The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Nachos (and something just as good, with our EP Audrey)

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Nachos were invented in a Mexican border town for a group of American ladies who lunch, and now they are considered food for the beer-drinking, football-cheering everyman. They can come piled high with twenty ingredients; a plate of nothing more than chips with melted Velveeta are also considered nachos. Whatever floats your tortilla, Kenji and Deb discuss ways to optimize every bite. Also, our Executive Producer Audrey Mardavich gets advice on how to slay the Super Bowl potluck.Recipes mentioned: The Ultimate Fully Loaded Vegan Nachos (Serious Eats) Corn and Black Bean Weeknight Nachos (Smitten Kitchen) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Romance, family drama, history, fantastic original music, and a killer cast, including Loretta Devine, S. Epatha Merkerson, Danny Glover and Jennifer Beals. Radiotopia presents Red for Revolution, wherever you get your podcasts. Kenji, are you eating nachos right now? I am. Did you just randomly decide to make nachos because it's the nacho episode recording day or were you craving nachos? I wouldn't call it random. No last night. These are leftovers nachos. I had um, I got some Mexican food last night

They came with them, you know a bag of chips and and I had some cheese in the fridge So this is surely very day that I put on top of some chips with cheese and then I had like a little you know to-go containers of all the various salsas and then I had like all the little, you know, to-go containers of all the various salsas, and then I had some radishes and some sliced cabbage that was leftover from the pozole, and I just put it all on top of a pile of chips and I popped it in the toaster oven. Kenji, that's pretty aesthetic for like a toaster oven lunch. I don't think that my toaster oven lunches come out that pretty. They're not that gifted and talented, you know? Are these Texas-style nachos or these Genki style nachos? These are absolutely not Texas-style.

Ha ha ha ha. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for The New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen. She's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks.

We've been professional recipe developers for nearly two decades, and we've got the same basic goal, to make recipes that work for you and to make you excited to get into the kitchen. But we've got really different approaches, and on this show, we'll cook and talk about each other's recipes, comparing notes to see what we can learn from each other. This week, we're talking about nachos. Kenji, do you know the origin story of nachos? I do.

You know, it's an interesting one, because it's one of those things where, so I got a friend named Clay, he's from Texas, and he has this habit of turning every restaurant into a possessive, you know, so like I worked at a restaurant in Boston called Clio and he would always call it Clio's, you know, and I don't know if that's a Texas thing, but he would just make everything into a possessive and nachos are one of the rare cases where it started out as a possessive and is now not. We've gotten rid of the apostrophe because nachos are named after Ignacio Naya. So he was the maître d' at the Victory Club,

which is a hotel on the Texas-Mexico border near Eagle Pass. And you know, as with the story about like buffalo wings and Caesar salad and probably every other apocryphal origin story, it was like a group of people was coming in and he needed a snack. And so he ended up throwing what he had together in the kitchen, but he invented

what he called nachos especiales. So it was nacho as a nickname for Ignacio. And so he basically took some chips, melted some cheese on them with some pickled jalapenos, served them to a group of women who were passing through. And that became so popular that it spread from there, basically throughout Texas and then throughout the Southwest. And then they were invented in 1943.

Yeah. And then sometime in the 70s is when they became real popular in baseball stadium. It was with the invention of cheese sauce that nachos really took off. I read something about some San Antonio businessman named Frank Liberto, and he started selling this melted processed cheese food

to Arlington Stadium, like the stuff that you can pump. Right, right, right, the cheese pump. And that became, people started calling that nachos, and that became more what people associate with nachos, I think outside of Texas. Inside Texas, it's still that individual chip with the cheese and the jalapeno, but the nacho sauce became something else

in the 70s. Well, these days we get all kinds of nachos. I don't know that I even grew up with, I mean, I definitely grew up with nacho cheese sauce in a pump like when I went to the baseball game or something like that. But I think most of the nachos I ate were the kind that come with a ton of toppings on a real thick, hot ceramic plate that they throw in the oven and they bring it to your table. And it's the stuff that's served out

like what I call hot plate Mexican restaurants, you know, where when the server puts their food down, they say hot plate. We're talking about sort of, I called them Yankee nachos, which they're not really, but sort of this less traditional nacho style, which is actually more common in the US. And then you have Texas style nachos,

which are completely different. And in fact, they were completely new to me before this week. Really? No, I did not know about Texas nachos at all, but I had... Have you never been to a Chili's? Or a TGI Friday, that's where they do it. I mean, I've been to TGI Fridays, but I think I was ordering other things.

I don't think that's what I would get there. I'm trying to remember what... I think I was getting the potato skins. Definitely some sort of spinach artichoke appetizer. I think it's been a while though. Well, if you order the nachos at TGI Fridays, they come, they're the more traditional Texas style. Yeah, we can talk about the difference, but like a Texas style nacho

is where you take individual chips, usually like a quarter of a tortilla, like a slightly larger chip, preferably freshly fried. And we can talk about that also when we're talking about constructing nachos, but, and then it gets topped individually. These days it'll usually have refried beans, a sprinkle of cheese, cheddar cheese, or maybe queso chihuahua, something like that, a single slice of a jalapeno,

either fresh or pickled, and then that just gets baked like that. And so you end up with these individual chips that have like a, it's like you end up with like a bean dip, but are like a pre dipped chip, you know. I'm a fan of those. Well, I'm a fan of all kinds of nachos. But how do you feel about this step? Unfamiliar with them. So I don't know if you have this feature on your phone, but I have this feature

