Although they go as far back as the Roman Empire itself, it seems like the world has suddenly rediscovered dip sauces in the past few decades. Almost everything we eat now comes with a dipping sauce that adds extra flavour and makes the already tasty food even tastier.
Currently, there is a huge variety of dip sauces that only take a few ingredients to make in only five minutes. Many of them go with most finger foods. Others are only consumed with certain ones. For instance, you can eat French fries with most dipping sauces; however, dipping them in soy sauce, for instance, sounds unusual. Likewise, what goes with seafood might not match a margarita pizza.
Speaking of chicken, the most consumed type of protein, it is that kind of food that can be made in a variety of ways, from poaching, deep-frying, and stir-frying to baking, grilling, and pan-searing. They are all delicious, and indeed, each needs a different dip sauce. In this article, we are demonstrating eight different types of chicken dip sauce that you can make in no time.
So let’s hop into it.
One thing that might be confusing about the famous Buffalo chicken wing dip sauce is its name. If it goes along with chicken, why, for God’s sake, was it called Buffalo?
Well, as the story goes, Buffalo has nothing to do with meat here, but instead, it is a proper name that refers to Buffalo City in New York. This was where the Anchor Bar Restaurant is located, where Teressa Bellissimo, who worked there, invented this dipping sauce back in 1964.
Despite being so attached with chicken wings that it was named after them, this Buffalo dip sauce can pretty much be consumed with other chicken parts as well. It has a very distinct tangy, spicy, and rich taste that basically comes from another vinegar-based sauce called Worcestershire that is used to make it.
If you can have that, it will complete the taste of your Buffalo sauce. If you cannot, you will still get a great, tasty sauce anyway. This sauce is not thick and takes only a few minutes to make.
Place a cooking pot on medium-high heat. Add the hot pepper sauce, white vinegar and the minced garlic. Stir the ingredients well, then lower the heat and let the sauce simmer for around five minutes.
Add the unsalted butter to the sauce in the pan, whisk until the butter melts and let the sauce cook for another two minutes. Turn off the heat and let the sauce cool for some time.
You can either pour the sauce on the crunchy fried chicken wings, which is how they are usually served in restaurants, or you can dip your chicken in it.
You can make your Buffalo chicken wing sauce even spicier by adding half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper powder. This is actually included in the original recipe by Anchor Bar.
In the food context, ranch refers to the famous creamy salad dressing that goes back to the 1950s and was invented in California, USA. It uses a combination of buttermilk, mayonnaise and spices to get that zesty taste.
Now, the ranch dip sauce is one of the most widely used dip sauces not only in the US but in the entire world as well. It pairs so well with chicken as well as all pizzas, except the Hawaiian of course, and French fries.
The regular ranch dip sauce is so easy to make and uses a handful of accessible ingredients. But what we are making here has jalapeño as an extra ingredient to give it a spicy-sour taste. This recipe also takes less than five minutes to make.
Add the sour cream, mayonnaise to a large mixing bowl as well as the buttermilk and jalapeño and mix them all well. You can do this using a spatula or a food processor, but in that case, your jalapeño will be finely minced. If you like it this way, then go ahead and use the food processor.
Once blended, add the garlic and onion powders and the lime juice to the mixture then blend well. Sprinkle some salt and pepper to your desire, add one tablespoon of white vinegar and the dried herbs. Blend the ingredients once again.
Let your jalapeño ranch chicken dip sauce chill in the refrigerator for a while before serving with chicken.
Going all the way from the US to Southeast Asia, more precisely to Thailand, the following sauce we have today is the sweet chilli chicken dip sauce. As the name suggests, it has a sweet taste combined with spiciness from the chilli.
Besides chicken, this sweet chilli dip sauce is most commonly consumed with spring rolls, egg rolls, dumplings, fried rice, meatballs, vegetables and seafood.
Since it is Asian, this Thai chicken dip sauce must surely use some Asia-exclusive ingredients or at least one that is Asia-themed. This ingredient is rice vinegar in this recipe. Yet, thanks to globalisation, it is always available in the Asian aisle of most supermarkets.
So here is how to make the sweet chilli chicken dip sauce.
Place a saucepan on medium-high heat. Add the water and vinegar, mix and bring them to a boil. Add the sugar (or honey), chilli flakes, garlic, ginger and ketchup. Mix them with the water and vinegar mixture and let them all simmer for around five minutes.
While the mixture is simmering, add two teaspoons of cornstarch to a small bowl with some water and mix until smooth. Add the cornstarch to the simmering chilli sauce and whisk well until it thickens a little. Add salt to your desire, then turn off the heat. Let your sweet chilli chicken dip sauce cool before serving with chicken.
Like the Buffalo chicken wing sauce, the Chick-fil-A sauce is attributed to the American fast food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A, where it was invented. However, unlike the Buffalo chicken wing sauce, the recipe for Chick-fil-A is still a secret. The ingredients and recipe that we have here are based on the taste that customers reported.
This means that, so far, there is no one standard way to make that Chick-fil-A sauce. All the recipes you can find online are different attempts made by chicken and dip sauce-loving people.
Most customers said that this orange-ish sauce has a creamy texture, a little sweet and tangy taste with some smokiness. So, we have used ingredients that provide such taste and texture. However, the recipe is ridiculously easy, and all you need are five very common ingredients.
