of trained people there.

[00:09:06]Trained in the skills of trades.

[00:09:10]Might be one guy that knew how to do plumbing or electricity or whatever.

[00:09:15]And those guys were the richest guys in town.

[00:09:20]My mom was a white Southern lady.

[00:09:25]And she knew how to cook good old-fashioned Texas style chicken, mashed potatoes.

[00:09:37]And let me tell you, she was in demand.

[00:09:44]She'd actually gotten a job [clears throat] working as a cook at the like the old folks home basically.

[00:09:55]And um she'd make fried chicken, homemade puddings, cobblers, peach cobbler made out of canned peaches.

[00:10:09]I'm telling you these people losing their minds. They had never had some of this good food.

[00:10:20]Cuz I'm telling you the American Indian menu diet is pretty small.

[00:10:32]And the majority of American Indians have diabetes, they're overweight, and it's cuz they eat so much of this damn fried bread.

[00:10:51]Cuz it's good.

[00:10:54]There's not much to an Indian taco.

[00:10:56]>> [snorts] >> It's got the same ingredients of a regular taco. The difference is the fried bread.

[00:11:03]Indian tacos are very tribal, very different between the Navajo, Sioux, etc. I've noticed that the western style tacos uh fry bread rather is very different from up north in the Midwest and South Dakota.

[00:11:24]In Oklahoma.

[00:11:26]They like to use a thicker, chewier bread. Here it's a much thinner bread.

[00:11:33]That being said, still has the same kind of flavor consistency.

[00:11:38]This is very good. I would say if you haven't had one of these and you just want to try something different because we've been eating the same bunch of stuff forever, come try it. Uh look for them on Instagram and they will show where they're going to be at their current location.

[00:11:57]Here lately I've been seeing them here on Pecos at the um Home Depot that's on the Pecos in between Sunset and Russell.

[00:12:08]Right down the street from where I live.

[00:12:11]It's very good.

[00:12:13]Um they said that they've been getting a lot of new followers on Instagram.

[00:12:18]A lot of the local Indian uh community has been coming by and I think that's great and they they set up at powwows and things and I haven't been to a powwow in a very, very long time. And I think I'd like to go. I would love to uh have some of the food and see some of the stuff and you know, hear some of the sounds.

[00:12:39]You know, I've I've been a part of and witnessed the some of the real powwows before they banned a lot of the stuff.

[00:12:45]The real sun dances, you know, the real sweat lodges, the real the real [ __ ] You know, and uh pretty amazing. Anyway, thanks again for uh having lunch with me.

[00:13:01]This is Bobby's Vegas.