called call a Texan, which it brings my friend Angela Moore. She's got a great new company called Moore hospitality. She does PR for restaurants anyway, but Angie is from San Antonio and she's very strong opinions on Tex mixMex food and what's correctly Texan. And so I asked her about Texas nachos because I was pretty unfamiliar with them. And also I'm mad at her for never having made them for me before. So there were a few conversations happening, but she basically thinks that they're vastly

superior, which is not surprising. And she says they don't have to be vegetarian. She said there's this place in Texas that she gets it with like a little piece of steak on it and that's one of her favorites. She says, usually it's, you know, beans, a cube of meat, you know, jalapeno and like a little pico. And she said, at a restaurant, the chips are homemade,

but at home you could use them from a bag. And I said, doesn't that mean they fall apart? But she says that there's much better bagged tortilla chips available in Texas, like they aren't so fragile. And I said, but who wants to faff around with individually loading tortilla chips? Like that does not, that sounds like highly unpleasant. But she feels like they're not a lot of work

and they're also a lot more filling. So you don't really need as much of them. But I think, I hear a challenge in that. It's a different concept. Also, Deb, for someone who loves to cook, you really hate cooking. I don't hate cooking. I just haven't. There's something about fiddling with individual things that I know will make me lose my mind.

Plus, when I eat them, I'm picturing fingers all over the food. It's very touched food. This is highly touched food. Well, that's one of the advantages of the... I mean, if you care about fingers in your food, which I know you do, I don't, but that's one of the advantages of the Texas style nachos is that you put them on a platter and each person picks one up and you don't go, you don't have this business of people rooting around for that one perfect chip. I guess I never really thought of it that way.

But yeah, so she feels strongly that not just that I grew up with her, like the big messy pile in the middle of the table is just messy and sloppy and, you know, uneven where some chips have some things. And I said, I actually think that all chips need to have some things, but no chips need to have some things, but no chips need to have all things. And she said, that's completely incorrect. All chips need all things, Deb. Your friend from Texas doesn't agree.

And this was an all caps. So I want you to know, you know, she's probably correct, but I know what I grew up with and I kind of like, I like the rooting around where I'm like, I want this one with bean and sauce, and I want this one with bean and sauce, and I want this one with meat and jalapeno. You subscribe to the school of what our friend, Dan Pashman from the Sporkful calls heterogeneity, right?

You like your bites to have variety in them. You like a wide variety of bites in a pile of nachos. Exactly, I like soups with things kind of half mixed in. And so it's funny, I'll bring something to the table with like, here's a scattering of something crispy and creamy or whatever, and my son immediately stirs it so it's all even. And then I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I need like variation or I get bored. So nachos are really fun for me.

Did things touch on your plate? That doesn't bother me. I'm not that crazy. I know you think I'm so, so many, I'm many types of crazy, but that is not, that is not my own personal one. I didn't mind things touching. In fact, I like it because then those bites taste different from the bites on the other side of the table.

Right, right, right. I don't want every bite to be the same. But apparently I need to try Texas nachos because they do sound and look amazing, especially that one with the little piece of steak on each. Yeah, I think it's wonderful. And it's a great way to do leftovers also. Like if you've got just like not quite enough

of like your chili Verde leftover to actually like feed people a bowl of it, you make nachos and you put like a little bit of that, a little bit of that pulled pork on top of each one. And you can get, you know, so you get like a full meal by opening a can of beans and you can recycle leftovers into a whole new meal. Which you can also do with the piled nachos of course.

Should we talk about piled nachos? Yes. I had also, I wanted to just give a shout out to, I had to check in with Lisa Fain on this too because she's my other favorite Texan with opinions on food. I guess I have a few. So Lisa Fain has the long running blog called Homesick Texan and she's written a few cookbooks and she also talks about Texas nachos and I just thought it was really funny. She's talking about her dad asking her she prefers a pile of chips with some toppings slopped on willy-nilly or do I prefer each nacho to

be one chip toasted with a tasteful spread of long-cored cheddar cheese. We'll get into that in a sliced jalapeno. She just, to her the idea that anyone would choose any other kind is just so absurd. Like it's just, she's like the chips on the bottom have too much stuff. Like there's no balance, there's no equity, there's no grace. And she says, that's really, really, really is actually the, he's the guy who invented, invented piled nachos. And she says the worst part is that if you order the piled nachos for a group of people, there's always a big fight to grab the chips with the toppings because you know how awful the

naked stragglers will taste. So she's a riot on this and you should just read everything she has to say. That's the Texas one. I don't mind the chaos and the wetness and the mess. I don't mind. For me, I don't mind because I'm usually with my kids and I'm faster and bigger than them. No. Your kids are going to learn to eat or get eaten, right? Eat or go hungry.

You can't elbow daddy out of the way. No dinner for you tonight. I like that also because for me, part of my favorite part of the nachos are the chips that have gotten a little bit toasted and they don't get toasted like that when they're covered in stuff. Okay. So I like the toasted.

So when I was a kid, I don't know if you used to do this also, but whenever we went to a Mexican or a Tex-Mex restaurant, there was always a candle on the tabletop, and what we would get is you get that basket of chips, and then me and my sister would sit there and like toast individual chips over the candle. Oh my goodness.

To get like those little crispy edges. Don't remember doing that. It seems like it would smell like burning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you have to do it carefully the same way you toast a marshmallow, you know, so you don't want to catch on fire. Kenji, do you have a preference of Texas or I call them Yankee nachos, but we'll call them piled messy nachos.

