If you don’t have a stick blender, put the garlic and vinegar in a bowl and add two-thirds of the blue cheese. Stir in the vinegar and taste, adding a little more if necessary, and then fold in the remaining cheese and the chives, reserving a pinch for the top. Put the garlic, cream cheese and sour cream in a bowl with two-thirds of the blue cheese and whiz with a stick blender until fairly smooth. Photograph: Felicity Cloake/The Guardianġ10g strong blue cheese (I like gorgonzola piccante), crumbled He also adds chervil, and Bon Appetit pops in thyme, but testers can’t pick up either, and with a flavour as strong as blue cheese, it seems pointless to try to compete. Garlic and the chives Grano uses seem to blend better with the other ingredients. Not only is it more of a faff to prepare (really, who enjoys grating an onion?), but it has a harsher, more one-dimensional flavour than its modern counterpart, while spring onions, much as I love them, remind us all of cheap cheese and onion sandwiches. The extrasīon Appetit and Grano both flavour their dips with garlic, Forrest prefers spring onion, while Nickerson seasons it with “onion juice” which, a note explains, “mid-century cooks used … the way we now use garlic”. Keep some of the crumbled cheese back to stir in after blending for a more interesting texture and flavour. Photograph: Felicity Cloake/The GuardianĪlthough I’m sceptical about the use of anything mechanical here, given how easy it is to crush the cheese with a fork, as Bon Appetit suggests, if you happen to have a stick blender or a small food processor, it does help to aerate the dip, giving it a more moussey consistency. Her mix of cream cheese and sour cream is the most successful combination for both texture and flavour, although if you’re looking for a slightly lighter version, equal parts Greek yoghurt and sour cream are rather nice.īon Appetit’s sour cream version. This is also used by Jane Nickerson, whose 1953 recipe is collected in the New York Times Cookbook. Some testers find the tang of the mayonnaise, which also comes through in the Bon Appetit recipe using sour cream, comes through too strongly, preferring a more neutral base, such as Grano’s fromage blanc (Greek yoghurt makes a good substitute) or Forrest’s cream cheese. BBC Good Food’s mixture of creme fraiche and mayonnaise, by contrast, is almost runny enough to qualify as a salad dressing. Use a mixture of cream cheese, double cream and thick labneh yoghurt, as Forrest suggests, and your dip will be both solid enough to wreak some serious deforestation on the unwary broccoli floret, and so rich and creamy that you might not feel like going back to clean up the damage. More important than your choice of cheese, I think, is what you mix it with the base of the dip will dictate the consistency and, to some extent, the flavour profile of the finished product. Photograph: Felicity Cloake/The Guardian The foundations

Play around with what you have, but I reckon meek and mild blues are best deployed elsewhere.Īlessandro Grano’s dip uses fourme d’ambert. Creamier St Agur, which I thought would be a shoo-in, proved too shy and retiring for most of us, and the fourme d’ambert, used by chef Alessandro Grano in Alex and Leo Guarneri’s book A Year in Cheese, was deemed similarly disappointing. You may be relieved to hear that the last of the Christmas stilton will also work well, although some testers found it slightly bitter, while BBC Good Food’s more assertively salty roquefort also had its fans. However, if when that seasonal weight has lifted, you do wish to purchase some cheese specially, I would recommend a gorgonzola piccante, as suggested by Jamie Forrest on the Serious Eats website as being “not too mild but not too assertive either, and with a characteristic twang that really made the dip something special”. Given this is a recipe designed to use up leftovers, it would feel wrong to get too prescriptive about specific varieties.

How do i make cheese dip