HERESY

Proper use of the format, well done. In my view there are two types of nachos;

The formal nacho, this is what you’d see in fancier restaurants but you can certainly make it at home. You carefully measure and place ingredients per chip, and then cover each chip with cheese and bake so that each individual chip has the perfect ratio and can be individually eaten without disturbing another chip. This is truly a tapas for the more civilized texmex enthusiast.

And

The informal nacho. This can be soggy, but that’s not the point. The point is it’s 6pm on a Sunday. You’ve just woken up hungover and have the ineffable feeling of diarrhea, nausea, and extreme hunger for all the cheese you can physically endure. This is the trough nacho. A pile of chips, a pile of protein, a pile of jalapenos and any other veggie that you already have prepared, slathered in either cheese from a can or preshredded cheese you don’t remember buying. Microwaved somehow at too low of a power and yet for way too long. Your meal fit only for the laziest of fat fucking pigs whines when it’s ready, the steam the only thing preventing the chips from going too stale… And as you lift it from the microwave the half decade old paper plate you decided to use gives one warning wobble that this whole affair is as stable as the rest of your life. The informal nacho will be soggy, should be soggy five minutes in; if only to remind you of the shameful act you’re committing as an affront to God, Mexico, the ants that brought corn to the natives, and all of the rest of creation. A good informal nacho will leave you slick and sticky with the feeling of satisfaction and absolute self disgust. At the end you should feel simultaneously like you should work out to counteract what you just did to yourself; and like if you worked out you would spew the totality of everything ever human in history has ever eaten out of every hole god gave you.

Semi-soggy cereal is also better than totally crunchy cereal.

Hmmm, definitely an unpopular opinion.

And I partly agree.

I would argue that having both soggy and crisp chips, or even both on the same chip is superior to only one or the other.

With a mix of both, you get the distinct textures, and texture carries flavor; how things hit your tongue is at least partially caused by the shape and surface of the food itself. So, when you have both crisp and soggy chips, it’s the best of both worlds. You get that more unctuous (I hate how overused that word is, but it fits here), mingled mouth feel that rolls across the tongue; but you also get the more chaotic bursts of the different toppings as crisp chips fragment and things hit the tongue semi randomly.

When each chip has soggy and crisp parts, you’ll get an initial rollout followed by the tastes fragmenting as the crunch breaks things up. This also has the advantage of being able to avoid being poked, as the soggy sections give more room on how to present the sharp sections to your mouth.

Counterpoint: soggy nachos are disgusting. What the hell? The whole point of nachos is the crunchy chips!

full agreement

Fully agreed, the soggy depths are incredible