Huevos Rancheros
Huevos Rancheros is a delicious Mexican breakfast recipe featuring toasted tortillas, refried beans, sunny side eggs, and a mouthwatering vegetable sauce topping. Garnish it with avocados, queso fresco, chorizo, and more veggies.
For more Mexican inspired breakfast recipes, try my breakfast burritos and baked breakfast tacos.
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I feel like it’s easy to skip right over breakfast these days. The world is moving so fast, so it’s hard to sit down and enjoy a meal first thing in the morning! That is exactly why you should treat yourself to the protein packed, flavorful, and easy breakfast that you deserve.
Huevos Rancheros are great to enjoy on weekends but it’s also easy enough to prep ahead of time and enjoy during the week! Warm, pan toasted corn tortillas are topped with refried beans and runny eggs.
While the base of the Huevos Rancheros holds a lot of substance and flavor, my favorite part might just be the homemade salsa that tops it. Made with fresh ingredients like tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, lime, and more, this salsa is anything but boring.
Huevos Rancheros is a great family breakfast but it also doubles as a fantastic brunch recipe. If you plan on having friends over for some early afternoon Brunch Cocktails, consider serving this satisfying Mexican breakfast recipe as the main dish!
What is Huevos Rancheros?
“Huevos Rancheros” translates to “eggs of the ranch” or “rancher’s eggs,” and and basically refers to a farm style breakfast. It’s a classic Mexican dish that features eggs, tortillas, and a cooked salsa style sauce. It’s a great dish to make for breakfast, especially because you can easily customize it to your family’s personal tastes.
The best part is that you can make the salsa and beans components ahead of time and keep them in the fridge for the morning. That way, when you’re still little groggy, you can throw everything together in minutes!
Ingredient Notes
Corn Tortillas – While you can use flour tortillas if that’s what you prefer, corn tortillas are the traditional choice.
Cooking Oil – use neutral oil that can stan up to high temperatures, like avocado oil, canola oil, or vegetable.
Tomatoes – We love the aromatic tomatoes on the vine but you can choose your own fresh tomatoes.
Onion – yellow or white onion will work best.
Red Bell Pepper – choose any color bell peppers you prefer, there is not much flavor difference.
Jalapeños – Use fresh jalapeños and you can adjust the spice level just by choose older or younger jalapenos. Young jalapenos are less spicy and they have smooth, deep green skin. Older jalapenos get spicier as they age and they will have brown veins running along the skin. The more veins, the spicier the jalapeno. You can also discard jalapeno seeds if you want less spice of leave them in for more spice.
Cilantro – fresh cilantro is one of the classic ingredients in Mexican cuisine, it is pretty important. If you don’t like it, simply omit it, don’t substitute with another herb.
Lime – You’ll need the freshly squeezed juice of half a lime.
Refried Beans – Choose your favorite brand or homemade. I recommend your use simple, unflavored refried beans because you will get a lot of flavor from other components.
Chopped Green Chilis – come in a small can and you can choose the spice level. Make sure to drain them well prior to using.
Seasonings – You’ll need a mix of chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, paprika, and a pinch of salt to create the best flavor palate for your refried beans.
See recipe card for complete information on ingredients and quantities.
Optional Additional Toppings
Some of my favorite optional additional toppings include:
Avocados
Queso fresco or shredded cheese
Black beans
Corn
Fresh veggies like chili peppers, cilantro, raw onions
Meats like chorizo, bacon, taco beef, or leftover chicken
Feel free to have fun and get creative with your Huevos Rancheros toppings.
How to Make Huevos Rancheros
Start off by making the beans: Mix together all of the ingredients for the beans in a bowl until everything is fully combined.
Next, make the salsa: Dice the veggies. For spicy salsa, leave the jalapeño seeds in the mix. For a less spicy salsa, remove the jalapeño seeds and discard them.
Heat a pan with oil over medium heat. Cook the onions and peppers until they begin to soften. Add the diced tomatoes. Season with a pinch of salt, and continue cooking until the veggies are totally softened. Remove from the heat and stir in the minced cilantro and lime juice.
Assemble the Huevos Rancheros: Crisp up the tortillas by adding some oil to the pan and raising the heat to high. Toast the tortillas on both sides until crispy. Remove them from the pan.
Lower the heat and cook the eggs to your desired level of doneness.
Spread the refried beans over the toasted tortillas in an even layer. Add an egg to each of the tortillas. Spread some of the salsa over the top and add some crumbled queso fresco. Top it off with the toppings of your choice, and enjoy!
Recipe FAQs
As I mentioned, this is a great weekend breakfast recipe but it can easily be made during the week as well. Just prep some components ahead of time.
Refried beans: mix all of the ingredients for the refried beans. Store the beans in an airtight container in the fridge.
Salsa: cook the salsa per recipe instructions and let is cool. Store it in a separate container in the fridge.
When you’re ready, simply toast the tortillas, cook the eggs, and assemble your Huevos Rancheros.
Don’t forget to serve some classic restaurant-style salsa, salsa verde, guacamole, and chips!
For Mexican-style cocktails, Margarita, Michelada, and Paloma make nice brunch cocktails.
Other main breakfast dishes to consider are Breakfast Burritos and Breakfast Tacos!
Nope! Even though it is the most traditional style to cook eggs for Huevos Rancheros, you can absolutely use scrambled eggs if that’s what you prefer. You can also make your fried eggs ever medium or over hard, if you don’t like the runny yolks.
More Mexican Style Recipes To Try
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Huevos Rancheros Recipe
Ingredients
- 8 eggs
- 8 corn tortillas taco sized
Salsa:
- 1-2 tbsp canola oil
- 4 medium tomatoes on a vine
- 1 small yellow onion
- 1 red bell pepper
- 1-2 jalapeno peppers
- 2 tbsp minced fresh cilantro
- 1/2 lime – juice only
- salt
Refried Beans:
- 12 oz refried beans
- 3 oz canned chopped green chilis drained
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp paprika
- salt to taste
Optional Additional Toppings:*
- 3 avocados
- 2-3 oz queso fresco
Instructions
For the beans:
- In a mixing bowl, mix together all the ingredients for the refried bean layer until completely incorporated. Set aside.
Salsa:
- Dice tomatoes, onion, bell peppers and jalapenos. You can choose to leave the jalapeno seeds in or take them out to make it milder.
- Preheat the cooking pan over medium heat and add oil to the pan.
- Cook onions and both peppers until starts to soften and then add diced tomatoes. Season with some salt and cook until veggies are completely softened. Take off heat and stir in lime juice and minced cilantro.
Putting together Huevos Rancheros:
- Raise the heat to medium high heat and add some oil. Add the tortillas and toast them on both sides, until crispy. Take them out.
- Lower the heat to medium (add a little more oil if needed) and cook eggs to desired doneness.
- Spread some refried beans over the tortillas and add egg on each one. Spread some of the cooked salsa over the top, crumble some queso fresco, and add any other toppings over it.*
Video
Notes
Nutrition
All images and text ©Lyubov Brooke for ©Will Cook For Smiles. Please do not use my images without prior permission. If using my posts in collections and features, please link back to this post for the recipe.
Disclaimer: Nutrition information shown is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate as most ingredients and brands have variations.
This was so good!