Take Your Super Bowl Artichoke Dip To The End Zone With This Bold Ingredient

For perhaps a bit too many people out there, the only time of year they'll really enjoy green vegetables is during the Super Bowl — when they're dipping tons of tortilla chips into a creamy spinach and artichoke appetizer. It's a popular Super Bowl party dip, and its flavor comes from an odd but surprisingly effective blend of earthy-flavored greens and thick cream cheese. It's an unusual enough mix that it can be hard to think of how to mess around with it more. However, if you're interested in sweetening your artichoke dip in a way that doesn't mess up the flavor, you might find that adding caramelized onions works great.

Normally considered a crucial addition to French onion dip, caramelized onions are softer and sweeter than regular onions after they've been cooked. The sugar molecules inside the onions react to the heat, turning them brown and nutty. Typically, you'll want to caramelize yellow or big and sweet Vidalia onions before adding this ingredient to your dip. Yellow onions will come out a bit sharper, while sweet onions will be more mellow, but both should be mildly sweet enough to blend right into the gooey and complex texture of the dip. Then you can use all of that leftover artichoke dip in a chicken salad or on a pizza the next night, and it'll still taste great.

The addition of caramelized onions to your artichoke dip is straightforward. Start making the dip as you normally would, while caramelizing onions on the side. Once you've mixed together all the cream cheese, artichoke hearts, and spinach, take the freshly cooked onions and mix them into the dip until it's a proper blend. (You can chop them by hand or in a food processor first to avoid larger bites of onion.) The best part is that, because the caramelized onions can be added at the end, you have more flexibility with the dip itself. While you can make your own homemade dip easily enough, you can also buy the popular artichoke dip from Trader Joe's or any supermarket and use the caramelized onions to give it a boost.

Cooking the onions until they're lightly golden brown is the norm for French onion dip — and it'll serve you well for your artichoke dip, too. That shouldn't take you more than about 40 minutes of caramelizing. You can get faster caramelized onions after about 15 to 20 minutes, but they'll be crunchier and sharper since they're closer to raw onions. Similarly, your artichoke-spinach-onion ratio is no hard science. Chopping up one full onion should be enough for a dip made with one or two cans of artichoke hearts and two cups of spinach, but some folks prefer more onions. Make sure you let the caramelized onions cool slightly so you don't alter the dip's creamy, smooth consistency.