Name: Stanton Bundy's Winning Chilaquiles
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 55 min
Cuisine: Mexican/Latin
Ingredients: 8 oz corn tortillas, cut into 1/4-inch strips; 2 cups Mexican red salsa (salsa roja), fresh or jarred; 1/2 cup crema mexicana or Mexican crème fraîche; 4 large eggs; 6 oz chorizo, casing removed, crumbled; 1 cup shredded Oaxaca cheese or mozzarella; 1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped; 2 jalapeños, sliced thin with seeds; 1/2 white onion, thinly sliced; 1/4 cup vegetable oil; 2 cloves garlic, minced; 1 tsp cumin; Salt and black pepper to taste

Chilaquiles is a dish that rewards the cook who respects stale tortillas. At Traveler's Table in Houston — a restaurant whose menu has pulled from Peru, Vietnam, Lebanon, and about forty other countries depending on the week — Stanton Bundy has trained himself to find the through-line in any cuisine, and chilaquiles gave him a familiar one: texture management under liquid.

The critical variable is sauce temperature and timing. Bundy ladled his salsa roja onto the chips hot but pulled the pan from heat immediately, letting residual warmth soften the chips to pliable without crossing into mush. He ran a 60-second window. The eggs went basted, not scrambled, so the yolk stayed liquid — a second sauce built into the dish.

If you want to know what Bobby's chilaquiles looked like by comparison, the phrase the judges reached for was 'soggy.' Bundy had sixty seconds of structural discipline. Sixty seconds is everything.