How (Not) To Make Onion Dip

I love onion dip made with sour cream and onion soup mix. Love it. Loooooooooove it. But the ingredients scare me. Have you ever read that package?

So I decided to make my own. Of course I looked online for ideas first. Almost everything I saw included beef bouillon cubes. Oh yeah, that’s so much better.

What you see here is a first try. It’s pretty good as a dip, but really fabulous for … well, I’ll tell you down at the bottom.

Ingredients

1-1/2 cup diced onion
1 clove garlic
16 ounces sour cream
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon bacon fat
1 teaspoon secret ingredient, optional (see below)

Directions

I’ll assume you’ve already got some diced onion left from making something else.

You don’t? Oh, okay, I’ll wait while you go dice some.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You’re back? Okay, good. Now melt the bacon fat over medium heat and add the diced onion.

While that’s starting to cook, mince the garlic. Add the garlic and salt to the onion.

Cook the onions until they are caramelized, about 15-20 minutes. Keep stirring so it doesn’t burn.

Once the onion is caramelized, scoop it into a food processor. For a small amount like this, a mini-processor is actually better.

Process until it is fairly smooth, but don’t obsess over it. Some lumps are good.

Then add about a quarter-cup of sour cream. No, don’t measure it. Didn’t I say not to obsess over it?

That step was mostly to make sure all the oniony goodness got into the dip, instead of staying stuck to the insides of the food processor. If you’re using a large one, you might need to add all the sour cream. Process again.

Scoop everything out into a bowl about a size larger then what will just hold the dip. You need a little room to mix.

Add the rest of the sour cream, if you didn’t already add it in the processor, and mix.

Here’s the secret ingredient: Worcestershire sauce. Yeah, I know, sounds strange doesn’t it?

After mixing in the Worcestershire, I tasted it and it was too smooth. I like it thick and … well, not quite chunky, but I like bits of onion in it. And I had over-processed it. So I minced up some fresh onion and added that.

One last mix, let it sit in the fridge for an hour for all the flavors to integrate, and that’s it.

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I mentioned up top that it was good as a dip but great for something else. I already tweaked the amounts of ingredients listed above to make a better dip next time. I only used about one cup of onion, so I upped that to 1-1/2. And I used nearly a tablespoon of the Worcestershire, which was a bit much, so I listed a teaspoon. I also cut the bacon fat in half, because I didn’t need nearly as much in the non-stick pan as you see in the photos.

So what was this really good for? Hamburgers, believe it or not. I’ve seen meatloaf recipes that call for a couple pieces of bread, ripped up and soaked in milk. Milk … sour cream … that’s pretty much the same thing, right? And onion, garlic, Worcestershire, all stuff that I put in burgers already.

So I took half of the dip (about 8 ounces) and mixed it with two pounds of ground beef, a cup of bread crumbs and two eggs. Made burgers and grilled them up. They were unbelievably moist, and so flavorful you almost didn’t need any condiments on them. I didn’t bother to photograph them because I didn’t realize they’d be worth telling anybody about.

I love happy accidents.

Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.