Last week we showed you two different things we made for the Super Bowl this year, and now we’re going to feature our final game day recipe: bread bowl dips! We made two meatless dips – one broccoli cheddar and one buffalo chick’n – both from the same base, so we got two recipes for the price of one. And what we really liked was that our final product was entirely edible and self-contained, because the dips are made in hollowed-out bread bowls, so you take the pieces you cut out of each bowl and use them to scoop up the dips, and then when you get to the bottom you just break down the bread bowl and eat that too. We’ll show you here how to make both of these recipes, and you can choose which one is your favorite.
You’ll need:
- 2 bread boules
- A large head of broccoli
- 2 Morningstar Farms Buffalo Chik patties
- Blue cheese
- Buffalo sauce (double check the label to make sure it’s vegetarian)
- 1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) of butter
- Flour
- Heavy cream
- 10 ounces of cheddar cheese
To get started, you’ll want to use a serrated knife to cut out the middle of each boule, so that they’re shaped like a bowl. Then pull out most of the bread in the interior, but leave a 1/2-inch thick wall of bread around the entire inside. Set the extra bread pieces aside for later. Also, cut your broccoli into small florets.
Now you’ll make a cheese sauce: in a Dutch oven, melt your butter over medium heat and then whisk in 6 tablespoons of flour. Gradually pour in a cup of cream and continue whisking until the butter-flour mixture has combined fully into the cream and is no longer lumpy. Then shred all but 2 ounces of your cheese and add that in, stirring until you have a smooth sauce.
Now take one bread bowl and fill it a little less than halfway with cheese sauce, then drop half your broccoli on top.
Fill almost all the way to the top with more cheese sauce, and place the rest of the broccoli in the bread bowl …
… then shred the rest of the cheddar and sprinkle that on top.
Take your other bread bowl and fill halfway with cheese sauce. Microwave your buffalo patties for two minutes, then chop one up and scatter it over the cheese sauce.
Scatter a generous handful of blue cheese on top, plus some buffalo sauce.
Fill this second bowl almost all the way up with more cheese sauce and top with the second chopped buffalo patty, more blue cheese, and more buffalo sauce.
Turn your broiler on low and place one bread bowl in at a time to melt the cheese and brown up on top – start by broiling each one for 5 minutes, and increase the time by 2 minute increments as needed, making sure you watch the oven carefully to make sure nothing burns. Here’s the broccoli cheese bread bowl when it was done …
… and here’s the buffalo chick’n one after it come out of the broiler.
Now you can take the extra bread from each bread bowl, tear it into bite sized pieces, and serve it as the vehicle to eat each dip!
These were both an incredibly rich dish for the big game, and they hit all the right elements of Super Bowl food: there’s plenty of cheese, some buffalo faux-chicken, and a great dip to nosh on through all four quarters. Plus, all that deliciousness comes without relying on any meat at all. We had originally intended only to make the broccoli cheese dip, but we remembered that we had some Buffalo Chik patties in our freezer and decided we’d just make a double recipe of the cheese sauce and turn out a second dip. We’re really happy with our results, and we think these are some pretty creative – and pretty tasty – dips we whipped up for this year’s game.