12 Amazing Taco Bell Menu Tricks You Need to Try

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The existing Taco Bell menu is the mother lode of restaurant hacks. It seems like the evolution from its original 1962 menu has been built on stuffing one item into to create the menu we enjoy today. Given the fact that Taco Bell is continuing to hack its own menu, it makes sense that Taco Bell has inspired a decent amount of menu hacks among its fans. These days, living mas is all about taking a penchant for culinary creativity to the next level and seeing what you can put together from the Taco Bell best seller menu.

So what makes a good Taco Bell hack? The first box to check off is price. Menu hacks that get a decent bang for their buck are the most popular. There are also plenty of menu hacks that seek to capture a sense of Taco Bell nostalgia by recreating discontinued menu items. Regardless of a menu hacker’s motivation, one of the best things about hacking Taco Bell’s menu is the restaurant’s digital interface. Online ordering and digital kiosks make it extremely easy to customize each menu item to your liking. The menu offers truly limitless options for hacking, and here are some of the best.

There’s nothing wrong with Taco Bell’s use of refried beans. They show up on a good amount of its menu, but sometimes, you need to mix things up a bit. Swapping Taco Bell’s refried beans for black beans on items like the Loaded Beef Nachos and the Burrito Supreme provide a bit more textural heft than the creamy refried beans are packing. Black beans also offer a more pronounced flavor that does a lot to improve the quality of some of Taco Bell’s menu items. Even from a diet perspective, the protein and fiber content of black beans is higher than that of refried pinto beans.

The Bean Burrito is perhaps the best example of how black beans can elevate a menu item. Even though the classic Bean Burrito is a go-to for anyone looking for something tasty on a budget, springing for black beans instead of refried is a game changer. It’s a fairly cheap customization that pays off by creating a heartier burrito. The red sauce isn’t the best option for black beans, however, so leaving it off or swapping it with something a bit less aggressive is the way to go.

Taco Bell’s Lava Sauce gained a cult following when it appeared alongside the Volcano Taco and Volcano Burrito as part of the Volcano Menu back in 2012. Taco Bell has since revitalized the Volcano Menu as a promotional event, but fans are stuck with their own creativity until that particular volcano decides to erupt once more. While it may be difficult to recreate most of the Volcano Menu’s items, the spicy nacho cheese condiment known as Lava Sauce is pretty straightforward. To recreate this fiery dip, simply order a side of nacho cheese sauce and then mixing a few squirts of Fire Sauce or Diablo Sauce into the liquid gold. The correct way to do this is up to the individual, but a Reddit post in the Taco Bell subreddit suggests that two packets of Fire Sauce is the magic number.

The one problem with crafting this hack is that it requires a bit of DIY application if you want it on your favorite burrito. It’s perhaps best used as a condiment for tacos as it’s easy to mix up a batch and drizzle it over the existing filling. However, a lot can be said for spicing up the cheese sauce that comes with an order of Nacho Fries.

Not only have Nacho Fries become Taco Bell’s best selling item of all time, but they can also be added to any item on the menu — within reason, of course. All you have to do is select “seasoned fries” as a customization from the digital menu or kiosk and Nacho Fries are imminent. It’s worth a try because even on their own, Nacho Fries are good enough to find their way into the top five of Chowhound’s best fast food fries roundup. When combined with a Cheesy Double Beef Burrito for example, you get something truly next level.

The end result is a Taco Bell riff on a classic California burrito, and fans of this West Coast classic are in for a real treat when they try it with Nacho Fries. Putting regular fries on a burrito was a good enough idea to launch an entire burrito sub-genre, so swapping run-of-the-mill fries with seasoned Nacho Fries is totally broken. The Cheesy Double Beef Burrito is much improved with the addition of Nacho Fries, and making them the sixth layer of a Beefy 5-Layer Burrito is phenomenal.

