Listen, if you don’t listen to another food recommendation I give you for as long as I do this job, then please believe me when I say that the thing that has been missing from your life up until now is the duck fat Sonoran tortillas from Wandering Ranchero. (Located behind Palate Coffee). There are certain things that once you have them, you can never go back and these tortillas (and Wandering Ranchero in general, honestly) add a dimension to breakfast tacos that I had no idea was missing.
What owners, operators, Taco Scientists Will Burks and Laura Gabriel have done with Wandering Ranchero might seem simple at first glance, with three types of breakfast tacos, two different waffles and a few delicious add-ons, but each item has such specific and complex flavor profiles that it feels like we’re only scratching the surface of what Burks and Gabriel are capable of crafting.
“The idea for the food truck definitely came from Laura’s love for breakfast tacos,” says Burks, “and she noticed a lack of options here in Bend and wanted to fill that gap! The entire concept came together extremely fast after speaking with some mutual friends of the owners of Palate and hearing they were possibly interested in selling their food truck. We set up a meeting about purchasing it, and we all hit it off pretty well and decided it would be an awesome place to set up shop and help support each other’s businesses, selling breakfast tacos with their fantastic coffee!”
Sitting outside on what is likely one of the last warm(-ish) sunny days of the winter, with a perfectly pulled cortado from Palate and three fat, scratch-made breakfast tacos and a cinnamon toast waffle that tasted like Saturday mornings in front of cartoons… it all reminded me why I love Bend so much in the first place. It’s also nice that Will and Laura are just deeply warm and pleasant people whose immediate and unforced friendliness has secured me as a regular for as long as they will have me.
I’ll get to the tortillas in a minute, but first, let’s talk about these three tacos on offer: two carne and one no carne. First was the Al Pastor taco featuring smoked pork, pineapple, eggs and crisped Cotija and Oaxaca cheeses on the Duck Fat Sonoran tortillas, topped with cilantro and onion. One of the things that’s so easy for breakfast burrito and taco spots to get wrong is the ratio between the egg and everything else. What Wandering Ranchero gets right from the jump is their balance. So many savory breakfast spots front-load their tortillas with so many eggs and potatoes that whatever else they’re playing with is buried under starch and egg protein. You taste every ingredient in these, from the tender smoked pork to the sweet & salty contrasting cheeses, the Al pastor is wonderful.
Next came the Green Chili Chorizo taco with ground pork blended with green peppers and tomatillos, eggs, also featuring crisped Cotija and Oaxaca cheeses on the Duck Fat Sonoran tortillas and topped with cilantro and onion. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve had a more distinct and signature chorizo in Bend. Ranchero avoids the typical mistake a lot of local spots seem to fall into by not drowning the pork in paprika and cumin and here’s that word again, balancing the spice, smoke and sweetness with a chili sauce I wouldn’t mind filling a bathtub with. Zero grease, zero over-saturation of flavor…just a perfect meat lover’s breakfast taco.
However, it might have been the no-carne breakfast taco that stole this man’s heart. Packed with smoked sweet potato, eggs, roasted poblanos, ranch beans, crispy potato layer with their (hopefully patented) crisped Cotija and Oaxaca cheeses on the Duck Fat Sonoran tortillas with a splash of Habanero-Caribe-Peach sauce, this beast is incredible. I’m not a veggie taco connoisseur by any means, but the way the cheese meets the crispy hash browns, smoked sweet potatoes and poblanos feels like alchemy. “The smoked sweet potatoes were actually an addition that happened like two weeks ago because we got a review on Reddit that said, ‘The two meat options are incredible, but the veggie option is just OK.’ Says Burks, “I honestly agreed and just didn’t want to be putting any food out that wasn’t up to par with the rest of the menu, so I did some brainstorming with a few of our other cooks and we came up with the idea for smoking some hand cut sweet potato fries and tossing them in Calabrian Chili powder and Smoked Salt to try to amp up the option for people who don’t eat meat, and it seems to be taking off pretty well!” Yeah, much, much better than OK.
But these tortillas. Not to keep comparing, but when you see a place that genuinely cares about the quality of their tortillas, then it makes all the mediocre, wet, disintegrating ones even more infuriating. As fresh and hearty as all of the ingredients are, Wandering Ranchero ensures these gently crispy tortilla masterworks are the centerpiece of their tacos by not only being the spine that holds the entire enterprise together, but also adding a completely new depth of flavor to the meal.
“The tortillas were actually a very, very last-minute decision, says Burks. “We had a fantastic connection in Texas to order from, right up until the last month before opening, when they decided they couldn’t really supply the amounts we were requesting. So I went on YouTube and watched a bunch of tortilla-making videos and we decided that duck fat Sonoran-style tortillas were the best way to go! After countless hours in the kitchen at home, I finally came up with a recipe that seemed to work pretty well! After hand rolling the first 200-300 tortillas (and about destroying my back) we decided to order a sweet heated tortilla press from Germany that can make about 200 tortillas/hour and it has been an absolute lifesaver ever since!”
As Wandering Ranchero focuses exclusively on the breakfast arts, they’re open from 7 am to 2 pm daily. I envision a future where, hopefully, one day Will and Laura show us what their lunches and, dare I say, even dinners, look like. Regardless of what the future holds, I know Wandering Ranchero and Will and Laura will be a part of the local culinary scene for a long time to come.
Wandering Ranchero
Daily 7am-2pm
Behind Palate Coffee
643 NW Colorado Ave
wanderingranchero.com
This article appears in the Source December 25, 2025.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