I don't have a preference. I like some, I'm sometimes in the mood for one, sometimes in the mood for the other. And so, no, I love all of them. I have room have a preference. I like some, I'm sometimes in the mood for one, sometimes in the mood for the other. And so, no, I love, I love, I love all of them. I have room for all kinds. Again, I have not gotten to experience the Texas nacho in person, although I'm probably going to storm over to her apartment after this and demand she makes them, because apparently she made them for her husband, who's from Long Island, and he immediately said there's no other nacho for him. So, I mean, there's obviously something to this.

But yeah, let's get into the piled ones because there's so many elements and honestly, I want them all. Real quick, I want to jump back and say that your point about the Texas nachos being more fiddly and more difficult to make, oftentimes the reason I make them is because they're easier because they're made pretty much 100%

from pantry ingredients. So it's a can of refried beans, a block of cheese, which I always have in the fridge, and then a jar of pickled jalapenos and a bag of chips. So you don't need any of the sort of like the salsa, the sour cream, the fresh ingredients. You don't have any of the fresh stuff that goes on piled nachos.

Piled nachos like maybe are easier to assemble, but it's more difficult to assemble the ingredients. All right, so let's talk about the piled sort of classic, non-Texas bar restaurant. Style nachos, yeah. So you start with chips. Yeah. Homemade or store bought, corned or flour,

do we have preferences? You want a sturdy chip for nachos, right? Like you don't want that bag of like, Tostitos that like fall apart when you put more than a teaspoon of salsa on them. Like you need something that's going to stand up when you pull like a stretchy bit of cheese off of it. It's not just going to crumble and turn soggy.

Use a stretchy bit of cheese and I swooned a little bit, but that's fine, it's okay. I'll eat lunch after this, don't worry. You know, if I'm really going all out, then I'll fry them myself. You know, I don't think I've ever made tortillas and then fried them myself, but buying store-bought corn tortillas and then fried them myself,

but buying store-bought corn tortillas and then frying them yourself, I think is the best way to do it. Then it's like, even when they get a little bit soggy, they still retain, they get that kind of chilaquiles feel to them, where there's like a layer of sogginess, but there's that still crunchy core to them

that you get when you have real good homemade or like home-fried chips. So I think in an ideal situation, you fry them yourself. That said, if you can get a good store-bought brand, and I feel like most localities in the US these days, you can find a decent store-bought brand, you know, like a decent local brand. Like here on the West Coast, we get Juanita's. I don't know what you get in New York. I feel like I've tried a lot of different brands and I have yet to find my favorite.

Like the sturdy ones are too salty, the other ones are too thin and crumbly. So I'll keep looking or maybe I'll get a bunch of suggestions in the comments. There must be like local Mexican restaurants where for like $3.95 you can just get a big paper bag of chips, right? Absolutely, and those are generally the best one. But they're usually making their own tortillas.

Even Chipotle has like sturdy corn chips, I'm pretty sure. Definitely, we agree that it should be corn chips. Definitely sturdy. And I agree with you that for, I actually, it sounds so fussy, but I really don't mind frying my own corn tortilla chips. It's so easy to get a stack of them.

They're really fun to slice. They slice so neatly. You don't need to really deep fry them. I mean, you could, you're doing a little more than shallow frying, but it's not, it's really not a lot of work. It goes pretty fast. I typically do mine in a wok.

Of course you do. I fry almost everything in a wok. And well, the good thing about frying corn chips is that they're real forgiving. You actually don't want oil that's too hot, right? And with a lot of fried foods, you have to kind of, you want the oil hot enough so that you can get the outside real crispy before the inside overcooks. But with corn chips, you're trying to drive out all of the moisture anyway. So you can essentially like start them in cold oil

and basically by the time they stop bubbling, you know that all the moisture has been driven off and they're going to be crispy. So it's like the only real danger with corn chips is that they're going to actually like get too dark and burn. And so, yeah, as far as frying corn chips go, like a relatively moderate heat. I never use a thermometer when I'm doing corn chips.

I just throw one in and see how it's doing before I add the rest. You know, and then you just give it some time and you get like a spider and push them up and down until you don't see any more bubbling. And then they're done. And you also don't want them to be too dark because you're going to put them in the oven

for a second bake. Exactly. With the stuff on them and you don't want it to get too, you can tell I've experienced this where I made my own chips, made the nachos. And then I was like, wow, that tastes kind of burnt at the edges. So you're not trying to, this is not a good, this is not for a medium golden brown.

You want it to be pretty pale when you're done. Be pale, yeah. And you do want to salt them right after they come out of the fryer. I had an old chef, an oranger, who when anyone was working in the fry station, their first day in the fry station, he would tell them, he would always say, I don't care if it's dog shit,

if it's coming out of the fryer, you put salt on it as soon as it's out of the fryer while it's still hot and while the oil is still like glistening on its surface so that the salt sticks. Yes, so it has something to stick to, exactly. And even like dissolve a little bit in it. Although I think you're going to tell me scientifically it's not going to do that.

Oil doesn't dissolve in salt. I knew you were going to say, I knew. I have been a co-host on the Kenji podcast for almost a year. I actually already, I've learned maybe three things. That was one of them. If you go to like a Korean restaurant, a Korean barbecue place, and you get like the barbecue pork belly and you have that little dish of sesame oil

with salt and black pepper on the side, the salt just stays in little crystals on the bottom. You got to kind of drag the pork belly through it to get the salt, because salt does not melt in oil. All right, I clearly should have had lunch before we recorded this because this is distracting. I'm like dragging it through the sesame oil. That sounds so good. All right, so what's the next step?

