Fast Food Reviews: Taco Bell Volcano Nachos

I like the Taco Bell Volcano sauce. I don’t particularly like the pricing on it…could swear those volcano tacos were under a buck when they first came out, and now they’re a buck twenty? But anyway, the Bell is milking the spicy-by-fast-food-standards, vaguely cheese-flavored sauce as much as possible, and this is the latest iteration.

Would it surprise you to know that the actual thing you get is not as tidily arranged as the picture above? These things are assembly-line made, with someone taking fistfuls of the various ingredients, familiar to all denizens of Taco Bell. Fried-air tortilla chips, low-grade ground beef, bean paste, nacho sauce, volcano sauce, and those silly red tortilla strips that the Bell uses as filler any time they want to add another “layer” to something. I can’t imagine anyone feeling passionately about those things either way.

There’s sour cream too — low-calorie, apparently — but I don’t like sour cream, so for the purposes of this review, I had it left out. The plate is Nachos Bellgrande size. And there are like five jalapeno slices on the thing too.

The biggest surprise here for me was that the nacho cheese and the volcano sauce don’t work very well together. By itself, volcano sauce tastes vaguely cheesy and good, but up against nacho sauce (which admittedly is not exactly actual cheese) it feels like a bad imitation. Sorta like Doritos powder, diluted and thickened. I would have gone with just the volcano sauce, had I been the guy developing this.

Then there’s the price tag: $3.50 for nachos. Really? I think even 7-11 nachos are cheaper, and they give you all-u-can-eat toppings. Buy the Bell’s “Triple layer nachos” (i.e. nachos with cheese, red sauce, and the stupid filler tortilla strips again) for les sthan a buck, a taco for less than a buck, crumble the taco over the nachos, and you’ve more or less got this.  Add fire sauce for the spice.

I liked the volcano nachos, but they are not worth what you pay.