While some of these hacks add a bit more to an item’s price tag, getting a burrito grilled when you order it is both free and delightful. The “make it grilled” option is there for most every burrito, and since it’s free, there’s really no reason not to do this. The original Bean Burrito can tend to get a little squashed in this process, but it works really well with something that has a bit more heft. 

Take, for example, the Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito. Here, you have one of the cheapest items on the menu, but when you get it grilled, you feel like you’re having something a bit more sophisticated. It’s also a good bet since its soft-textured innards really benefit from the contrast of a crispy exterior. The reason that Taco Bell’s grilled burritos are so popular is precisely because of that textural difference. Nothing quite beats biting into the slightly crunchy, toasted tortilla only to have the gooey flood of beans, cheese, and meat assault your taste buds.

Most of Taco Bell’s menu innovations since the mid-1990s can be attributed to the Double Decker Taco. When it was first released, the idea of wrapping a taco inside another taco blew our collective minds. Since then, it’s easy to see the Double Decker’s DNA in a lot of the restaurant’s current menu. The school of thought behind this menu item is simple: What if an additional decker could be applied to the Double Decker, thus creating a triple decker?

Since the Cheesy Gordita Crunch is the current king of Taco Bell’s taco-within-a-taco oeuvre, this hack starts with the Three Cheese Chicken Flatbread Melt. Order one of these, open it up to expose the cheesy chicken innards, and then pop a Double Stacked Taco inside. It’s an attempt to combine the pros of both the Cheesy Gordita Crunch and the Double Decker, but three deckers just might be one decker too many. The crunchy taco gets very lost in this muddle, which defeats the purpose of combining both soft and crunchy tortillas. Perhaps a soft/crunchy/soft/crunchy quadruple decker would be the correct amount of deckers.

As the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito is widely considered to be one of Taco Bell’s finest creations, there’s not a whole lot one can do to improve upon its formula. It’s got some of the best ingredients that Taco Bell has to offer, and the synergy among those ingredients is truly impressive. Over the years, however, Taco Bell fans have invented an iteration that blends what we love about this burrito with the discontinued 7-Layer Burrito — and the secret is guacamole.

In fact, it’s the guac that gives this menu hack its name — well, that, and the burrito’s Hulk-like physique. A true Incredible Hulk Burrito starts with a Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, makes it fresco, swaps the Nacho Cheese Sauce with guacamole, and nixes the burrito’s interior tortilla. This last feature means you’ll need a bit of extra assistance from your local Taco Bell employee, so just remember to be cool about it when you make the order. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with keeping that second tortilla while making the Beefy 5-Layer fresco and swapping out the guac when you order online.

On its own, Taco Bell’s Quesadilla doesn’t have much going for it. When used in the menu hacker’s toolbox, however, it’s quite the versatile addition. It’s got the cheese, the Creamy Jalapeño Sauce, and your choice of protein. On top of that, the Quesadilla’s considerable surface area can be wrapped around just about anything. In its sliced form, each cheesy little triangle can be separated and used to enhance other items on the menu.

The Taco-dilla is what you get when you put one of the quesadilla slices into a taco, creating a kind of reverse Double Decker. This can be done with any Taco Bell taco, but the basic iterations are typically created with either the Soft Taco or Crunchy Taco. The Soft Taco is slightly inferior to the Crunchy Taco, as the soft tortilla and slightly toasted Quesadilla are too similar in texture. When you make this with the Crunchy Taco, you get a much better textural contrast.

Legacy fans of Taco Bell rejoiced when the restaurant brought back its previously discontinued Mexican Pizza back in 2022. The relaunch was captured in all its pageantry via “Mexican Pizza: The Musical,” a YouTube video — featuring Taco Bell super fan Dolly Parton, no less — that the restaurant released to promote the item. It’s a tricky menu item to customize, but the nacho pizza may be the best bet.