So we've got the chips covered. Are we going to get it? Is it time to talk about the cheese? Well, we don't have them covered yet. Right now they're bare. We need to get the chips covered. What are we covering them with, Kenji? Are we going to cover?

Obviously, cheese is a, you know, it has to be cheese. Yes. It has to be cheese. Well, unless it's vegan nachos and you're making a vegan nacho cheese sauce. I heard, does somebody on the internet have a really good recipe for vegan nachos, which I flat out refuse to make, some such a pain.

I have a recipe for vegan nachos and it's like for a nacho cheese sauce and a vegan chili and that you can combine all the stuff to make vegan nachos and the cheese sauce is real good. The trick to it is to is to put you you add potatoes. It's cashew and potatoes. But the trick is that you blend the potatoes so that they get kind of you know how like if you blend the potato when you're making mashed potatoes, it gets real sticky and kind of gross. If you add just a little bit of it to a vegan cheese sauce, it turns the cheese sauce kind of like gooey and stretchy and stringy. Oh, that does sound good.

Yeah, it tastes real good. So let's talk about the different kinds of cheese, because I just thought it was either cheddar, Monterey Jack, maybe you'd use that, like, is it Oaxaca cheese? Yeah, which is sort of like kind of mozzarella-like. So in Texas, though, I hadn't realized that there is one specific cheese that's used and it's this Longhorn cheese. I was like, again, this is news to me.

So it's this Longhorn is a Colby cheese and actually gets its name from the shape. I didn't realize this, but apparently it's a kind of soft and mild cheddar Colby flavor. And I think it gives it kind of a creamy taste. My friend Angie also says they absolutely never use queso. Like they're never using cheese sauce. Right, that's a different dish. That's only for dipping. It's not for pouring over.

Which is too bad because I rather like a nacho with both melted and saucy cheese. How about you? Absolutely, yes. That's my preferred, if I'm going to really go all out, yeah, I'll make a cheese sauce and then I'll also add like handfuls of grated cheese. Gooey cheese like helps the stringy cheese melt better. So you get that, you know, you get a little more heterogeneity cheese wise in each bite, but you don't get that problem. I mean, I don't

know if it's a problem for everyone, but you don't get that issue where the cheese congeals into a solid blob and then you pick up one chip and you end up with like you try and pick one and you end up with like 30 chips you know. That's because you'd eat them in the first 20 seconds after they came out of the oven. You had 20 whole seconds Kenji before the cheese was going to reform itself into a block. The longer you wait to eat a nacho the more nachos come with each bite. Exactly there's no single surfing anymore.

But that's where the sauce comes in. That's why I like a little mix. I don't mind if a couple chips are glued together, but I feel like the sauce gives you a little bit of that creaminess. How do you make your cheese sauce, Deb? I melt Velveeta. Melt Velveeta, yeah. However, I was, I learned this cool trick,

or I was reading about this cool trick, and I thought it was from Cooks Illustrated, but you were saying it's been around for a while. I thought maybe it's like ideas in food. Is it with this the one with the citric acid or you were familiar with it? Yeah. Well, sodium citrate is an emulsifying salts. So it's essentially it's one of the salts that could be used in American cheese.

There's various emulsifying salts. Yeah, it's one of these salts that will make it so that as cheese melts, the proteins don't tighten. Because what happens with a regular cheddar cheese, for example, is like as the protein in there tightens up, it'll squeeze out moisture and it'll squeeze out fat. And so your cheese will turn stringy and greasy and all that moisture will evaporate away.

But something like American cheese or Velveeta, which is just regular cheese that has added, like some added liquid and some added emulsifying salts, they don't squeeze as tightly. something like American cheese or Velveeta, which is just regular cheese that has added, like some added liquid and some added emulsifying salts. They don't squeeze as tightly, and so when they melt, the fat doesn't get squeezed out into kind of droplets. And so as a result, the texture is creamier,

and you don't get that kind of stringiness. You can take regular cheddar cheese, add a little bit of liquid and a little bit of sodium citrate to it. And sodium citrate is like a real easy to find ingredient these days and get it online, real cheap. But liquid and a little bit of sodium citrate to it. And sodium citrate is like a real easy to find ingredient these days and get it online, real cheap. But you just add a pinch of sodium citrate and some extra liquid to cheddar cheese

and then microwave it or melt it on the stove top and it turns into a real smooth cheese sauce. You can do it with any cheese actually. I'm utterly fascinated by this. Like I can't, I'm totally, I'm excited to try it because I have absolutely no quibble with Velveeta but I love the idea that you could take a more interesting flavor cheese and more dynamic cheese and melt it smoothly and dip things in it.

I mean, these are like all of my goals. Melting cheese and dipping things in it is like all I want. So I feel like we are repeated defenders of cheese products on this show from our grilled cheese episode to our mac and cheese. We are like team orange melty cheese that stays integrated even when it melts defenders on the show. It seems to be a theme that we come back to. And also my own personal affection for orange cheese powder. One of my favorite ingredients.

