Blue cheese dressing is mostly a question of how much you let the cheese stay cheese. Blend the whole lot smooth and you get a gray-beige sauce that tastes vaguely funky. Mash half of it into the base and fold the other half in whole, and you get something with actual crumbles suspended in it, which is what people want when they order it. Sharp, salty, thick enough to stand a celery stick in, and about ten minutes of work with a fork.
This is a strong dressing and it is meant to be. The cheese carries the salt, so I season at the end rather than the start, and I mean it about tasting before you add any. It feeds four as a dressing and makes a generous bowl for a wing platter.
Equipment
Weighing the cheese matters more here than in most recipes, because blue cheese crumbles pack unpredictably and a cup measured loose against a cup pressed down can differ by half again, which moves both the salt and the texture. The Large Capacity Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl with Scale lets you weigh straight into the bowl you are mixing in, and the depth keeps crumbles from skating over the rim while you fold. Crumbling a wedge by hand and mincing chives both want a surface you can scrape clean, and blue cheese is soft enough to smear into a wooden board's grain, so I use the Two-Tone XL Cutting Board and keep the cheese and the herbs at opposite ends of it. Like every dressing on this site it needs to rest cold and then lives in the refrigerator, and blue cheese is aggressive enough to scent everything near it, so an actual sealing jar is not optional: the Le Parfait Super Jars with Wire-Bail Clamp Lid keeps it to itself.
Ingredients
- 4 ounces blue cheese, crumbled (about 1 cup), divided
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- 1/4 cup buttermilk, well shaken
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon fresh chives, minced
- 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground
- Kosher salt, to taste
Ingredient Selection
The cheese decides everything, so buy a wedge and crumble it yourself rather than buying a tub of pre-crumbled. Pre-crumbled cheese is dusted with an anti-caking starch to stop it clumping, and that starch is exactly what makes a dressing taste faintly chalky. A wedge also lets you choose how sharp you want it. Roquefort is the most assertive and the saltiest, Gorgonzola the creamiest and mildest, Stilton somewhere in the middle with a drier crumb. Any of the three works; they are not interchangeable in intensity, so taste the cheese on its own first and let that set your expectations for the dressing.
One thing to check on the label if you or anyone you are feeding is pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised: some blue cheeses are made from unpasteurized milk. Cheese made from raw milk can carry Listeria, so those groups should stick to a blue made with pasteurized milk. It says so on the wrapper.
Mayonnaise and sour cream together rather than either alone is deliberate. Mayonnaise brings body and mouthfeel, sour cream brings the sharpness that keeps a cheese this rich from sitting heavy. Drop the sour cream and it tastes like cheese-flavored mayonnaise; drop the mayonnaise and it will not hold together as a dressing. Buttermilk thins the result and adds a second sour note that lines up with the cheese.
Worcestershire is a small amount doing a specific job. It brings a savory depth underneath the dairy that you notice only if you leave it out. Use it sparingly, because it is also carrying real salt.
Method
Mise en Place
- Crumble the cheese and split it in two: Weigh out 4 ounces and crumble it by hand into pieces roughly the size of a pea, keeping any large chunks intact rather than crushing everything uniformly. Divide it into two equal piles. Mince the chives and set them aside separately.
Build the Base
- Mash the first half of the cheese into the mayonnaise and sour cream: Combine them in the bowl and work them together with a fork, pressing the cheese against the side of the bowl until the mixture turns pale blue-gray and no large lumps remain. This is what makes the base taste like blue cheese rather than just carrying it.
- Thin it with the buttermilk: Pour it in gradually while stirring, until the base loosens to a thick, spoonable consistency. It will tighten slightly overnight, so stop a touch looser than you think you want.
Season
- Stir in the Worcestershire, lemon juice, garlic powder and pepper: Add them all and stir until evenly distributed and the color is uniform. Hold the salt back entirely at this stage.
Finish and Rest
- Fold in the remaining cheese and the chives: Switch to a spatula and fold in gentle strokes, stopping the moment the crumbles are distributed. Every extra stroke breaks more of them down, and those intact crumbles are the entire point of making this yourself.
- Refrigerate at least 1 hour, then salt to taste: The garlic powder needs time to hydrate and the cheese needs time to bleed its sharpness into the base, and it tastes muted and disjointed before that happens. Taste it cold at the end, and only then decide whether it needs salt. Most blues are salty enough that it will not.
