Chicken Walking Tacos | Instant Pot recipe
These crunchy Walking Tacos are made to travel! Filling a bag of chips with this saucy chicken and bean mixture makes a family-friendly dinner for any time of year.
Why You’ll Love This Recipe
Who doesn’t love chips and taco filling? This is a fun game day, tailgating, or weeknight dinner that everyone in the family loves. Made with chicken breasts, taco seasoning, and salsa, this is a low-lift recipe full of flavor.
We’ve been making these walking tacos for years, and they’re always a hit!
This is one of our favorite Instant Pot chicken recipes for dinner that’s full of Tex-Mex flavor. If you’re looking for more chicken dinner inspiration, try Easy Instant Pot Chicken Tacos, Instant Pot Honey Sesame Chicken, and Instant Pot Cilantro Lime Chicken Taco Salad.
Update: We’ve updated this post with new tips, step-by-step instructions, and photos to help you perfect these walking tacos every time.
INGREDIENTS YOU NEED
Here’s what you need for these classic walking tacos:
- Salsa. We prefer chunky salsa for this recipe.
- Taco seasoning mix. You can find this in the spice aisle. We like McCormick brand.
- Chicken. Go for boneless, skinless chicken breasts.
- Beans. We prefer black beans.
- Chips. You can use Frito or tortilla chips.
- Toppings. We like a mix of shredded lettuce, Mexican cheese, tomatoes, avocados, and sour cream.
How to Make Walking Tacos in an Instant Pot
✅ This easy recipe will work in any brand of electric pressure cooker, including the Instant Pot, Ninja Foodi, or Power Pressure Cooker XL.
The first step to making these walking tacos is to pressure cook the chicken. Add the water, salsa, taco seasoning, and chicken to the pressure cooking pot. Cook the chicken on high for four minutes, then use a quick pressure release.
Carefully remove the lid of the Instant Pot, then use a slotted spoon to carefully transfer the chicken to a cutting board. Dice the chicken into bite-sized pieces.
Return the chicken to the Instant Pot along with the beans, then use the Sauté feature to cook until most of the liquid has evaporated.
Now you’re ready to serve. Open your bag of chips and gently crush them to break them up a bit. Top the chips with the chicken and bean mixture, then add your favorite toppings and enjoy!
Important Tips for Making Walking Tacos
- If you prefer not to use a taco seasoning mix, we love the homemade spice blend in this recipe for Easy Ground Beef Tacos on Barbara Bakes.
- If you’re avoiding spice, choose a mild salsa. Or for more of a kick, go for hot salsa or add extra hot sauce on top.
Frequently Asked Questions about Making Walking Tacos
Yes, store any leftover filling in an airtight container in the fridge for up to four days.
Yes, you can use chicken thighs instead of breasts with no changes to the recipe.
You can swap out black beans for pinto beans if you prefer.
Feel free to use your favorite fresh, creamy, and spicy toppings. We love chopped tomatoes, avocado, and lettuce, plus sour cream and cheese. You could add hot sauce, pickled jalapenos, hot sauce, and cilantro too.
MORE Instant Pot Mexican-Inspired Recipes
We love making Mexican-inspired and Tex-Mex recipes in the instant pot, including:
- Easy Instant Pot Ground Beef Tacos are classic cafeteria-style tacos that the entire family loves.
- Easy Instant Pot Chili Colorado Burritos are a favorite Tex-Mex dinner smothered in sauce.
- Mexican Pinto Bean Soup is a hearty stew fully loaded with fiber-rich beans.
Do you LOVE this recipe?
Leave us a review below to tell us why!
Walking Tacos
Ingredients
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup chunky salsa
- 1 package taco seasoning mix (1.25 oz)
- 2 large boneless skinless chicken breasts
- 1 can black beans (14 oz) drained and rinsed
- Individual sized bags of Fritos or tortilla chips
- Additional toppings including shredded lettuce, shredded Mexican cheese, diced tomatoes, diced avocados, sour cream
Instructions
- Add water and salsa to the pressure cooking pot and stir to combine. Add the chicken breasts and sprinkle the taco seasoning on top. Do not stir.
- Lock the lid in place. Select High Pressure and 5 minutes cook time. When the cook time ends, turn off pressure cooker and use a quick pressure release. When the valve drops, carefully remove the lid.
- Use a slotted spoon to remove the chicken to a cutting board and cut into small bite size pieces.
- Add the chicken and black beans to the pressure cooking pot. Select sauté and cook, stirring often, until most of the water has evaporated.
- To serve, open a bag of chips and crush slightly. Top crushed chips with a scoop of the hot taco meat and your choice of toppings. Serve immediately.
