Elevate Your Chipotle Burrito With These 5 Ordering Tips

Chipotle is a chain of Mexican-inspired fast food restaurants that primarily specializes in Mission-style burritos, or huge flour tortillas encasing mountains of fillings that can be as large as your forearm. While it has expanded its options over the years, there aren't as many choices on the chain's menu as there are at one of its lower-brow competitors, whose name I can't quite recall but know that it sounds like Rocko Schnell. And if you're lucky enough to live somewhere with a lot of independently-owned fast-casual Mexican restaurants, Chipotle can leave a lot to be desired when it comes to selection.

I subsisted on Chipotle for a semester in college. After a while, the monotony of my meals there became depressing. And its cattle chute approach to ordering gives you little time to contemplate a new and exciting riff on the same old burrito. Nevertheless, each store has a lot of ingredients that can be combined in unique ways to make a trip to Chipotle anything but mundane. Below are five innovative ordering tips that will really elevate your Chipotle burrito, from the simplest to the most complicated hack that will require the right timing. Keep in mind that some of these tips may incur additional charges and may not be available to order online.

Chipotle's burritos are so large that they can be impossible to eat gracefully. I typically resolve this by ordering a burrito bowl and a flour tortilla on the side — yes, it's a way to make an at-home Chipotle burrito out of your leftovers. If I'm feeling cheap, I tear the tortilla into two equal halves, spoon on the fillings, wrap, and enjoy two slimmer and markedly less unwieldy burritos, or I divide the tortilla into smaller pieces to make tacos. Otherwise, I just order a couple of extra tortillas on the side. This is also a great option to share the chain's hearty portions with a companion.

This is the Chipotle-style version of putting Fritos in a burrito, which was popularized by Taco Bell. Ask whoever is assembling your order to add a side of chips inside your burrito before they wrap it up. Make sure they crunch them up well for ease of wrapping, or your burrito will look like a porcupine with the chips poking through the tortilla. You can get a chilaquiles effect by adding salsa, queso, and sour cream over the chips.

A wet burrito is different from a regular one in that it gets smothered in sauce like an enchilada. Order your Chipotle burrito with rice, beans, meat, and cheese. Instead of wrapping it in foil, request that an employee place your simplified burrito in a bowl. Now you can give your burrito the enchilada treatment by smothering it in the salsa of your choice and sour cream. This is a less messy approach to the soup burrito that employees dread assembling. To take it to the next level, consider adding Chipotle's queso.

Chipotle has most of the elements available to make a higher-quality version of Taco Bell's Cheesy 5-Layer Burrito. Start off by ordering your burrito with pinto beans, steak or plant-based Sofritas, lots of shredded cheese, and sour cream. Don't overstuff your creation because you're now going to ask your burrito slinger to take another tortilla, spread it with a layer of queso, and wrap it around your burrito. It's not exactly the same as Taco Bell –-  it's actually so much better!

When made well, a burrito will feature all its fillings in horizontal layers, but you can still take a bite and get nothing but rice or sour cream. The secret to more even distribution is concentric rings. Simply begin with the condiments and sauces, asking your burrito builder to spread them throughout the tortilla while avoiding the edges, and finish with the rice, beans, and meat. Just keep in mind that this tip may really mess up Chipotle's flow, so you're going to want to try this one out when there aren't many customers.