TITUS orange cheese powder. Yeah. Have you ever or would you ever consider doing like a like a bechamel style, like a Mornay sauce for nachos a like a bechamel style like a Mornay sauce for nachos like a bechamel style cheese sauce? I was thinking about that. I think so. It would definitely be milder. I was trying to remember how we do sauce for fondue. I haven't made it in so many years. What is usually added to a cheese fondue? Fondue is typically just wine. Okay. Sometimes a little bit of brandy or Mark or something like that. Sometimes a little bit of mustard, but typically it's just wine and then you really carefully

melt Gruyere into it. Fondue does have the tendency to clump up. I was going to say, how does it stay gooey? Do you think they're putting citric acid in, in the back of the restaurant? You can add a little bit of lemon juice, you can add a little bit of citric acid. You can also toss like your grated cheese with a little bit of starch, you know, like with flour or starch, and that helps. But a real traditional fondue doesn't have any of those,

just wine and cheese, garlic, you know, you throw garlic clove in there, rub the bowl with garlic first. I would love that. But yeah, but fondue, if you overheat it, like a real traditional one, if you overheat it, it does have a tendency to kind of turn real stringy and clumpy.

So you asked me about a bechamel-style sauce, and I think I wouldn't rule it out. But in a world where a Velveeta exists and melts so easily, I would never make it that complicated. I think there's no reason to. Do you microwave your Velveeta? I guess I've generally microwaved it like diced, microwaved, stirred it. Or I love doing, well, this is more for a party for putting it out. But when you mix it with like the Rotel, maybe some.

And then I love putting it out in a small slow cooker. It's like a perfect way to keep it at that perfect temperature. I know you're very anti slow cookers, but it's actually perfect for quesadillas. No, for serving for parties it's fine. Yeah, yeah, you got like whiskey wieners in a slow cooker, you get cheese dip in a slow cooker.

Yeah, and that by the way is a real classic Texas recipes, Velveeta and Rotel tomatoes. For folks who aren't familiar with Rotel tomatoes, they're canned diced tomatoes that have chilies in them. Chilies, and is there onion and garlic or just chilies? There might be onion and garlic in there too, yeah. They're like seasoned canned tomatoes. And it's really the magical mystery ingredient

in a lot of stuff. And it used to be hard to find outside of Texas, but I feel like the food internet. Oh, you can find it everywhere. Yeah, now I can find it everywhere. I don't know if it's always the case. Like what I feel like when I first started food blogging, it wasn't like regularly found in the grocery store,

but now I feel like it's- No, I think we get it at like Safeway here in Seattle. Started food blogging in the dark ages, so we would still dial up phones. So, you know, it's all relative. Before you started food blogging, before the internet, people just called you and asked you food questions.

I went on my AML modem. The kids will never know. Okay, so we have covered cheese. Oh, I actually, I want to give a little shout out to you. I love, this is just what I make it at home. I love sprinkling a little cotija on top. That salty, crumbly cheese. I feel like to me it's one of the perfect finishes.

Like I like the melty, gooey cheese, but I also like the salty finishing cheese. I wouldn't cook that, there's no reason to. It's just a really nice topic. This is a post oven topic. Exactly, it's a little. I like that too. Well there's a lot of post oven stuff,

but first we should get into the other stuff we put inside the oven. Okay. And then I think we get into meat or beans or both. We'll have more of the recipe in just a moment. For meat, it could be anything from, I would say, chili. It could be like a kind of beef taco filling with spice. My kids love that. I also really like it with chorizo, like if you kind of crumble and fry it up.

It's so good. It gets so crispy and spicy. Yeah, I like the chorizo. It comes in those like those little plastic sleeves that you split open. Unless you're my friend Connor and think that the plastic sleeve is a sausage casing and you try and throw the whole thing out. No, no, no, no, no. Well, there's Spanish chorizo and then there's Mexican chorizo. I'm thinking of the fresher sausage that you'll crumble up and fry. The Spanish one, which is the one that's heavy on the smoky paprika and it's cured and cooked. And I also... No, cured and cooked. And I also-

No, cured and raw, like a salami. Oh yeah, like it's like a salami. But you could eat it as it is or you could- You eat it raw. Actually, whenever I do crisp it up in a pan for several recipes, but like you have like two seconds before it starts smoking. It's a really low smoke point food. Yeah.

We're talking about Mexican chorizo. We're talking about crumbly. Fresh sausage. Yeah, Mexican chorizo, which is like a fresh sausage, that's kind of a vinegary flavor, red. But when you fry it, I like to fry it until it's like real, real dark. And you get like real, like lots of little crispy bits and the little fatty bits start to pop.

You fry it until it's like dry and like really sizzling. I'm swimming for the third time in this episode. Like, tell me about the fatty bits. Okay, so I like it because it is really fatty and so it really takes well to crumbling and frying and that's why it's so good when you stir it into queso or you sprinkle it on the layers of your nachos before they go in the oven.

That style of chorizo, what I find often is that it's real wet when it comes out of the package. And so you have this kind of like slop in a pan and you're like, oh, this is not gonna get crispy, but you just keep going. Like just don't stop. It's real hard to overcook a Mexican chorizo You just keep going until it until all that extra moisture is evaporated and it really crumbles. That's the key

So that's actually my favorite but for a weeknight taco I feel like the beef taco filling works really well and then I can you know, it's kind of like taco night But we've layered it and baked it in the oven Yeah Also, I mean any basically any kind of leftovers also works. Rotisserie chicken works fine. If you have leftover carnitas, leftover braised, like if you braise some beef or you braise some pork,

anything that's leftover and shreddable. So then we've got beans, and I feel like you can choose between, I feel like with the Texas style nachos, I'm definitely seeing refried beans the most, and I think it's because they add a little creamy, salty, sticky element. But for layered, I don't call them, we'll call them messy Yankee piled nachos. I feel

like I usually see whole beans a bit more. Yeah, and they can be black beans, black beans or pinto beans. But yeah, exactly. And I love that because I love it when you get like that one chip that has like the bean embedded and now solidified cheese. It makes me happy. Hmm.

