Super Bowl Snacks: Blue Cheese Burger and Caramelized Onion Dip

Super Bowl Sunday is a cherished day for me. I do love a good football game, but I also love a good football spread. In my brain, football is synonymous with the three F’s of food: fried food, finger food, and fat food. This particular recipe sits on the fat food scale, if not breaks it entirely from it’s sheer weight.

I came up with this idea while I was going over my menu for the Super Bowl party I throw every year. I make all the standard stuff: wings, guac, chili, fried things with cheese, and of course, assorted dips. Seems everyone is familiar with buffalo chicken dip, and I thought why not take this to the next level and make a blue cheese burger dip? Beef is not getting enough love here, plus it’s one of my favorite burger combos. That said, you could sub shredded cheddar or gruyere here too if you’re not a fan of blue cheese.

I have to say that I think this dip was perfect. I used bacon (obviously), but you definitely don’t have to if you don’t want the added meat or added salt (but why would you not want added meat?!). I made the caramelized onions ahead of time, loosely following this recipe from The Kitchn. The blue cheese sauce is also from scratch, and I think that’s necessary; I’m all for saving time if I can, but I wouldn’t sub a bottle of dressing on this one. Plus, who doesn’t want to learn to make a good blue cheese sauce?! It was easy too – you can put it on burgers, on fries, on steak…or on a spoon and eat it straight…

Another thing you can do is add 1/2 cup of Frank’s Red Hot if you want to make it a buffalo blue cheese dip. I did that the second time I made it and it was straight fire. In a good way.

Blue Cheese Burger and Caramelized Onion Dip

NEEDS:

1 lb ground beef

1 cup caramelized onions (made ahead, here are some good tips)

1/4 cup blue cheese, crumbled (for topping)

4 slices bacon, divided (2 for mix and 2 for topping)

Caramelized Onion NEEDS:

2 onions, sliced

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp butter

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp sugar (optional)

Blue Cheese Sauce NEEDS:

1 1/2 cups blue cheese, gorgonzola, or whatever blue variation you like (I used gorgonzola)

1 8 oz. package of cream cheese

3 tbsp sour cream

2 tbsp buttermilk

1 tbsp mayo

1 tbsp Worcestershire

1 clove of garlic, minced or grated on microplane

1 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

1/4 tsp mustard powder

1/4 tsp salt

Pepper, to taste

DIRECTIONS:

1. Make the caramelized onions. Add butter and olive oil to large skillet and when the skillet is hot but not smoking, add the onions. Stir to coat evenly with butter and oil. This is a long process. They will take over an hour usually, so please make these ahead of time or you won’t want to cook anymore when they’re done. After 20 minutes or so they will start to break down and become very translucent. Add salt and sugar, if you wish. After 35 minutes they will start to get brown caramelized bits on them and will smell a bit sweet. After 1 hour, I added 1/4 cup of water to scrape up any brown bits on the bottom of the pan. ALWAYS DEGLAZE THE PAN. I sometimes use balsamic vinegar, but I didn’t want that flavor here, so I just used water but you can use wine, beer, vinegar, anything. It’s just a constant watching and stirring process, and mine took about an hour and 15 mins to make. 2 medium-large onions made 1 cup.

2. Make the blue cheese sauce. Combine all of the blue cheese sauce ingredients into a bowl (softened cream cheese, blue cheese, sour cream, mayo, Worcestershire, lemon, garlic, mustard powder, buttermilk, salt, pepper). Mix together and the sauce should be nice and thick and have a slight blue tinge to it from the cheese. MMMMM.

3. Cook the ground beef and bacon. Do the bacon first and set aside. When the bacon is cool, chop 2 slices and add to the blue cheese sauce, if you wish. Brown the beef in a large skillet, then drain over a mesh strainer. We don’t want much excess fat running through this.

4. Add beef to blue cheese sauce. Mix together in a large bowl and taste for seasoning.

5. Assemble the layers! In an 8 1/2 x 9 dish (or closest to that you have), add the beef and blue cheese sauce mixture first, then top with 1 cup of caramelized onions and spread around to make a nice even layer. Then add the other 2 slices of bacon, chopped, and the blue cheese crumbles.