Guy Fieri's Mile-High Nachos Have Lobster in the Mix

At the Food & Wine Classic in Flavortown, er, Aspen, the Triple-D star got extra fancy with a mountain of his signature Trash Can Nachos.

You have had nachos in your lifetime. You may have enjoyed these nachos from a helmet-shaped vessel at a stadium. Some nachos may have accompanied frosted pitchers of Margaritas at your favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. You may have meticulously stacked and layered trays of them for a festive gathering at your home. There’s even a chance you have experienced a moment of satisfaction as you gazed upon the vista of chips, cheese, beans, peppers, and other nacho accoutrement with a full heart and a rumbling stomach. But Guy Fieri makes better nachos in a tin can than your myriad nacho experiences combined.

It's OK! Guy Fieri is widely accepted as a nacho deity. His signature Trash Can Nachos are available at his bajillion restaurants and when purchased online via Goldbelly, arrive at your home accompanied by the eponymous can, custom-crafted for optimal ingredient stacking. Nachos are the lingua franca of Flavortown and perhaps even its currency, so it stands to reason that its mayor would be really dang good at crafting its signature dish. "Nachos are kind of like, when they're good, they're really good," says Fieri. "And when they're bad, I'll still eat 'em." Even so, Aspen — home to the Food & Wine Classic since 1983 — is at least geographically at a higher elevation than most places, so Fieri met the occasion by making equally lofty nachos at his demonstration this year, featuring freshly-fried chips piled high with cheesy Mornay sauce, beans, chiles, and lobster that he poached and tempura-fried in front of a salivating, sold-out audience.

Did Fieri lead them in a chorus of "Beans, Beans, The Magical Fruit"? Yes he did. But he also dropped some serious nacho knowledge — and offered up his custom-blinged extra-large trash can to the person willing to write the largest check to the Guy Fieri Foundation to support first responders, military, and emerging chefs. Here are some tips he shared about how to make the best nachos of your life.

Related: 12 Nacho Recipes That Steal the Show

Don't skimp on chips

"If you're gonna wolf down as I do, at least make great tortilla chips. You've got to fry me some fresh," says Fieri as his cooking assistant — his son Hunter — oversees a tall pot of oil, armed with a long-handled spider to skim out the quartered chips when they hit the perfect puffy gold state. "When they come outta that fryer, that's when you've gotta make sure that you hit them with the salt. Don't worry, I'm your cook. I'm not your doctor. Just remember that. Be responsible on your own time."

Go H.A.M. on your pork

Fieri opts for lardons of thickly marbled pancetta, which will meld well with the beans he'll be layering into the nachos. "I love the saltiness and I use it instead of bacon because I don't want it to compete with the smokiness," he says. "I want the cured, I want the unctuous silkiness that I'll get from the fat, and I want the chew, but I don't want to go with that bite that we have in American bacon."

Related: Guy Fieri's Pork Chile Verde

Then go hard with the beans

Fieri notes that black beans — while excellent — aren't quite the texture and flavor fit he's after. "How about cannellini beans? Nice, so creamy. Any time you're working with beans, unless you're gonna puree them or they're gonna sit there in a soup for a long time and get really soft, I think you gotta go from a hard bean," he says. "Soak those beans overnight, and pick through them making sure that you don't have any funky ones or any rocks. Let them come to a simmer and they'll be ready in about an hour." Meanwhile, he waxes poetic about his favorite legume.

"Here's the deal with the beans. You gotta think about all the civilizations that grew up on beans. They can do anything. They go so far and they feed nations. These are gonna be silky, creamy, salty, and rich." Especially when they're lightly mashed with sweated mirepoix vegetables — which he hits with a splash of white wine.

(Fieri takes this moment to mention that not all of the alcohol cooks out. "If someone has a concern with alcohol, this is really something to know. There's a lot of great alternatives to using white wine — you can use chicken stock.)

Related: The Simplest, Most Delicious Way to Cook Dried Beans

Take stock in that lobster

"There's all kinds of controversy," Fieri says. "Should we cut that lobster before we drop it in and so forth? I mean, we're going into boiling water. There's not much left for him. But, the truth of it is that cooking lobster in the shell is probably the number-one way to enjoy it. The shell is all the flavor, same thing with shrimp, so when you cook it in its original package, that's when you're gonna get the best out of it."

After a quick poach, Fieri plunges the lobster into a salted ice bath, then instructs Hunter to remove the claw and tail meat for the next step — and he saves that stock he made to add a little something extra to the cheese sauce.

Mornay all day

Plain old melted cheddar is plenty good, but that's not what gets you elected as eternal mayor of Flavortown. Fieri whisks together a roux of butter and flour, taking care not to get it too far past the blonde stage, explaining, "When it gets dark, it gets nutty and it gets a really great flavor and that's your base for a lot of your gumbos, but it loses some of its thickening properties." From there, he starts to slowly — SLOWLY — incorporate half-and-half, strained lobster stock, copious amounts of cheddar, and Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce for extra kick to this gloriously gooey Mornay sauce — which is essentially a béchamel with cheese added.

But back to the "slowly" part. "What happens here if we start to make a mistake thinking if we put it in and everything was fine, why don't we start adding a bunch of it really fast?" Fieri queries the crowd. "Have you ever made fondue and found all the cheeses that make a hard softball at the bottom of the pot? What happens is it seizes up if you don't give it a chance to melt properly and all the proteins come together."

Related: Guy Fieri Is Living Proof That You Should Trust Your 10-Year-Old Self

It's fry time for lobster

Plain old crustaceans would be luxurious, but you know the drill. Fieri makes sure to only lightly poach the lobster before halting the cooking with the ice bath — knowing that the claws would get a second plunge into bubbling oil after a dredge in chili-powder-spiked tempura flour, then a another in a batter of that same tempura flour mixed with very cold San Pellegrino. "The effervescence of this, as well as the contrast between cold and hot will make this a battle of puff when Hunter fries off these claws that we're putting in these nachos. You're looking at an ice cream batter consistency for that versus this oil he has at 350°F," he explains. Science, it turns out, is on the Fieri family's side, and it's time to get stacking.

Related: This Plant-Based Powder Turns Used Frying Oil Into a Solid Before Your Very Eyes

Yes we trash can

Now that the chips, beans, pancetta, Mornay sauce, tempura-fried lobster claws, and chopped lobster tails, as well as Fresno chiles, pickled red onions, and parsley are assembled, it's nacho time. "This is all gonna come together," Fieri asks. "So can I get some 'making nachos for semi-drunk people that are getting ready to go destroy Aspen tonight' music?" The sound engineer cranks up Guns 'N' Roses' "Paradise City" as Fieri places the sparkling trash can mold down on a platter, throws down some chips and ladles in a base layer of Mornay sauce. "Then you can start sprinkling in some of that lobster meat, and those cannellini beans with the pancetta that's gonna be salty against the lobster meat, then more chips, more cheese sauce. We're building layers of flavor here," Fieri says. "Then more of the beans, more of the Fresno chiles. When you get a bite of this, I want you to have all of the flavor."

He continues, "More of the cheese sauce, more of the lobster. Who needs to go to the gym? No one." Then again, by the time Fieri is finished building the final layers, scattering the chiles, onions, and herbs as the nacho muses guide him, the whole glorious mass is stacked so high inside the can that it seems a physical impossibility that it wouldn't completely topple over — let alone be held aloft to the rabid crowd, suddenly clamoring to the stage for a benediction and a bite from their nacho god, but somehow he manages. If the mountain won't go to the nachos, the nachos must become the mountain.

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