Party Dip Recipes - Easy, Fast and Delicious

Don't shy away from improving on someone else's work, especially when you're really rushed. It's so simple to take a pre-made onion dip, add some chopped scallion and garlic, give it a stir and quickly out to your buffet.

We'll help you find the right dip, mix it up just great and also answer your party food questions for FREE with Ask-a-Caterer.

Olive Bread Bowl is beautiful and rich, adding a bit of glamour to your party. No Wine Bar should be without it, the perfect compliment to the driest of Sauvignon Blancs.

Dips often call for mayonnaise, sour cream and cream cheese. Let's talk ideas about each:

Mayonnaise comes in many different kinds, but is essentially eggs and oil mixed with spices. Adding olive oil to a mayo based dip will add flavor to a "mediterranean" style, and blend easily with the oil in the mayo. Other flavored oils will work too, such a garlic oil, or minced garlic packed in oil.

Mayo is easily available as a reduced fat product, and also fat free. We have not had good luck with the fat free products, and you need to work for Dow Chemical to pronounce some of the ingredients... However, the fat reduced ones perform better.

Sour cream is available as a dairy product, or a non-dairy. Both types offer full fat, reduced and fat free. The non-dairy type is especially good for outdoor summer picnics where refrigeration is an issue. But nothing tops the taste of the diary original.

Again, the fat free sour creams leave something to be desired. But the reduced fat ones aren't too bad.

Cream cheese, like sour cream, comes in many varieties. We're not using anything except dairy, full fat cream cheese - been there, tried that, not going back.

Yogurt is a welcome addition to party dip recipes. Avoid flavored ones (like "vanilla") when dip building. Their moisture content needs to be checked too - drain the yogurt in a strainer before using. Also, yogurts seem to work best for us when we add to mayo and or sour cream - instead of using yogurt by itself.

Brand names? At home, out of the jar on a sandwich - sure, we've got our favs. But in a party dip recipe, one can hardly taste the difference. The store brands are often packed by the name brand companies, perhaps with slight differences in the recipes, but the cost difference makes the choice easy.

Most dips improve as the flavors marinate together. We try to build dips and refrigerate them overnight.

Don't forget to garnish. Stir up your dip, get it into your nice bowl, and get something cool looking on top.

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