Holiday Party Dip Recipes

Holiday Party Make-Ahead Tip: This onion dip can be covered and refrigerated for up to 3 days. Serve this creamy, savory dip with potato chips, crudite or slices of baguette for a no-fuss appetizer. 

This ingenious, briny sauce couldn’t be simpler: Chef René Redzepi purees raw oysters with a little of their liquor, plus rice vinegar and oil. He adds diced blanched vegetables for texture, then serves the dip with potato chips.

Drizzling a high-quality olive oil over this dip will add depth and complexity, but stick with a less-expensive supermarket brand when sautéing the garlic and herbs.

Suggested wine pairing: Serve with a robust, dark-fruited Zinfandel from Sonoma County.

Pumpkin seed oil from southern Austria gives this spread its nutty flavor.

F&W's Justin Chapple uses frozen sweet corn from Gill's Farm in Hurley, New York, to create this cheesy, slightly spicy dip.

Jerry Traunfeld toasts and grinds whole coriander seeds before pureeing them with roasted cauliflower, tahini paste, lemon and cilantro. Instead, use ground coriander from a bottle to season this bright, tangy recipe.

This fantastic healthy version of artichoke dip is made with non-fat Greek Yogurt, tofu and cayenne. Parmesan cheese and sour cream replace the usual mayonnaise.

Beets have a strong presence in the cuisine of almost every ethnic group in Jerusalem, Yotam Ottolenghi explains. They color pickling juices on the Arab table and form the basis for a soup of Jewish, Iraqi and Kurdish origin. Ottolenghi purees them for this luscious spread.

This is a variation on a cocktail-party classic.

For this classic tapa, Jose Garces stuffs his delicious crab salad into individual piquillo peppers and roasts them until hot. Instead of laboriously stuffing piquillo peppers, spread the crab mixture in a baking dish, top it with slices of the peppers, then cook until warm and melty.

The classic Syrian nut dip muhammara typically contains walnuts, bread crumbs, Aleppo pepper paste and pomegranate syrup, but there are endless variations. Pistachios, cashews and freshly toasted pine nuts, almonds and walnuts give it a chunky texture, while onions and red bell peppers make it tangy-sweet.

This fruit-filled butter is wonderful on crusty bread. It’s also great with warm popovers, pancakes, waffles and muffins.

With walnuts, mayonnaise, apples and grapes, this recipe is a riff on classic Waldorf salad.

Brooklyn’s Flatbush Farm feels like a cross between a French bistro, an English pub and a Brooklyn neighborhood joint, and the bar menu includes corresponding comfort foods. One is this all-American, over-the-top, cheese-smothered dip.

To create this tasty dip, Lee Anne Wong blends soft or silken tofu (which has an especially custardy texture) with high-potassium avocado and a little bit of low-fat sour cream and yogurt. For extra fiber, she serves the dip with raw vegetables and rosemary whole wheat pita chips.

Salty, creamy (and even a little crunchy), this recipe is the ultimate party snack for when you are looking to go far beyond the average bowl of onion dip. 

Before opening Zahav restaurant in Philadelphia, chef Michael Solomonov visited hummus parlors all over Israel trying to find the best recipe. "Hummus is the hardest thing to get right," he says. "It has to be rich, creamy and mildly nutty." To make his hummus luxuriously smooth, he soaks the chickpeas overnight with baking soda to soften them. While Americans now flavor hummus with everything from pureed red peppers to fresh herbs, Solomonov says among the fanciest garnishes you can find in Israel are whole chickpeas, paprika and lemon-spiked tahini, used for hummus masabacha.

Leyden, a Dutch cheese flecked with cumin seeds, inspired Laura Werlin to create this cumin-spiced Gouda fondue. Serve it with soft, warm pretzels or pickled vegetables for dipping.

French onion soup mix combined with sour cream is the quintessential '70s dip. This luxurious upgrade eschews the powdered stuff in favor of crunchy fried scallions. Replacing the sour cream with the Lebanese cheese lebneh creates a dip that's fairly low in fat; substituting nonfat fromage blanc or drained Greek yogurt would make the dip more virtuous yet.

Boston chef Matt Jennings tops this simple, crab-packed dip with supercrispy brown-butter breadcrumbs.

For a healthier alternative to sour cream, try mixing in nonfat Greek yogurt.

To put a healthy spin on the classic spinach dip, try using kale instead of spinach and pureed cannellini beans in place of the bechamel sauce. This recipe is completely gluten free and can be prepared in advance for a quick and healthy appetizer.

To give this creamy bean dip its fresh herbal flavor, Jim German, owner of the Jimgermanbar in Waitsburg, Washington, drizzles it with olive oil blended with lovage leaves. Since lovage isn't always easy to find, a combination of parsley and celery leaves can mimic its flavor.