Do you like finding the chips that you pull up that have the indentation from where the bean once was? Ah. The bean's nest. It snapped. Well, the bean's nest now becomes a texture ridge for picking up more salsa. Exactly. If you dip the chip.

All right. So those are the things that go, I think, into the oven. You've got the chip, the cheese, the meat and beans. And then everything else, I kind of consider something that goes on after. Wait, before we talk about what goes on top after they come out of the oven, I think it's important to talk about how to assemble the nachos before they go into the oven.

Because for me, the worst case scenario is what happens sometimes at like a sports bar where there's just not a lot of attention paid and you get a plate, like a heavy ceramic plate with a big pile of chips and then a whole bunch of toppings and melted cheese on top. And then as soon as you're done with that top layer, you just have a bunch of naked chips underneath and nothing to put in it.

That is appalling. That I would be like, excuse me, you only gave me half a dish. That would never happen to you in the Spinnin' Kitchen. That would never happen. We would never do that. I am like, even when I make like assembled salads, I'm putting down a layer of lettuce, sprinkling the toppings, putting down a layer of lettuce, sprinkling.

So you've got to sprinkle between layers. So yeah, I think that leaves you two options, right? That there is the sprinkling between layers option where you put every topping in between each layer of chips. The other option is something that I saw, I don't think it was real popular until maybe like the mid 2000s when you started seeing restaurants do this, but it's sheet tray nachos where you basically instead of piling the

nachos up, you just have them spread out in a real thin layer and then you sprinkle them with cheese and you get, you know, get, and then you pop the whole thing in the oven. So you get a real, something that covers basically the entire surface of your table in a single layer of nachos. And my friend, Daniel, my former colleague, I was going to say former friend, he's still my friend, my former colleague. I was going to say former friend, he's still my friend, my former colleague. What happened? It starts up.

Daniel Gritzer, we had a fight over nachos, over who they were. No, but he has a recipe for nachos on Serious Eats that he and I worked together on back in the early days of his time there at Serious Eats. The ultimate fully loaded nachos, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on that one, our strategy or his strategy was to put all the oven toppings on, bake

them, but you build little spaces into the tray where you can put your dipable toppings out. So you get like a little space for your guacamole, a little space for your salsa. And so essentially like you assemble the nachos with the bowls in place on the tray and then you remove the bowls before you bake the whole thing. So then when they come back out of the oven, you can stick a bowl of guacamole, a bowl of salsa, bowl of sour cream, whatever else you want on the side. I see what you did there.

So I feel like that could work because when I looked at the picture, I was like, that's a little too much guac in the middle. It's going to be messy. But now I see what you're doing and it makes sense. I'm a big fan of the sheet pan nacho. I also don't mind a little bit of layering. I don't ever want a mountain because you know

that bottom center is going to be so gross and goopy and nobody's going to want to eat it. But I like a two layer. You know, like a two... I like a little pile up because I think a crispy and then a half soft chip. Soft chip. But I, you know, a chip that started to give way

under the weight of all the delicious, I don't mind that as long as it's still semi-crisp or has some texture going on. I don't mind a two layer, sometimes three layer, but nothing more than that. Oh, pushing it. You know, I'm thinking like a semi-overlapped. The chips are not flat.

The homemade ones are flatter. They're usually curved, so it's never going to be three high. It's always going to be like lopsided and teetering. So that would be, I'm a big fan. You put down that first layer, you sprinkle all the toppings on that you want to melt, and then you do maybe a second layer. And then we're about pretty much done with two,

because I like a little bit of a mix. And then we do all the stuff. So I'm a big sheet pan fan. How do you do it? Are you a sheet pan person too? I do sheet pan, yeah. So I made an individual portion of nachos right here and it's in my little toaster oven tray.

And yeah, I like doing the sheet pan. I like doing the Daniel Gritster method. And as far as the post oven toppings go, what are your go-tos and how do you apply them? It's either going to be fresh tomatoes or it's going to be pico de gallo with like the tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, lime. Chilies, yeah.

Yeah, chilies. Usually jalapeno in there. Yeah, jalapeno. Or serrano. Yeah, and the chili too. Did I forget that? So I'm either going to use tomato or pico de gallo. Then I'm going to either use some sliced or diced avocado

and, or some guac. I don't always need it to be guac because all those ingredients are there. I definitely, I've got to have some fresh radishes. I feel like that's an important crunch. That's almost like a top layer crunch. I love either pickled red onion, pickled white onion, or you know that kind of mixture you sometimes get at a taco place with a white onion. It's like pico de gallo minus the tomato. It's the white onion, cilantro, lime, chili. I love that kind of fresh relish you could, I like it because it's usually very finely chopped

so the chips can really pick it up. Yeah, like what you would put on a, what you would put on like a street taco. I do like sour cream on it, but I want that sour cream to be in a squiggle and not a spoon. So do you thin your sour cream out before you apply it? Well, if you're using Mexican crema, which is excellent, it's usually a little bit thinner.

