Nacho, Nacho, Bar! I Got to be at the Nacho Bar!
Now through May 18th, build your own nachos at the Nacho Bar! How will you build your nachos to make it ultimately delicious? Wholesome and spicy?
If you love chili, take our Deep Kettle House Chili soup, smother it on top of the tortilla chips and drizzle nacho cheese sauce for the classic chili cheese nachos. If you love a little more flavor, the offered toppings are salsa de Lupe, sour cream, scallions, yellow onion, cilantro, cheddar cheese, and jalapeños will give your nachos a hot kick!
Speaking of hot kick, New Mexico’s Albuquerque Sweet Tomatoes locations are in for a real treat! Hatch chilies will be served as part of the condiments at the nacho bar as well as “Joel’s Hatch Green Chile Sauce!” Who is Joel you might ask? Joel Espinoza is Albuquerque’s Sweet Tomatoes General Manager, who shared his family’s more than 100 year-old recipe with the company’s menu team.
Joel’s great-grandmother created the original recipe before passing it down to his grandmother, who passed it to his mother, and then to him. He learned his family’s Hatch chilies sauce recipe and thought it would be fun to bring it to the nacho bar.
What is a Hatch Chile? A green chili pepper that is grown in Hatch and Mesilla Valleys of New Mexico and are handpicked and then processed within 24 hours. Growers have worked with the same processor for three decades to ensure quality and consistency of this famous product.
And there is more to the local angle. Director of Operations Natalie Lahr grew up on a farm where the Hatch chili was created and her family grew the delicious green peppers there for four generations. “The man who developed the green chilies that we eat in New Mexico today, Dr. Fabian Garcia, was my great-great uncle. I grew up on the same farm and lived in the same house that he did,” says Natalie. “My family continued to grow the chilies for four generations.”
Dr. Garcia is known as a pioneer horticulturist who developed the state’s signature chilies in 1894 while at the college now known as New Mexico State University. The peppers were cultivated to have a larger, smoother and fleshier pod through the hybridization process.
Have fun building and eating nachos now that you know the story of where Hatch Chilies come from.
Great to see our NM chiles recognized! Hope they go national so we can get them not only at our Sweet Tomatoes in Albuquerque but also at the one we go to in Boca Raton in the winter.