To create the nacho pizza, simply order up a Mexican Pizza and then swap out the Mexican Pizza Sauce with Nacho Cheese Sauce. No judgments if you want to swap out the Three-Cheese Blend with sour cream or guacamole, but the Nacho Cheese Sauce is key here. The end result is a unique combo of nachos and pizza, which has traditionally been a tough look for fast food restaurants to pull off. The highlight of this hack is the Mexican Pizza shell, which is perfect for a nacho setting. The four layered slices are already built as a food delivery system, so the lines between nachos and pizza become pleasantly blurred.

One of the main selling points of the Cantina Chicken Bowl is that it’s a low-carb option, but carbs tend to make everything just a little bit better, so there’s a hack for that. This bowl has all the makings of excellent nachos — especially if you’d prefer yours with tasty Slow-Roasted Chicken instead of Taco Bell’s Seasoned Beef. All you have to do to make that concept into a delicious reality is add an order of Chips and Nacho Cheese and you’re good to go.

With these two menu items assembled, you’re primed to scoop all that Cantina Chicken goodness up with your chips. One order of Chips and Nacho Cheese should do the trick, but two orders will make sure you’ve got the right chip-to-topping ratio. One of the major benefits of this dish is that your chips don’t end up getting soggy underneath all the toppings. However, soggy chip fans could go far by dumping the chips on top and mixing everything up with a fork. Nachos Bell Grande might rank high on Chowhound’s ranking of Taco Bell’s Best Seller Menu, but the Cantina Chicken nachos can give them a run for their money.

There are plenty of discontinued Taco Bell items that have made a glorious comeback, but we have yet to see such a glow-up from the 7-Layer Burrito. It got nixed from United States menus in 2020 and hasn’t had a promotional comeback since. It never quite reached the heights of the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, but it was a great plant-based option that had a lot going for it. Luckily, many of the 7-Layer Burrito’s layers are still in circulation at Taco Bell.

The best way to recreate this classic Taco Bell item is to order a Cheesy Bean and Rice burrito because it gives you three of the original seven layers. From there, you add lettuce, guacamole, sour cream, and tomato — the latter two can be done by making the Burrito Supreme. Purists will want to swap out the Nacho Cheese Sauce for the shredded alternative, but the creaminess of the Nacho Cheese Sauce ends up working pretty well with everything else — nothing wrong with a bit of reinvention now and then.

The existence of a Mexican Pizza implies the existence of a Mexican Calzone — or at least that is how Taco Bell menu hackers think. The Mexican Calzone puts the Crunchwrap Supreme on the operating table for surprisingly tasty results. It’s a decent menu hack that gets a lot of mileage out of Taco Bell’s ingredients, but it does struggle a bit with cohesion. It’s also high time to get a good hack out of the Breakfast Crunchwrap, which did pretty well on Chowhound’s breakfast sandwich ranking.

To make a Mexican Calzone, you first need to order a Crunchwrap Supreme and then swap out the lettuce and nacho cheese for your choice of beans and the three-cheese blend. The black beans were a bit better than the refried beans, but this will vary based on individual preference. As far as a menu hack goes, the ingredient swap doesn’t really do anything different for the Crunchwrap. Adding the beans to the party is a good call, but it feels like this menu hack is only scratching the surface of what a good Crunchwrap hack could be.

Few historical moments compare to the debut of Mountain Dew’s electric blue Baja Blast exclusively at Taco Bell. Traditional Mountain Dew has always gone particularly well with Mexican-inspired fast food, and Baja Blast took that relationship to the next level. Even though Baja Blast is available at most stores, nothing quite compares to getting it straight from the Taco Bell soda fountain.

Given the fact that Baja Blast is the beverage equivalent of Nacho Fries, Volcano Burritos, or Double Decker Tacos, it’s the perfect subject for a bit of soft drink mixology. There are a few different menu hacks that feature Baja Blast, but one of the most underrated is the Baja Palmer. It’s a simple mix of Baja Blast and Lipton Brisk Mango Fiesta Iced Tea. The flavors of mango and Baja Blast have complementary citrus notes, and the tea’s slight bitterness really ramps up all the sugary sweetness at play. It’s a refreshing complement to any Taco Bell item — hacked or otherwise.