So to make the Chick-fil-A sauce, place a quarter cup of honey in a large bowl then add a quarter cup of barbecue sauce, half a cup of mayonnaise, one tablespoon of lemon juice and two tablespoons of yellow mustard. Mix all the ingredients very well and let them sit in the fridge for some time so that the flavours meld. After that, you can serve the sauce with chicken nuggets or tenders.
The next chicken dip sauce we have is the Bang Bang sauce, another one that originated in the US and was very popular there before it expanded to the rest of the world.
No one actually knows why this one is called this way. Some say that it is the sound of hitting all the ingredients together, which means all sauces, then, should also be named Bang Bang. Others say it is a metaphor for its super spicy taste. This is also not very accurate, given that many other sauces are actually spicier than this one.
Anyways.
The Bang Bang sauce was actually made to go with seafood. But because it has become so popular and customers loved it, they started consuming it with different kinds of finger foods and has recently been associated with chicken tenders especially.
All you need to make this sauce is half a cup of mayonnaise or plain Greek yoghurt, a quarter cup of the sweet chilli sauce we made a few paragraphs ago and one tablespoon of sriracha sauce. This is another super spicy sauce made from chilli, vinegar, garlic, salt and sugar. You can either buy it from the supermarket, or you can substitute it with any other type of chilli sauce.
Mix all the ingredients very well, then let the sauce chill in the fridge before serving.
The Boom Boom sauce was, too, invented in the US and has been consumed with finger foods. It is creamy, tangy, spicy and sweet and goes very well with chicken.
Besides the cool name, the Boom Boom sauce is like the Bang Bang sauce but with a richer and spicier taste that comes from a few extra ingredients.
So to make this sauce, bring a mixing bowl and add one cup of mayonnaise, three tablespoons of sweet chilli sauce, three tablespoons of ketchup, half a teaspoon of onion powder, half a teaspoon of garlic powder, two teaspoons of sriracha sauce and a sprinkle of salt and black pepper.
Mix all the ingredients very well until well blended. Let the sauce chill for some time before serving.
Blue cheese is a very rich kind of cheese. It is characterised by the distinct blue spots that result from leaving the cheese to age while making it. It could be one of the very few types of cheese that uses strains of penicillium Mould during the cheese-making process. It grows in the cheese and creates these blue spots and veins.
Blue cheese originated in Europe. There are different types of it that belong to different European regions. However, the most famous type of it is the French Roquefort.
Like its main component, the blue cheese chicken dip sauce also originated in Europe and made its way all around the world. It has a deep, pungent, creamy and unlike-anything-else flavour.
It is also this deep, pungent, creamy and unlike-anything-else flavour that makes the blue cheese dip not everyone’s first choice when it comes to which sauce to dip their chicken in. However, it does make the perfect dip sauce when combined with other ingredients. So here is how to make your blue cheese chicken dip sauce.
In a bowl, add one cup of blue cheese—any type you can find—half a cup of sour cream or plain Greek yoghurt, and a quarter cup of mayonnaise. To get an even richer taste, add one tablespoon of buttermilk, and for the tangy flavour, squeeze half a lemon and add a pinch of salt and black pepper.
Mix all the ingredients until the cheese crumbles get so small and the ingredients are well blended. If you want to make sure there are no crumbles, use a food processor to blend the ingredients. Let the blue cheese chicken dip sauce chill in the fridge before serving with chicken. Given that blue cheese is already old, the sauce can survive in the refrigerator for a week.
Leaving Europe behind and heading to South America, specifically to Peru, let’s try the famous Peruvian Aji Amarillo sauce, which is actually a primary ingredient in Peruvian cuisine.
Unlike the other sauces we demonstrated so far, the Aji Amarillo sauce’s spiciness does not come from jalapeno or red chilli but from yellow chilli. That is why it is called Aji Amarillo, which literally translates to yellow chilli pepper.
Yet, like many of the other dip sauces we have demonstrated so far, the Aji Amarillo does not only go along with chicken but also with French fries, cooked potatoes, raw vegetables and seafood.
The standard recipe uses yellow chilli pepper paste. If you cannot find this in your local grocery store, you can use a homemade alternative. Just mince one yellow chilli pepper and sautée in a little bit of oil, and it will work just as perfectly. Having said that, you are also going to need a food processor for this recipe.
Add all the ingredients minus the salt and black pepper in the food processor and process until the mixture is creamy. Make sure there are no cheese crumbles or any small pieces of pepper or onions.
Move the sauce to a bowl and add salt and black pepper to taste. Give the sauce a mix with a spoon and let it set for some time before serving. It is recommended you leave the sauce in the fridge for up to 24 hours before consuming to give the ingredients a chance to meld and for the taste of the sauce to become more profound.
The types and varieties of chicken dip sauces are countless. Whether their base is mayonnaise, sour cream, plain Greek yoghurt, or butter, the vast variety of spices, herbs and other sauces that can be added creates a different taste and aroma every time.
You, too, can play with the ingredients and create your very own chicken dip sauce, and who knows? Others may like it. They may try to make it. It may go viral, spread to the entire world and become your own trademark.
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