A Packet Of This Soup Mix Is All You Need For More Flavorful Fajitas

As entrees go, fajitas sure do have a way of announcing themselves. In a restaurant setting, they sizzle and steam; that noise, of course, comes from the fiery hot skillets that brave, uniformed servers have been marching through casual dining chains for time immemorial. Fajita flavors also tend to be more pronounced in professional settings thanks to the typical combination of factors that makes all manner of foodstuffs, like steak, taste better in restaurants. You can recreate some of those more concentrated tastes with a bit of the flaky, powdery blend that never seems to exhaust its novel uses: onion soup mix.

If you imagine the fragrance that accompanies those sonorous fajitas, you should recall savory protein, but also the heavy presence of soft, translucent onion strips. Onion soup mix takes that bouquet and pulverizes it into one allium- and umami-packed packet, underscoring its titular ingredient with that classic flavor enhancer, salt. Not only is it plenty tasty with your preferred fajita fillings, but one packet goes a long way to declaring "yeah, it's fajita night."

Onion soup mix's chief characteristic, after its eponymous veggie presence, is salt, so cut whatever you might have otherwise used to avoid overdoing it in the mineral department. By all means, fry up however many onions you'd like — they bring their own pleasant texture to the fold — but eliminate any onion powder. It, too, overlaps too much with the soup mix. Otherwise, onion soup mix goes nicely with fajitas' BFFs, chicken or steak, as well as any other meat you'd ordinarily enjoy with onion.

There are a couple easy ways to zhuzh up said meat with onion soup mix. You can fashion it into a marinade, dissolving it into a liquid, such as unsalted stock or broth, with some oil and other seasonings. Let it all bathe for a few hours, pat dry, and pan-fry how you normally would. You can also brown your meat first, then simmer it in a similar combination of liquid, soup mix, and additional non-competing spices and seasonings. You end up with a nice, onion-forward plate of fajitas in either case. It may arrive a little more quietly than some of those restaurant platters, but it speaks volumes of flavor nonetheless.