Tostada (tortilla)

Tostadas are a category of dishes in Mexican and Guatemalan cuisine built around a toasted tortilla. The tortilla itself is usually deep-fried or toasted until it becomes flat or bowl-shaped, and it can be eaten on its own or serve as a foundation for other ingredients. While corn tortillas are the most common choice, versions made from wheat or other bases also exist.

To make a tostada, a stale tortilla is fried in boiling oil until it turns golden, rigid, and crunchy—similar to how stale bread becomes toast. Commercially produced tostadas taste and feel much like tortilla chips. In Mexico and the American Southwest, tostadas are a standalone dish and also accompany foods like seafood, stews, menudo, birria, and pozole. They are found throughout Mexico.

Toppings for tostadas largely mirror those for tacos: a base layer of beans, cheese, sour cream, chopped lettuce, sliced onions, and salsa, topped with diced and fried chicken, pork, or beef. Seafood versions with tuna, shrimp, crab, chopped octopus, or ceviche are also popular. Vegetarian tostadas exist but are less common. Because tostadas are fragile, the main topping—often beans or cream—must be pasty enough to hold everything together and prevent garnishes from falling off while eating. In the Oaxaca region, a large version called tlayuda is as big as a pizza and sometimes topped with fried chapulines (a type of grasshopper).

Tostadas can be served as an appetizer (botana) by cutting them into small triangles to make tortilla chips for dipping into salsa, guacamole, beans, cream, cream cheese, or chile con queso. This chip version traces its origins to both totopos de maiz and New Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine. Commercial tortilla chips, sometimes called nachos, are widely sold in stores. In Guatemala, tostadas are often topped with black beans, parsley, ground beef, and curtido.