I made this last night and it was a hit! Instead of the “walking” part, we just made taco salads with some crushed Doritos added. YUM!! My husband plans to make a Mexican omelet tomorrow with some of our leftovers. (Personally, thinking of this added to eggs kind of turns my stomach, but I don’t have to eat them!) 🙂 This would be good in a wrap too.
I am so glad that I splurged on an electric pressure cooker last month. I like that I can check out your website during the day at work and have time to cook something delicious after work! Well, technically, I get home 2 hours before my husband does.. but I don’t want to spend the whole time cooking!!
I’m about to use my Emeril Tfal PC for the first time. I’ve got 2 frozen boneless skinless breasts and all the ingredients to make this dish. Should I alter the time for frozen breasts? I’m so scarred to use this appliance!
Hi Kerry – don’t be afraid. How about doing a trial run with just water, then you’ll know what to expect and know you’re doing it right – the noises it makes when it comes to pressure, that you’ve got the lid on just right, etc.
If you’re using frozen chicken breasts, add 3 minutes to the recipe time.
What a great meal. I made this last night and wow. The flavors were great, the meal was enough for 4 of us and very simple to make. Thank you for your help in my quest to find great meals for my family.
Thanks Jonthon – so glad you enjoyed them!
I hadn’t heard of Walking Tacos, but then again I can’t remember the last time I bought snack bags of chips, lol.
However, I’ve been making DIY Taco Plate and Taco Salad for years (decades actually), using a base of crushed tortilla chips and/or sliced romaine lettuce and taco toppings and deboned shredded or chopped cooked whole chicken*. So I was way ahead of Chipotle Grill’s bowl option, lol. I guess the main difference between Walking Tacos and what I’ve been doing is the serving vessel.
I don’t think the non-GMO corn tortilla chips I buy are available in single serve bags, but I do think another crunchy snack my family enjoys fairly often might be available single serve or smallish bags – pork rinds, aka chicharrones. I always choose the unflavored pork rind variety because it’s simply made from pork & salt & nothing else (& while I wouldn’t rely on pork rinds as a main source of protein, pork rinds are mostly composed of protein and the pork fat, which is mostly rendered out, is mostly monounsaturated and a traditional fat used by humans for thousands of years, just like olive oil).
I’ve used crushed pork rinds as a low carb, gluten-free bread crumb substitute for the last 10 years or so, but it never occurred to me to just lightly crush them and use them as a crunchy low carb stand-in for crushed corn tortilla chips in Taco Plate. If I can find pork rinds in small single serve bags, I’ll definitely try them in Walking Tacos. If not, I suppose a disposable bowl would work just as well as a chip bag at a picnic.
BTW, for others like me who don’t buy canned beans anymore, cooked pinto or black beans freeze beautifully in recipe-sized or even single serve portions. Anytime I cook plain pinto or black beans, I try to make enough to set aside a small zip of vacuum sealed bag for the freezer. I also freeze presoaked uncooked beans for the times I want to make a bean recipe but didn’t plan ahead for pre-soaking. It’s important to label, though. Once a family member mistook soaked uncooked beans for cooked. Not good. 😉
* I cook a whole 4-5# organic pasture-raised chicken nearly every week in my Instant Pot pressure cooker, with 2 cups water or broth, for about 20-25 min, then pull off the meat & store it in the fridge for quick meals. I put the chicken scraps and any other chicken bones, necks, backs, & gizzards saved in the freezer with any carrots, onions, and or celery I have that need to be used up (or none if not available) with more water back in the pot for 1-2 hours of pressure cooking for a ready supply of chicken bone broth. The pressure cooker method is just as good and so much faster than my previous 2-3 hour slow poach plus 24 hour slow cook method – plus the house doesn’t smell like a broth factory with the sealed pressure cooker. This method is economical, too. Less electricity, less heating up of the kitchen, and even though organic chicken costs much more per pound than conventional, a whole organic chicken cooked this way is a bargain compared to buying boneless chicken breasts & cartons of broth, and there’s far less packaging trash. The weekly whole chicken routine done at my leisure also saves SO much time later if meals need to be made in a rush. Plus it offers my teenager something nourishing when he’s surveying the fridge for an EZ quick snack. Also, my husband and I prefer dark poultry meat over white meat, but our son prefers white meat, so a whole chicken makes everyone happy. I cook a weekly or every other week batch of .5 -1 # of dried pinto beans, too, for refried beans (tacos, nachos, tostadas, dip, etc.). Keeping these staples stocked in the fridge makes feeding a ravenous teenage boy SO much easier.
Hi Anna – thanks for sharing all your tips. I’ve been after my husband to buy a second freezer so I’ll have more room to stock up. Such great ideas.