Turn Up The Heat With This Nashville Hot Chicken Dip Recipe

While it is a whole lot of work to whip up a round of Nashville hot chicken for everyone coming over to watch the game, this Nashville hot chicken dip recipe has all those same flavors and can be on the table in just a matter of minutes. This dip, from recipe developer A.J. Forget, is perfect for game day, movie night, cookouts, potlucks — wherever you serve it, this dip is sure to be a hit.

With a base of cream cheese, yogurt, and shredded mozzarella, you know that this dip is plenty creamy. As for flavor, well, it's got that in spades as well. That creamy base gets its first layers of flavor from garlic, onion, pepper, paprika, and pickle brine. Then we stir in the chopped chicken and diced dill pickles. But no Nashville chicken would be complete without its signature spicy sauce. For this recipe we melt butter and infuse it with a bit of brown sugar, a touch of paprika for color, and a good hit of mouth-tingling cayenne. Drizzled over the top of the dip and swirled in, the butter sauce truly completes the effect of that famous sandwich from the Music City.

In this recipe you will need butter, brown sugar, cayenne pepper, and paprika for the hot butter sauce. For the dip, you will need cream cheese, Greek yogurt, shredded mozzarella cheese, onion powder, garlic powder, pepper, a bit more paprika, pickle brine, chopped chicken, and chopped pickles. Once you have all of these ingredients together, you are just a few minutes away from enjoying a delicious snack or appetizer.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat.

Stir in the brown sugar, cayenne, and ½ teaspoon paprika. Remove from heat and set aside.

Add the cream cheese, yogurt, mozzarella, pickle brine, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper, and remaining paprika to a skillet over medium-low heat.

Cook, stirring regularly, for around 5 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and the mixture is uniform.

Stir in the chicken and pickles, allow to warm for 2 minutes, and remove from heat.

Pour over the butter mixture and swirl it in.

Serve warm, accompanied by crackers, tortilla chips, or toasted white bread.

Writing about the origins of a dish is not always an easy thing to do. Rarely are the stories well-documented, even for the most enduring of culinary traditions. And perhaps especially with the most popular dishes, there is almost always more than one person claiming it as their own. Fortunately, the origin story of Nashville hot chicken does not suffer from this — though there may still be a bit of legend mixed in with the facts.

Nashville hot chicken can be attributed to a man by the name of Thornton Prince. The story goes that back in the 1930s — Prince was something of a man about town, prone to late nights and philandering. One morning, after he'd spent a night out on the town without her, the woman that he'd been seeing decided to get a bit of revenge by serving Prince a fried chicken breakfast steeped in spicy peppers. But, much to her surprise, Prince loved the new creation, and decided to build a business around it.

Prince and two of his brothers opened up a restaurant called the Bar-B-Q Chicken Shack to sling this spicy new fare. In 1980, the restaurant's fourth owner (Prince's brother's nephew's daughter — his great niece) renamed it Prince's Hot Chicken, which remains the name today. It would take decades more for hot chicken to really catch on and find its way from Nashville to the rest of the world, but these days Prince's contribution to the culinary scene spans far and wide.

While dill pickles are a near-mandatory garnish for a Nashville hot chicken sandwich (and a pretty excellent addition to any fried chicken sandwich), we understand that not everyone loves the salty, sour bite of a dill. We think that they are just perfect in this recipe, lending the dip their signature tang, but there are substitutes out there for those who'd rather hold the pickles with this dip.

If it is specifically dill pickles that you are looking to exclude, the first place we'd suggest looking for an alternative is other pickle varieties. Other varieties of pickle can be much sweeter, and appeal to a different palate than their dill cousins. You could even try making your own bread and butter pickles with this recipe, giving you full control of the recipe.

Another great alternative for pickles in this recipe would be pickled onions. Homemade pickled onions are a breeze, and you can really tailor them to your own tastes, making them as sweet, salty, sour, and spicy as you like. Substituting pickled onions would certainly add another layer of aromatic flavor to the dish.

Greek pepperoncini, pickled banana peppers, or even quick pickled jalapeños could also make an interesting addition, adding both the tang of the brine and another layer of heat.