I've been perfecting this dressing for months now. I LOVE bleu cheese and its dressing. You'll find all manner of people posting on recipe hack forums trying to find the Chris' & Pitt's BBQ bleu cheese recipe, that's the standard with which I grew up. I feel like my standards are pretty high, and my expectations are rarely met. I like a dressing to be thick but creamy, chunky but not with massive chunks, fresh tasting, and not too heavily seasoned so that I can still add fresh pepper to my salad, or use peppered bacon in the recipe below the dressing.
Since the Greek yogurt craze is in full swing and doesn't look to be going anywhere any time soon, I'm hoping to keep making my dressing this way, so that I always have a kind of dressing I can eat. Lots of dressings contain corn products in some form or another, including distilled white vinegar, corn starch, HFCS, and corn syrup, so it's hard for me to find a reliable brand that meets my standards and doesn't cost a million dollars a bottle. I made this mostly with things I already keep on hand, the buttermilk is the only thing I had to actually go out and buy.
Amazeballs Bleu Cheese Dressing
1/2 c low fat buttermilk
1 c nonfat greek yogurt
3 tbsp regular sour cream
1 5oz pkg bleu cheese
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp ground kosher salt
1/4 tsp ground white pepper
fresh ground black pepper - start with 1/2 tsp, add to taste
Make sure the bleu cheese is crumbled small enough for your taste. Put everything, buttermilk first, into a jar, and shake well. Add a little more buttermilk if you like it a little runnier.
Putting buttermilk in first makes the shaking go faster, because you don't have the thick yogurt sticking to the bottom. I also put the salt, pepper, and herbs in the middle of the jar, so they don't get all stuck to the top or bottom.
Notes on the months it took me to get here:
- You could substitute minced garlic, but it gives the dressing a much sharper taste, even with minced roasted garlic, it was just way too sharp to be pleasurable.
- Fresh tarragon would be delicious but I'd probably have used a little less than dried, and our local groceries don't stock it frequently enough.
- PLEASE use full fat sour cream. It's not that bad, and the light gives a weird texture to the finished product.
- This lasts about a week in the fridge; I didn't try freezing it so I've no idea whether it'd thaw well.
I could be boring and put this on a salad, but here's what I plan to put it on tomorrow (Thanksgiving, my second favorite holiday):
Brussels, Bacon, and Shrooms
3 parts brussels sprouts
2 parts baby portabella mushrooms
1 part bacon (I use pepper bacon and use less fresh ground pepper)
garlic cloves to taste
parsley
salt and pepper
Clean the sprouts, they can either be whole or halved for this recipe. Halve or quarter the mushrooms so they're roughly the same size or slightly larger than the sprouts. I like to cut the bacon strips into 1" pieces, but you do whatever your heart desires.
I start the bacon in a pan, just long enough to render a little of the grease, about halfway to edible. While that's going, put the sprouts, garlic cloves, shrooms, parsley and salt and pepper into a lightly oiled baking dish and mix together. I use a 9 x 13 Pyrex rather than the cookie sheet I usually roast veggies on, because the mushrooms tend to give off a lot of liquid.
Put the bacon evenly over top of the sprouts and shrooms, and pour the grease evenly over the whole pan. Keeping the bacon on top allows the grease to drip down into the veg and make them taste awesome.
Roast in a 425° oven roughly 25-30 minutes, it may take up to 45 minutes if you leave the sprouts whole.
Serve hot with slotted spoon to prevent mushroom juice sloshing, spoon bleu cheese dressing over top.
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