Hidden Veggie Ground Beef Quesadillas

If you love cheesy, meaty ground beef quesadillas and would like to sneak more vegetables into your diet, this recipe is a must try. Extra lean ground beef is cooked with a blend of fire roasted tomatoes, chipotle chiles in adobo, garlic, onion, and “hidden” leafy green veggies spinach and kale.

The extra picky eater in my house gives these hidden veggie quesadillas two big thumbs up. So I feel confident in saying you’ll never know the greens are there!

How to Make Ground Beef Quesadillas with Hidden Veggies

The secret to successfully hiding spinach and kale is a blended sauce that’s added to browned and cooked ground beef. Once it’s cooked and reduced down, you’re left with a rich and flavorful beef filling for quesadillas (or tacos, stuffed peppers, enchiladas, Mexican pizza, or anything else you can think up).

Hidden Veggie Sauce for Ground Beef

To make the sauce, you’ll need half an onion, peeled garlic cloves, salt and ground cumin, fresh baby spinach and kale (or any leafy green), fire roasted tomatoes, and chipotle chiles in adobo. Everything goes in a food processor and is blended until smooth.

If you have a picky eater like me, start small with the added veggies and increase in the next batch if you’d like to get more inside each quesadilla.

Best Tortillas for Quesadillas

Flour tortillas are ideal for quesadillas since they easily fold without breaking and support more filling than corn tortillas.

You’ll see a note in the recipe card below about nutrition facts with Mission Carb Balance tortillas. These are a great tortilla option for making lower carb, lower calorie quesadillas like my cheddar bacon ranch turkey quesadillas or ground chicken quesadillas.

The tortillas I used for the recipe video are the same flour tortillas I used for our leftover barbecue chicken quesadillas recipe. I also used H-E-B’s southwest flour tortilla for half the quesadillas.

A final great tortilla option for quesadillas is a corn and flour blend like you’ll see in our sheet pan chicken quesadillas or air fryer chicken quesadillas recipes. (Side note: Those are great resources for alternative prep methods and freezing leftovers for meal prep.)

Best Cheese for Ground Beef Quesadillas

It’s hard to beat queso Oaxaca when it comes to making quesadillas. It’s similar to string cheese or mozzarella, but it melts incredibly well. If you can’t find Oaxaca cheese, queso Chihuahua is a great option. And the tried and true Monterey jack is always a great choice.

In addition to queso Oaxaca, I used a blend of Colby jack and pepper jack cheese.

Whatever cheese you go with for your quesadillas, I would encourage you to use freshly grated instead of pre-shredded cheese. The anti-caking agents in pre-shredded cheese makes melting difficult.

As a nutrition facts note, you can make these beef quesadillas a bit more macro friendly by reducing the amount of cheese that goes in each quesadilla. The recipe calls for an ounce and a half in each, but cutting back to an ounce (1/2 ounce on both sides of the beef filling) works fine.

What to Serve with Quesadillas

I like serving these with salsa verde, sour cream or fat free Greek yogurt, guacamole, and some form of side dish. Here’s a handful of pairing ideas:

• Mexican Street Corn Salad
• Smoked Charro Beans
• Cilantro Lime Rice or Cauliflower Rice
• Mexican Escabeche
• Shortcut Refried Black Beans
• Borracho Beans

Let me know in the comments if you have a go-to side dish I need to try.

That should cover everything you need to know. If I missed something, drop any questions in the comments below. And if you try these ground beef quesadillas and love them, we always appreciate recipe reviews!