For New Year’s this past year we were looking for a new sauce to try for with our chicken strips and Derek came up with the idea for a Buffalo Blue Cheese Dipping Sauce. Buffalo chicken is a classic combination and many restaurants serve chicken strips tossed in buffalo sauce with blue cheese dressing on the side, so it seemed like a classic flavor profile for a sauce. And we happened to have some blue cheese on hand that was begging to be crumbled and used.
Aside related to the picture: If you’ve been following the blog for a while or checked out our chicken strip and sauce posts; no all these chicken strip and sauce pictures were not taken on the same year at the same time – we do really have the same meal every year on New Year’s Eve. Only the sauces really change. I realize even the china is one of two patterns depending on whose house we are at in a given year! This is one tasty tradition – and Dani and I have both declared it our favorite meal of the year!
As it turned out this was one of my favorite all-time sauces. For my chicken AND my fries! Yes, the fries. Oh. My. Goodness. Were the fries good with this sauce! The funny thing is I dipped the fries in the sauce accidentally. The leftover sauce also became the inspiration to make Crispy Ranch Shrimp which I’ll be posting shortly as one of our upcoming Lent recipes.
Here’s what you need:
The recipe is incredibly simple with only 3 ingredients. The hardest part is crumbling the blue cheese (if you don’t buy it already crumbled).
Derek got me these adjustable measuring cups (#CommissionsEarned) for Christmas which I have already fallen in love with for measuring things like sour cream, peanut butter, shortening, molasses, or other things you normally need to use a rubber spatula to get out of the measuring cup. You just set the measuring cup to as much as you need. Fill. Then push and it squeezes everything out, no scraping required.
Start with some sour cream.
Now add some cayenne pepper sauce (I like Frank’s) and blue cheese.
Mix together. Taste and adjust to your desired spice level.
Allow to hang out for an hour or two in the fridge to let the flavors meld if you can wait that long.
Enjoy with chicken strips, fries, shrimp or anything else that could be improved with a kick of buffalo.
- 1 ½ c sour cream
- ½ c cayenne pepper hot sauce (I like Frank’s)
- ½ c blue cheese crumbles
- Mix all ingredients together.
- Chill for 1-2 hours.
I devised something similar to this about 10 years ago. Figured it out trying to deconstruct a certain unique wing sauce at a certain pizza joint in a certain town in VT. Try this: To your recipe above, add about 1T fresh ground black pepper, and then add just enough apple cider vinegar that it’s faintly detectable to your taste buds. Of course, that amount will vary by individual, so you may have to experiment a bit, but there’s really no downside, just extra wings. If you have trouble getting the apple cider vinegar amount just right, start cutting back on the sour cream little by little until you hit the recipe sweet spot. Happy Winging!!