Ground Beef goes in the slow cooker with spices and hot sauce, and a few hours later you have perfectly browned and seasoned ground beef for tacos, burritos, or taco salad!
(For Friday Flashbacks I feature recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites, and this method for "browning" taco meat in the slow cooker is one I've used over and over since I first posted this a few years ago.)
Maybe everyone but me knows about the idea of cooking ground beef in the slow cooker without pre-browning the meat, but when I saw this idea popping up on various blogs, I was intrigued. I don't use a lot of ground beef, but I do love Taco Salad, and the idea of having Spicy Ground Beef for Tacos, Burritos, or Taco Salad in the freezer was enough to get me to try this method. I love the ground beef tacos you get at a Mexican restaurant, where the meat is highly seasoned and very finely broken apart, so that's what I was going for.
I was fully prepared to try this several times to perfect the recipe, but my first try was a winner! I did use a very generous amount of Cholula hot sauce to season the meat, so if you're making this for kids (or adults who don't like much heat) you probably want to use the smaller amount listed in the recipe.
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