An article in BBC reports about the World’s largest nachos, native of the city of Piedras of Mexico.
Two nations, one community
Nestled on the north-eastern edge of the Mexican state of Coahuila, the city of Piedras Negras faces its northerly neighbour, Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande river.
Though the river separates the US and Mexico, these communities’ proximity and shared history are as fluid as the water, and thanks to two bridges that unite them, a strong exchange of food, culture and traditions has been fostered over the years.
One of these culinary inventions has since gone on to unite snack-food lovers across both nations: the nacho.
The birth of the nacho
Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras were both established in the 1840s and remain sister cities roughly 170 years later. Over time, the two communities developed together, thanks to their shared mercantile and ranching trades.
Today, Mexicans with a Border Crossing Card – or ‘Laser Visa’ – and Americans with a passport are still able to cross back and forth to visit family and friends. It was through one of these border crossings that the nacho was born.
In 1943, a group of American women whose husbands were stationed in Eagle Pass at the Fort Duncan military base crossed the bridge into Piedras Negras to go shopping. Afterwards, they decided to stay for dinner, but all the restaurants were closed except one: the Victory Club.
The women asked the Victory Club’s maître d’, Ignacio Anaya, if they could order food, but when Anaya went back into the kitchen, no-one was there. So instead, Anaya tossed together whatever he could find in the kitchen, famously telling the San Antonio Express-News in 1969 that,
“I sliced a tortilla in four pieces, put some cheese and a slice of jalapeño on top and stuck it in the oven for a few minutes.”
Anaya took his invented snack out to the ladies, who asked him what it was called it. Since ‘Nacho’ is a common nickname for Ignacio in Latin American countries, he quickly responded, “Nacho’s Special!”
An experiment explodes
The US women loved Anaya’s improvised dish so much that he shared the recipe around the restaurant’s kitchen. After leaving the Victory Club in 1961, Nacho took his namesake dish across the border to Eagle Pass and opened his own place, Nacho’s Restaurant.
‘Nacho’s Special’ eventually shortened to ‘nachos’ and became the most popular appetiser at the restaurant.
Word of Anaya’s nachos spread like wildfire along the border region throughout the 1960s. A decade later, an executive at a San Antonio concession-supplier business named Frank Liberto decided to take Anaya’s nachos and modify them for the masses to sell at sporting events.
He swapped the fried tortillas or totopos Anaya had been using for round chips and concocted a creamy cheese sauce with a long shelf life – now famously known as ‘nacho cheese’. These concession nachos were introduced at a Texas Rangers baseball game in 1976 as ‘Ricos Nachos’, named after Frank’s father, Enrico.
A year later, they were sold at Dallas Cowboys football games, and soon after, they proved so popular that they were found at stadiums and cinemas across the US.
International phenomenon
Though Mexican by birth, nachos have become a snack staple around the US, with many American regions and cities adding their own local flavours to it – from organic, vegan ‘rawchos’ in Portland, Oregon, to lobster nachos in New England.
Yet, many Mexicans still proudly claim nachos as their own and continue to serve the original recipe that Anaya invented: top the totopos with a generous pinch of Wisconsin cheddar cheese (which happened to be in the Victory Club’s kitchen the day Anaya whipped up the first nachos), put them in the oven until the cheese melts and add a thick, pickled jalapeño slice to each chip. And nowhere are Mexicans prouder of their nacho history than in Piedras Negras.
One cheesy festival
In 1994, Piedras Negras resident Adalberto Peña and some of his friends were at the site of the old Victory Club eating lunch. While sharing a plate of nachos, the friends thought about creating a festival honouring the nacho and highlighting its birthplace in Piedras Negras.
A year later, the International Nacho Festival (better known as the ‘Nacho Fest’) was born. As part of the event, people from both sides of the border come together to create the biggest nacho possible.
The first year, Peña said that only about 20 people showed up and they banded together to create a single 0.91m chip. But as the years have passed, local sponsorships and radio promotions have attracted visitors from beyond the region.
This past year, more than 25,000 spectators from Mexico and the US descended on the Piedras Negras River Walk on the bank of the Rio Grande, between the two international bridges. And as the festival has grown each year, so has the nacho created by the volunteers.
A new world record?
To create the world’s largest nacho, you need lots of friends. Some 15 volunteers begin by kneading and flattening 68kg of dough seasoned with salt and dried pork skin to just 1cm in thickness using a giant wooden rolling pin.
This dough will form the tortilla chip, and it’s laid upon a massive 4.6m skillet that expands by roughly 0.3m in length each year. The volunteers then douse the dough with cooking oil and use a series of flame torches to ignite the skillet and fry the dough.
The chip is cooked for roughly 30 minutes before 59kg of Wisconsin cheddar cheese and 11.3kg of jalapeño peppers are sprinkled on top – all of which is donated by local businesses on both sides of the border. Finally, Peña torches the top of the chip to melt the cheese while the bottom burners continue heating the chip.
When it’s completed, the nacho will feed up to 350 people. While Guinness World Records doesn’t officially have a category for the world’s single largest nacho, Peña is planning to register the border communities’ bi-national chip in 2020 in honour of the festival’s 25th anniversary.
Friendship through food
Each year, the mayors of both Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, the Customs and Border Patrol port director (all pictured here) and many local business owners from both sides of the border come together to make the event – and the nacho – possible.
In addition to the Mexican and American businesses that donate all the ingredients, Peña points out that there are bi-national welders that help make the pan larger each year, a friend from Eagle Pass that houses the giant triangular skillet in Piedras Negras and a crew of volunteers that help haul it out to the River Walk.
More than food
Food has always brought the residents of Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass together. The sister cities’ most famous invention, the nacho, may now be served at restaurants, arenas and cinemas around the world, but at its core, this cheese-topped, tortilla-piled snack symbolises the unique identity and friendship that Mexicans and Americans living side-by-side at the border have always shared.
Ultimately, the Nacho Fest is a celebration of the party snack Mexicans and Americans now know and love. After all, as Peña said, “If you’re eating nachos, you’re celebrating something.”
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Source: BBC
