You'll Never Suffer Through Soggy Nachos Again With This Surefire Homemade Chip Method

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People tend to get a little wild with nachos. This dish, which was first created in the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras by Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya in the 1940s, takes hearty tortilla chips and piles them high with just about any topping you can imagine. That's where things tend to get out of hand. It's easy to get carried away with those toppings, which leads to an unfortunate nacho disaster: soggy chips. Not only are soggy chips unpleasant to eat, but they certainly aren't going to carry those delicious toppings all the way to your waiting mouth. You'll need a fork to fix this mess, which defeats the purpose of finger food. Instead, learn how to make your own tortilla chips for the sturdiest chip around.

There are plenty of easy ways to avoid mushy nacho messes, like draining the excess liquid from wet ingredients, and you can always switch out your tortilla chips for pita chips (combined with Greek-inspired toppings, these make a killer nacho dish!). But when you make the chips yourself, you can control the thickness. And that all starts with making the tortillas the right way. Making the chips is easy — cut tortillas into wedges and deep fry them until golden — but to make a tortilla that is going to give you a good hearty chip, you want to know about a little something called nixtamalized corn, an ingredient that can help you get the best, most authentic tortillas for nacho chips.

Nixtamalized corn, or nixtamal, is flour you get from treating the dried corn kernels with an alkali solution. It is a method that has been used in Mexico for centuries and it makes incredible tortillas that are not only delicious, but sturdy and able to withstand more than a simple dip in salsa or guacamole. But many store-bought brands of tortillas in the United States use different methods to give the tortillas a longer shelf life. Unfortunately, while store-bought tortillas will last a long time, and will give you crispy tortilla chips when you fry them, they won't be as sturdy as tortilla chips made from nixtamalized corn tortillas.

Once you've learned the secret of nixtamalized corn, which you can find at many Mexican markets or online, you can start using it to make homemade tortillas, which in turn you can cut up and fry into amazing tortilla chips. You can use them for chips and dip, enchiladas, tacos, and chilaquiles, and you can even use them to make fast and easy homemade pizzas in a pinch. An even simpler option is to buy pre-made tortillas made from nixtamalized corn and use those to make your own chips, or buy nixtamalized corn tortilla chips. Not only will you be able to give your nachos chips that can hold up to the toughest of toppings, but you can also take pride in knowing that you are keeping a centuries-old tradition alive by making them the way they were intended.