First, to get this out of the way: Nobody needs their Chipotle burrito to be any bigger. That thing already packs a day’s worth of sodium and has gobs of saturated fat for twice the body swell. But the pursuit of bigger food is a near-constitutional right, and a guy named Dylan Grosz may now need to Roto-Rooter the cholesterol buildup from his veins, stat, but it was all in the name of a Chipotle Burrito Maximization technique that he says will almost double the size of your burrito.
Boastful hacks like these have been floating around for a while, but Grosz’s adds quantitative research. He got the 17-ounce average weight up to 31.6 ounces by testing various ordering methods against a control burrito group (white rice, black beans, chicken, mild salsa, cheese), weighing them ingredient by ingredient.
The hack boils down to two key points, essentially: getting a burrito bowl, and asking assembly-line workers to go half-and-half on everything it’s an option for. (A burrito bowl, Grosz discovered, gets you about 15 percent more from the get-go.) Next, say you want a tortilla on the side, then go ahead and ask for another — it’s no different than requesting they double-wrap a burrito. Splitting the rice into half white and half brown, beans into half black and half pinto, and even the protein into half chicken and half steak (or whatever you fancy) should yield just one serving of each, but Grosz says he got 50 percent more meat and twice as much rice and beans this way. Finally, he says, make them heap on the grilled fajita veggies and corn salsa, neither of which typically gets offered in the line. Then take this two-pound gargantuan burrito and feed the whole office. You’ll win friends and live to tell about it.
