Forget Nachos — Totchos Are The Super Bowl Show Stopper Your Party Needs

How time flies. We just put away the Christmas decorations and now it's time for the great February Food Fest. We're not talking about Valentine's Day, a holiday whose true purpose is to celebrate our love for all things chocolate, nor are we discussing the lucky foods of Lunar New Year just yet. Before we hit either of those milestones, we have Super Bowl spreads to prepare. A high proportion of watch parties will likely be serving nachos. If you want to switch things up just a little, though, you can opt for something similar (and rhyming) — totchos, the dish that mashes up a Mexican-style snack with a Midwestern hotdish.

Tater tots are the not-so-secret ingredient that puts the "tot" in totchos. To make them, start by baking up a bag of the frozen kind. (Do non-frozen tater tots even exist?) After they're done, go to town with the nacho toppings. Sprinkle on some shredded cheese first so it melts (you can put the tots back into the still-warm oven to facilitate this), then layer on cooked ground beef, chorizo, shredded chicken, beans, diced tomatoes, sliced green onions, pickled jalapeños, salsa, guacamole, sour cream ... you know the drill. One upside of totchos over nachos is that the former are less likely to turn soggy since the potato base is already on the squishy side. The downside is that a tot, unlike a chip, can't really serve as a standalone vessel for conveying toppings to your mouth, so individual plates or bowls and a serving spoon are an absolute necessity.

The dish feels quintessentially Midwestern because, after all, totchos are essentially a nacho-inspired potato casserole. As it turns out, they seem to have been invented by some unknown person in Colorado while the name is credited to an Oregon bar owner named Jim Parker. (Parker himself once attributed it to a bartender named Jonathan Carmean.) As a side note, the tater tot is itself an Oregon invention. It was first produced in 1954 by the Oregon Frozen Foods Company (which was later re-branded as Ore-Ida).

Totchos seem to have first debuted in 2006 on the menu of Parker's Oaks Bottom Public House in Portland. (The pub is still in business and still selling totchos even though Parker passed away in 2019.) It took a while for totchos to catch on, but by the mid-'10s, they had conquered the bars and restaurants of that other PNW powerhouse, Seattle. Over the following decade, they went nationwide. Home cooks soon caught on to the fact that totchos are ridiculously easy to make, at which point the dish transitioned from trendy pub grub to the kind of thing you can serve your picky toddler — or football watch party. Totchos are versatile enough to cover both scenarios, which is why we think they'll stick around and join the standard Super Bowl snack lineup.