So there's nothing to thin. I haven't, I guess I haven't really bothered thinning it out, but that does make sense. You could totally just add a tablespoon of water or milk just to get it there. Yeah, either would work. I usually add a little pinch of salt and then I'll thin it out with some milk. Sometimes a little squeeze of lime juice in there also if I got a lime going. Yeah, no, I'm with you. I don't like, sometimes you go to the ski lodge,

the ski area nachos and they serve you the guacamole and the sour cream with an ice cream scoop and it comes out with that ice cream scoop shape. And you try so hard to shake it off and you always end up with that giant mouthful of sour cream. And I mean, I love sour cream, but it is so, it feels so wrong. It's just like, so it's gotta be squiggled

or it's gotta be thin. Maybe you put it on the side so you can spin it over as you want. The only classic post-baking nacho topping that I don't care for is I'm not into the olives. And I love olives. I just pour the canned black olives. I think they're so gross. There's some things spongy and flavorless about them that I cannot.

I know they come in jars, too, but like something about pre-sliced olives are just a huge issue for me. One of my many. I think of them as a completely different food stuff from a normal olive. Maybe that's what I need to do. I need to separate it, because it's all wrong to me as an olive.

It's not an olive. Like I wouldn't put like a canned black olive in my like pasta puttanesca, you know, but as a nacho topping and as a pizza topping, I love, you know, I had a friend, the same friend Clay from Texas, when he worked in an office in Cambridge, he used to bring in a sandwich every day.

It was a tuna sub with raw red onions and black olives. And he would eat this like at his desk in his office. Wow. And just imagine the smell coming off that thing. Anyhow, that has nothing to do with nachos. It just has to do with clay and black olives. That is aggressive. That is like, that is literally probably why people started blogs in 2003

to complain about coworkers coming in with like two different sandwiches with raw onions on them. And what about, what about salsa for you? So definitely salsa is fine. I feel like the heat can come in a lot of different ways. You could do that kind of restaurant style red salsa. I kind of love more of like a ranchero sauce almost. Like kind of one of those thinner red sauces that are spicy.

I really like that because I feel like it's really good at getting on everything without making things too wet. Obviously, hot sauce has a similar effect, but hot sauce is more like a vinegar. So I feel like a ranchero sauce is like a nice way to get that drizzle on where every chip gets a little bit of it without it being, yeah, like that wetness of a tomato salsa. How about you? I want a thinner, intensely flavored one if I'm going to drizzle it on. I'm okay with having like the salsa on the side if I'm going to be able to dip it, but yeah, I don't want a big chunky salsa

just poured over the top of my thing. What ends up happening is the same thing that happens when you let chicken soup sit too long where the liquid gets absorbed and you end up with dry chunks of tomato and wet soggy chips. Which is not what I want in the salsa. But if you're putting pico on though,

I feel like that's when I don't know that you necessarily needed tomato salsa, so with pico, I might just squiggle some hot sauce over but again it's nice to have one with a little bit of body so it doesn't just soak in like vinegar. My friend Ange also says that in Texas that they always finish it and honestly a lot of other she um I hope I'm saying it right escabeche is that am I saying it right? Escabeche? Yeah, like little pickled carrots. Exactly. So in Texas, she says it's the jalapeno, carrot and onion,

and it either comes chunky or it comes more finely chopped, but it's pretty much a condiment on the table for everything. And she says, I'm like, do you make it at home? And she's like, no, you would just buy it. You can buy it in a jar or a can. And it's ubiquitous in Texas. So she says that's what they would finish their Texas nachos with.

That sounds delicious. Yeah, I'm definitely down with it. Mm-hmm. We'll have more of the recipe in a moment. So today we're going to try something new. We loved doing our mailbag episodes last year, so we wanted to find a way to sprinkle them into our regular episodes. We have a listener submitted question today that we are going to do our best to answer.

Kenji, who are we hearing from today? We actually have a question from Audrey Martovich, who's the executive producer of our network Radiotopia. She helped us get the show up and running and when she's not working behind the scenes on the important grownup stuff like contracts and all that executive stuff that you and I are so wonderful at, she also records some of the ads for our show. So you probably will recognize her voice. She does it all. So let's see what Audrey wants to know.

Hi Kenji and Deb, Audrey here. I heard you're talking about nachos this week, which is exciting because I love nachos. And I know we're getting close to Super Bowl season. I had a question for you, which is, I love Super Bowl parties. I love hosting them. I love going to them and I love them because I love dip. I don't really care about football, but I love dip and I love all of the foods that we tend to eat at Super Bowl parties. And so my question is, do you have a recommendation

for something that is sort of like a crowd pleaser, sleeper hit, not something that you would see on the usual spread at a Super Bowl party. So like, I got my dips, I got my chips, I got my wings, but like, what is an alternative yummy thing that maybe can be kind of like an antidote to all of the usual suspects or just like something that's different,

I don't know, maybe lighter, maybe not, I don't know. I would love to know what you think that I could make or bring for the Super Bowl that's not the norm. Okay, talk to you soon, bye. Deb, what do you got? I have like at least a thousand ideas, but none of them are what I would consider light.

But I love playing around when we're having parties. I do this more for holiday entertaining, but playing around with the intersection of variations of melted cheese and things you might eat for dinner. Hear me out. So for example, I've got this thing where you do, it's on my site, it's a baked brie with garlic butter mushrooms.

