Prep Time: 15 mins | Cook Time: 20 mins | Subterranean Consumption Phase: 21–35 days | Serves: 8–10 party guests (or 1 larval hymenopteran)
Image credit: GoblinLife Vault
Every autumn, as the air turns crisp and the bleachers fill with screaming fans, a familiar anxiety creeps into the back of my mind. Half of that anxiety is the fear of showing up to a watch party with a crockpot of lukewarm, broken cheese dip that has separated into a rubbery yellow puck swimming in a quarter-inch of orange grease. The other half is the paralyzing realization that if the karmic wheel of samsara is real, and my ledger is weighed accurately based on the things I did behind the Arby’s in 2019, there is a near-100% mathematical certainty that I will be reborn as an Aphonopelma chalcodes—the Arizona blond tarantula—specifically on the afternoon it crosses paths with a gravid female tarantula hawk wasp.
Most people ruin their nacho dip because they rely on pre-shredded bagged cheese, which is coated in potato starch and natamycin to prevent clumping in the package. That starch stops the cheese from melting into a velvety, homogenous emulsion. Similarly, the venom of the genus Pepsis doesn't actually kill you; it floods your ion channels with neurotoxins that sever the communication between your motor neurons and your hydraulic leg muscles, leaving you completely alive, hyper-aware, and unable to twitch a single pedipalp while a two-inch metallic-blue nightmare straddles your sternum.
Anyway, the secret to this recipe is evaporated milk and a heavy bottomed cast-iron skillet. Put out a bowl of this with some thick-cut cantina chips, and nobody will even notice you sweating through your jersey while staring catatonically at the drywall!
What You’ll Need Before the Burrow is Sealed
- 1 lb bulk Mexican chorizo (pork, not soy—we aren't animals, yet)
- 8 oz block of sharp cheddar, freshly grated by someone who still has full control of their appendages
- 8 oz block of Monterey Jack or Oaxaca cheese, shredded
- 4 oz American cheese (from the deli counter, cubed—you need the sodium citrate to stabilize the emulsion, stop being a snob)
- 1 can (12 oz) evaporated milk
- 1 tbsp cornstarch
- 1 large poblano pepper, finely diced
- 2 serrano peppers, minced (keep the seeds if you want to feel something other than existential terror)
- 3 cloves garlic, mashed into a paste
- 1/2 cup pickled red onions and fresh cilantro, for garnish
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Read Full Investigation >>Step 1: Render the Chorizo and Contemplate the Sting
Place a 10-inch cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat and dump in your bulk chorizo. Use a stiff wooden spoon to break the meat into fine crumbles. You want to let it sit undisturbed for two or three minutes at a time so the Maillard reaction creates those crispy, caramelized bits of pork called fond on the bottom of the pan.
Once the fat renders out into a vibrant, brick-red puddle, toss in your diced poblano and minced serranos. The capsaicin hitting the hot pork fat will release an aggressive, peppery plume into your kitchen. Breathe it in deeply. Cherish your lungs. Tarantulas don't have lungs; they have "book lungs"—stacks of alternating air pockets and hemolymph-filled tissue located on the underside of the abdomen. When the female tarantula hawk delivers her sting, which entomologist Justin Schmidt rated a 4.0 out of 4.0 and described as "blinding, fierce, shockingly electric, like a running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath," those book lungs keep right on pumping oxygen into your blood. You don't pass out. Spiders don't have a biological mechanism for fainting from trauma. You just lie there in the dirt, experiencing the pure, uncut voltage of the pain while your eight eyes stare directly up at the desert sun for the very last time.
Stir in the garlic paste and cook for another 60 seconds until fragrant. Remove the meat mixture with a slotted spoon and set it aside in a bowl, leaving about a tablespoon of the red chorizo grease in the pan.
Step 2: Build the Protein Matrix and Enter the Dark
Turn your burner down to medium-low. In a separate bowl, toss your freshly grated cheddar and Monterey Jack with the tablespoon of cornstarch until every strand is dusty. This is crucial: the starch molecules physically intervene between the milk proteins, preventing them from knotting up into greasy strings when exposed to heat.
Pour the can of evaporated milk directly into the warm skillet with the reserved chorizo drippings, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan with a silicone spatula. Bring it to a gentle, barely perceptible simmer.
As those tiny bubbles break the surface, imagine being dragged backward across three hundred yards of gravel by your own face. Because you weigh five times as much as the wasp, she has to clamp her mandibles onto your chelicerae and haul you into a subterranean chamber she dug specifically to match the dimensions of your body. Once you are shoved into the pitch-black dirt hole, she deposits a single, pearlescent white egg onto the side of your abdomen. Then, she climbs out and kicks dirt over the entrance until the light is gone forever. You are now alone in absolute, suffocating silence, completely immobilized, waiting in the dark for that egg to hatch. You cannot scream because you do not have a mouth built for screaming. You can only wait.
Drop the cubed American cheese into the simmering evaporated milk and whisk until completely smooth.
Step 3: Fold in the Dairy and Ration the Vital Organs
Grab your bowl of cornstarch-coated cheddar and Monterey Jack. Add the cheese a single handful at a time, whisking constantly in a figure-eight motion. Do not let the mixture boil. If you boil the dip, the fat emulsion will shatter, and your guests will talk about your failure in the group chat on the drive home. Wait until one handful is completely melted and glossy before adding the next.
That level of patience and methodical precision is actually something the wasp larva excels at. Three days after you are buried alive in the dark, the egg hatches. The grub doesn't just tear into you blindly—if it killed you right away, your carcass would putrefy in the humid burrow and poison the larva before it could pupate. Instead, guided by millions of years of merciless evolutionary hardcoding, the grub chews a tiny, neat hole through your exoskeleton and begins sipping your hemolymph and fat bodies first.
For weeks—literal weeks—it eats you alive in a strict anatomical hierarchy. It hollows out your digestive glands and reproductive organs while scrupulously avoiding your heart and your subesophageal ganglion (your brain). You are kept meticulously alive as a living, breathing, conscious refrigerator so the meat stays fresh. In the final forty-eight hours, having grown fat and translucent inside your hollowed-out shell, the larva finally consumes your central nervous system and heart, weaves a silk cocoon inside your empty husk, and waits for spring.
Once all the cheese is incorporated, the dip should coat the back of a spoon like molten velvet.
Step 4: Reincorporate the Pork and Serve Hot!
Fold two-thirds of the crispy chorizo and pepper mixture directly into the cheese, reserving the remaining third to scatter across the top so your presentation pops. Garnish heavily with the bright, acidic pickled red onions and chopped cilantro to cut through the richness of the dairy and pork fat.
Set the cast-iron skillet directly onto a trivet in the center of the coffee table while it is still bubbling around the edges. Surround it with sturdy tortilla chips—none of those thin "restaurant style" flakes that snap in half under the structural load of real queso—and watch your friends' eyes roll back in their heads on the first bite! And if you catch yourself staring at your buddy Dave while he double-dips a broken chip into the center of the skillet, take comfort in the thought that if there is any justice in this cold, uncaring cosmos, he’s going into the burrow right next to you.