Serving and Application
This is thick on purpose, which makes it a dip first and a dressing second. As written it holds on a celery stick or a wing, which is the job it does most often. For a wedge salad, thin it with buttermilk a tablespoon at a time until it pours in a ribbon rather than a blob, and spoon it over rather than tossing, because tossing wrecks the crumbles you worked to keep whole. It is also the standard partner to a steak, where its salt and sharpness cut through fat the way a squeeze of lemon does on something lighter.
Popular Variations
- Smooth blue cheese dressing: Mash all 4 ounces into the base instead of half. A legitimate style rather than a mistake, and the right call if you are dressing a delicate salad where crumbles would overwhelm it.
- Roquefort dressing: Use Roquefort as the whole cheese and cut the Worcestershire, because Roquefort is salty enough on its own. This is the classic French-influenced version.
- Gorgonzola dolce: Use the young, sweet Gorgonzola rather than the aged piccante for a noticeably milder, creamier dressing that suits pears and walnuts.
- Buffalo blue cheese dip: Stir a tablespoon of hot sauce into the finished dressing. Widely made, and the heat and the dairy work on each other.
Make Ahead, Storage and Reheating
This is a raw dairy preparation and it is never heated, so treat it as perishable from the moment it is mixed. Get it into a clean airtight container and into the refrigerator at 40F or below straight away. It keeps for about a week and it genuinely improves for the first two or three days as the cheese works into the base. Expect it to thicken as it sits; loosen it with a splash of buttermilk rather than water.
It does not freeze. The dairy goes grainy and the crumbles turn to paste on thawing.
Putting it out for a crowd is where this one gets caught out, because a bowl of dip at a party sits out for hours by default. Perishable food should not be out of refrigeration for more than 2 hours, and only 1 hour above 90F. Put out a small bowl, keep the jar in the refrigerator, and refill rather than setting the whole batch on the table.
History
The honest answer is that nobody knows who first thinned blue cheese into a dressing, and I am not going to invent a story for it. The cheeses themselves have long and well recorded histories in Europe, Roquefort in southern France, Gorgonzola in Lombardy and Stilton in England, all of them centuries older than any dressing made from them. The dressing is a different and much more recent thing, and it belongs to the American mid-century steakhouse and the iceberg wedge rather than to any of those traditions.
What can be said plainly is that it spread alongside the wedge salad and the buffalo wing, two dishes that both needed something cold, thick and sharp to work against, and that it has stayed on menus because it does that job better than the alternatives. Anyone who tells you a specific inventor and a specific year is repeating a story that the record does not support.
Nutrition
An estimate, calculated ingredient by ingredient from USDA FoodData Central entries by hand rather than measured in a lab. The recipe makes about 2 cups, and the figures below are given per 2 tablespoons, because that is a realistic serving of a dressing this rich rather than a share of the batch.
| Nutrient | Per 2-Tablespoon Serving | Total Recipe Batch |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | 88 kcal | 1,414 kcal |
| Total Fat | 8.6 g | 137.9 g |
| Cholesterol | 13 mg | 201 mg |
| Total Carbohydrates | 1.0 g | 15.2 g |
| Sugars | 0.6 g | 9.1 g |
| Protein | 1.9 g | 30.5 g |
| Sodium | 138 mg | 2,208 mg |
References
- CDC: How Listeria Spreads Through Soft Cheeses and Raw Milk, on cheese made from unpasteurized milk
- FoodSafety.gov: 4 Steps to Food Safety, on the 40F to 140F danger zone and the 2-hour rule
Related Guides
The base here is half Mayonnaise and Aioli, and making that yourself changes this dressing more than swapping the cheese does. If you want the same buttermilk-and-sour-cream structure without the cheese dominating it, Ranch Dressing is the direct comparison, and making them side by side is the fastest way to understand what each dairy component is actually contributing.
Thank You
Thanks for crumbling a real wedge instead of opening a tub. If you land on a cheese you think beats the usual three, tell me, because this is a recipe where the shopping matters more than the technique. Drop me a note through the contact page. More dressings are coming, so say which one you want next.
Chef Alan
Wine Drop Cookery
35 years, Six Four Diamond Awards