Hot Sauce Grilled Nachos

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It's FOOTBALL SEASON! I love my boys of summer and baseball, but there's something to be said for football. When I was a kid, we weren't a big sports family, but I do remember how my dad always went all out with the snacks for big games. And one of his specialties was nachos. He would pile them high and put them under the broiler in the kitchen, until the cheese was ooey gooey and delicious.

What I've done is taken that classic party food, nachos, and made a tailgate friendly version. With a little bit of advance preparation and a cast iron skillet, you too can make these nachos in a stadium parking lot near you!

When I say “advance preparation,” there's one specific thing I'm talking about: making my King of Flavor chips to serve as the base for your nachos. What do you do? It's infusing the delicious spice of El Yucateco Red Habanero Hot Sauce onto each and every chip in your nachos.

They're easy, but you'll need to do this part ahead of time; in the morning before you leave is fine; they cool quickly, so you don't need to leave a ton of time for these.

Hot Sauce Grilled Nachos

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 35 minutes

Glazing the chips with hot sauce and baking them before adding your nacho toppings makes for a killer treat!

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Ingredients

• Tortilla chips; I recommend a thicker cut chip, to better hold up to the sauce application.
• 3 Tablespoons El Yucateco Red Habanero Hot Sauce
• 3 Tablespoons oil (I used olive, canola would work just as well)
• Assorted nacho toppings of choice

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees.
2. Mix equal parts El Yucateco and oil in a lidded container.
3. I used 3 Tablespoons of each to do most of a standard size bag of chips.
4. (The main thing is to maintain equal parts hot sauce and oil)
5. Seal container and shake well to combine oil and hot sauce.
6. Using a pastry brush, apply liberally to one side of each chip.
7. Lay chips in a single layer on a foil-lined cookie sheet.
8. Start baking time at 20 minutes, go longer in 5 minute increments if needed until chips are dry to the touch.

Once your chips are made, you can prep other things to take with you; I browned some ground turkey and grated a whole bunch of cheese. (Side note: I never use pre-shredded cheese for stuff like nachos where the melt factor is so important; the pre-shredded stuff has a coating on it to keep it from clumping, and it can make it melt weird.)

Once you get to your tailgating site, it's time to prep the nachos! Get all of your ingredients out and start layering! I used a layer of non-sauced chips at the bottom of the pan, in case they burned or got stuck, I didn't want to waste that lovely flavor!

The great thing about cooking with cast iron is that you can basically do anything to it, including put it on the grill, so it's the perfect vessel for grilled nachos. Build a smallish fire in the grill; you're reheating more than anything else, so you don't need it to be roaring.

Be sure to close the lid and let it go for about 10 minutes; the grill gives an amazing smokiness to the nachos, and then with the kick of El Yucateco on every chip, the amount of flavor in this one pan is mindblowing.

Once you take the nachos of the grill (Careful! Hot pan!) you can add the finishing touches; we added some fresh pico de gallo and sour cream to finish off ours.

El Yucateco Red Habanero has less vinegar than other hot sauces, so it's more of a pure pepper flavor, so you don't need a ton to pack a punch. Having it there under every bite of these nachos meant that there were none of those sad nachos that you normally find, those lonely chips with no goodness that are always left behind. King of Flavor means there's a kick in every bite.