And it's really fun to see these incredible roasted mushrooms. And then you just slop this baked, this baked camembert, baked brie in the middle. And it becomes like this dip and you're scooping up the roasted vegetables that are really flavorful and garlicky and very vibrant with the cheese. And I just, I just think it's so fun for an appetizer, but it also has this vegetable

element where you feel like you're eating a little bit more. I know it's not like classic Superbowl food, but it goes so fast. I also have a different bake. I have a baked Caviar. I think it's in my second cookbook and it has this herby garlic thing on top. You kind of wedge pieces of garlic and herbs in, and it's just, it's a really fun way to, so I basically, she said light, and I said,

I hear you want melted cheese scooped on toast. I have you covered. Kenji, what would you do here? You know, for me, honestly, I tend to like to take what people would think of as a traditional food, and just like really give them like a real excellent version of it. And so, well, okay, if we're talking about lighter stuff for a party like this, like

I think a real good crudite platter that's not just like your jarred blue cheese dip or your jarred ranch dressing. So like in my second book in the walk, I have a recipe for this gochujang ranch. So it's like a, it's a ranch, it's like a yogurt ranch. So it's a lot lighter than a traditional ranch and it has some of those ranchy flavors in it, like dill and black pepper and fresh garlic and garlic powder. But then it also has some Korean chili flakes

and gochujang, so it's a little bit spicy and it's a little bit light and it goes really well with vegetables. So, you know, I would do something like that where you take like a classic Super Bowl dish and just do a homemade version of it that's got like a little bit of a twist or is a little bit sort of better than what you expect.

So instead of the jarred salsa, like make a real good like roasted fresh tomato salsa, make a real good homemade guacamole, you know, something like that is what I tend to. I like to wow people with quality, not with out of the box thinking. Yeah, I'm with you on that too. I think we successfully gave some good ideas

that did not answer her question at all. Yeah, we're absolutely no use whatsoever, but we sure had fun and that's on that too. I think we successfully gave some good ideas that did not answer her question at all. Yeah, we're absolutely no use whatsoever, but we sure had fun and that's all that matters. Ha ha ha. Kenji? Yeah, we got a wrap of questions, huh? Yes.

Can you waffle nachos? I don't know, to be honest. I feel like Texas style nachos maybe you could if you got a real good nonstick waffle iron. I've never tried it. That's it. That's a real good question I feel like I just wouldn't I probably wouldn't yeah, I just think I wouldn't I don't think there's any value add to it There's so many value adds to so many things in waffle irons, and this is just maybe not one of them But you know we we don't know until we try it. Maybe I'll give it a shot sometime, yeah. Yeah, get on that. Kenji, can you taco nachos?

Because there's so much ingredient overlap. Oh, geez, that's a very meta question. Yeah. Because I feel like in many ways nachos, at least the Yankee nachos are like a version of a taco salad. And a taco salad is already just a deconstructed taco. Okay.

So I feel like what you really could do with nachos is turn them into migas, like Mexican style migas, where you basically take leftover nachos, chop them up and fry them with some scrambled eggs and then tuck that into a tortilla. I think that would be real good. God, I would totally eat that. Yeah, I think everything except the shredders

would work in there. Yeah, absolutely. If you have shredders on there. But I think, yeah, I feel like you could just do that. Just take your nachos. I feel like you could definitely make it work. Can you leftover nachos? Cause I feel like, oh, it's a little iffy.

You can turn leftovers into nachos. Yeah. I think the real option would be maybe to turn them into some form of like, like a variant of chilaquiles, you know, where they're already a little bit soggy and maybe you're adding some eggs to them in the morning. Yeah, like putting them in the toaster oven or in the microwave and then adding some eggs like that might that might work. But actually that sounds really good. To be honest, nachos are one of those things where it's real rare to have leftovers because you're usually in a big party.

And it's like, you know, the nachos are always like, I feel like a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone's worried that they're not going to get their share of nachos and so they overeat. Oh yeah. Yeah, no. I definitely am like a wild animal with nachos. All right. Can you cook it in a pan with butter? You could. you could. I don't know why you would want to, to be completely honest.

Yeah, for science. For science, for science you could, and I don't think anything has ever really come out badly when you cooked it in butter in a pan, but I don't think it's a, like the waffle iron, I'm not sure it's a value add here. Kenji, can you get nachos out of kids clothes? Not easily, no.

It's, no. It's too many ingredients. Especially when you've got, if it's got like, if you've got any kind of like fatty ingredient like chorizo on there or something like that, like it doesn't come out easily at all. Why is that so hard to get out of clothes? Seriously, I don't understand this. It's like red fat, red fat specifically. Yeah, yeah, like chorizo grease, forget it.

So no, I would be a, my kids would have stayed in clothes basically. Yeah, no, my kids put on their muddy buddies before they, before they eat their nachos. I guess kids in New York don't have muddy buddies, which are like part of like the toddler uniform in the Pacific Northwest. Is it because of all the rain you have? Oh yeah, rain and mud all the time. So it's just like you put your toddler in a full head to toe body suit. Okay. I have looked up muddy buddy clothes

and I see it and it's very cute. And no, it is absolutely not standard here. My kids have never worn this, but it's super cute. I'm going to see if I can get them to do it. That's really cute. Yeah. Well, you could call them nacho ponchos. Nacho ponchos. Wow.

Time's up already. That's it for today's episode, but we want to hear from you. Is there another recipe or food you want us to chat about? Any comments or questions about this week's dish? Tell us at TheRecipePodcast.com or at Kenji and Deb, or call us and leave us a message at 202-709-7607. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions.

The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich, and Yuri Losordo is director of Network Operations. Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.