Nacho average smell

someone please call 911 and report a foul odor

Good day, clowns!

The passage of Labor Day means that everyone gets to shout about how summer is officially over. You are required to murmur this at least once this week, look around the room, and feel very proud that you pointed this out to everyone. Then, if you do not receive accolades for doing this, all those people who ignored you will be dead to you forever.

One of my favorite things about the arrival of fall is football season.

I love football, but not because I enjoy watching sports. It’s because whenever there’s a football game on, my errand-running time is cut in half since everyone stays at home. What a godsend. But here’s one thing I have to say, and it’s that sports-watching food is awesome.

I’m a big fan of Buffalo wings, soft pretzels, and of course, nachos. So I thought to myself, “Dannis, the formula for nachos is pretty simple. How can you, the greatest food writer in all of history, innovate nachos for the gorgeous people who read your newsletter?”

The answer was simple: I could create my own cheese sauce from scratch, with a very special secret ingredient which would make the end result silky and smooth. But also, I could make the nachos smell like buttholes.

The secret to silky smooth cheese sauce at home is an ingredient called sodium citrate.

Sodium citrate is an ingredient that goes into uniformly melting processed cheese products like American cheese. While I’m not much of a chemist, I do have Google, which brought me to Modernist Cuisine’s website. It explains the science behind what sodium citrate is is and what it does.

First of all, it’s a sodium salt derived from the citric acid naturally occurring in fruits. The site says, “Sodium citrate allows the proteins in the cheese sauce to become more soluble while lowering the pH of the sauce, which creates a smooth emulsion without curdling.”

So what Modernist Cuisine is saying is that sodium citrate works by using magic.

Computer, please zoom in to the top portion of Dannis’ photo.

Here’s a hot culinary tip: If you have two asshole cats who do nothing but cause mass chaos in your apartment, do not leave your ingredients sitting out on the kitchen counter overnight. They will chew through the top, spill its contents all over the floor, and play with it like they’re in their litterbox.

(They do not appear to have ingested any because they are totally fine.)

In order to make my nachos smell like stinky ass, I purchased two of the smelliest cheeses known to man.

The first one was a blue cheese. This one’s a Stilton, which is known for being particularly pungent. Though it does smell strongly moldy, it’s also quite delicious. It’s salty, tangy, has a touch of an ammoniated smell, and is very savory. I understand why many people avoid blue cheese, but I think it’s pretty great.

The second cheese is one notorious for smelling like a sweaty tube sock filled with rotting garbage: Limburger.

Once I took off the wrapper, I involuntarily winced. The aroma of feet and rear ends filled the air quickly. Like the Stilton, the rind has an ammoniated smell to it, but it’s quite strong, almost like cat pee.

Speaking of cat pee, I let our furry dickhole roommates take a whiff of the cheese.

“It smells like your litterbox,” I said to them. They were immediately hooked on the scent and started licking their lips, so I had to snatch it away from their faces.

I tried some, and it tasted much like it smelled, like body odor and ammonia-based cleaning product. That might sound terrible, but it was decent once you got past the borderline dead body smell. It was creamy and smooth in the center with a complex funky flavor to it.

Davida had some too. “It tastes like a barn,” she said.

I chopped both cheeses into small chunks, probably ruining my cutting board in the process, and dumped all of it into a bowl.

Then I heated up a little water in a saucepan, added some sodium citrate, and stirred until the salt was dissolved.

I put some cubes of cheese in and stirred until each batch melted into the liquid.

The smell of ass and feet began to waft into my face. The more I stirred, the more intense the experience got. Fuck. What had I gotten myself into?

I looked at Davida in the other room and said, “It smells crazy in here!” She laughed, made a sour expression, and said she could smell it from where she was sitting. I motioned at her to come into the kitchen, and when she did, her face pinched up. Gotcha, babe!

Once the cheese was melted, I was left with a fondue-like sauce that was thick, smooth, and smelled like a high school gym locker room on a 100 degree day.

I made sure to plate the nachos in the best vessel for the occasion, an upside down ceramic football helmet that was originally intended for fondue.

(Some of you long-time readers may recognize this from way back in the day in an earlier edition of the newsletter.)

I filled the helmet up with chips and dosed them with a fat blanket of the smelliest cheese sauce known to man.

I then dressed the nachos with pickled jalapeños, Chi-Chi’s thick and chunky salsa, and a sloppy spoonful of sour cream, and barreled in like a Heisman Memorial Trophy winner (sports joke!).

While the nachos smelled like a odiferous riot, they tasted…just fine. In fact, they tasted pretty good, because I couldn’t stop eating them. It’s no secret that smelly cheese tends to taste excellent, and when blended together, the Stilton and the Limburger flavors softened up. Don’t get me wrong, by itself the cheese sauce was still a punch to the balls of my mouth, but with the other nacho components, it became a tolerable background flavor.

What was a weird disappointment, however, was the Chi Chi’s salsa. I have a soft spot for crappy American jarred tomato salsa, since it tastes like it’s been stewed into oblivion. This stuff was so sweet it was off-putting. What an amazing feat by Chi-Chi’s, considering I made nachos that smelled like a sweaty foot freshly pulled out of a horse’s ass. Davida wasn’t particularly a fan of the nachos, but I naturally have a significantly stronger tolerance to ass-like aromas anyway.

You guys can have your pumpkin spice lattes. From now on, I’m greeting fall with my new delicacy, smelly nachos. Who wants to watch some football at our house?

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It smells really weird in here. Please do me a favor and don’t forget to share the newsletter on social media, because it helps grow this thing like crazy.

Then, of course, sign up for a paid subscription! You’ll get exclusive editions of the newsletter nearly every week, with extra experiments and culinary troublemaking. This week, paid subscribers will get an actual recipe for the smelly nachos, if you feel like turning your friends into mortal enemies.

New subscribers, don’t forget, you get full access to the archives at foodisstupid.substack.com, so you can catch up on the three years of shenanigans I’ve been cranking out.

As always, I love you all. I’ll greet some of you in your inboxes later this week. Okay, I better go clean the kitchen. I cannot stress to you how strange it smells in here right now.