Hot Cheese Dip (with Velveeta, White Cheddar and Jalapeno Pepper)

This warm Velveeta Cheese Dip will be your go-to for holiday entertaining. Great for potlucks, family game night, and Super Bowl parties! 

I’ve been making this warm Velveeta cheese dip recipe for 20 years. It’s my family’s favourite homemade dip, and it’s become synonymous with Christmas at our house.

You know those recipes that you faithfully make every Christmas because it just wouldn’t be Christmas if you didn’t? That’s the way it is with this Warm Cheese dip at our house.

I don’t even have an official name for this dip. We just call it Velvetta Cheese Dip or Warm Cheese Dip or Hot Cheese Dip. Feel free to come up with a fancier title at your house.

I first discovered this warm Velvetta Cheese Dip when a co-worker brought it to a staff Christmas party in 1995. At that time, I had never tried a warm dip, never mind a warm CHEESE dip, and let me tell you, it was love at first bite.

Since then, this has been my go-to easy recipes for holidays and pot-lucks because it’s SO quick and easy to make, and it is addictively delicious.

If you’re serving a crowd, keep it warm in a slow-cooker

When I’m serving this cheese dip at home over the holidays, I just serve it by the bowl, but if I’m taking the whole batch to a potluck or party, I serve it in my slow cooker so it stays piping hot for the duration of the party.

Great dip for super-bowl or last-minute entertaining

Because this recipe makes quite a bit of dip, it’s a great dip for super-bowl, New Year’s Eve etc. and it keeps well in the fridge, so you can have it on hand when you need it for family games nights over Christmas break or for last-minute holiday entertaining.

Make it as mild or spicy as you like:

You can control the spiciness of this dip by controlling how many jalepeno seeds make it into the dip. The seeds of a jalepeno are what give off heat, so you can leave the seeds out entirely for a mild dip or throw a few in for a bit of kick.

What to serve with Warm Velveeta Cheese Dip

We always serve tortilla chips with this dip, but here are some other things that go well with warm Velveeta cheese dip:

• tortilla chips
• pita chips
• raw vegetables
• thin slices of toasted baguette
• wheat thins or other similar crackers
• bread sticks

My kids and their friends LOVE this cheese dip. I’ve made two batches over the holidays already. One, I made about a week before Christmas to kick off the holidays, and I made the second batch on boxing day to dip into while playing games and visiting with extended family.

So easy to make!

You’re going to LOVE how easy this recipe is! You just dump a handful of ingredients into a roasting pan, and pop it in the oven for an hour.

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Velveeta Cheese Dip Ingredients:

• 1 pkg Velveeta Cheese (16 ounces or 450 grams)
• 2 cups old white cheddar, grated (roughly an 8 ounce brick of cheddar)
• 1 tin diced, stewed tomatoes WITH the juice (28 ounces or 796 ml)
• 1 large onion
• 1 jalapeno pepper with some of the seeds
• 4 cloves garlic
• roasting pan (spray sides with non-stick spray for easy clean-up)

TIPS:

*For the stewed tomatoes: if you can’t find canned diced tomatoes, you can use canned whole or halved tomatoes. To dice them quickly, stick a pair of scissors into the can and chop them up.

*For the jalapeno: the heat of the jalapeno pepper is in the seeds, so you can decide how many seeds you’ll toss into your dip.  I generally use about half the seeds from the pepper, and that doesn’t make my dip overly spicy.

How to make Warm Velveeta Cheese Dip:

All you have to do is chop or grate all of your ingredients into a roasting pan.  You don’t need a huge pan; the size that you’d roast a small chicken in is perfect.

If you’d like, you can spray your pan with non-stick spray to make clean-up easy.  Sometimes I do, and sometimes I forget.  It’s no biggie when I forget.  Clean-up has never been difficult.

First, I chop my Velveeta with a pair of kitchen scissors which is totally easy. I just cube it all up.

My tomatoes are already diced in the tin, so that leaves just the white cheddar, jalapeno, onion and garlic. I use the cheese grater for the first 3 items, and for my garlic…  sound the trumpets…  da, da, da…..

I use my AWESOME Koopeh garlic chopper.

Lemme stop for a sec, and tell you about it.

I LOVE this garlic chopper. I can’t even remember where I bought it, but oh my!  It’s so much easier to use than my old metal garlic press. That thing was so difficult to squeeze shut, tricky to get the garlic out of, and it was a pain to clean.

With this handy-dandy garlic chopper, you just pop in a couple of cloves of garlic, set the lid on, and twist the top and bottom sections to crush the cloves.  Then, you just push the bottom-center, and that raises the garlic up so it’s flush with the surface of the chopper, and you can swipe all of your garlic bits into whatever dish you’re cooking.  It rinses clean easily under the tap.  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

Ok, back to the dip.

Dump everything into the roasting pan.

Now, give it all a stir.

Mix it up well, and then pop it in the oven, UNCOVERED.

Bake at 325ºF for one hour, stirring every twenty minutes.

Remove from the oven and pour into a heat-proof serving dish or into the crock pot to keep warm.

Set out a bowl of tortilla chips, and get dipping!

Mmmmm!!

Like this hot cheese dip recipe?  You’ll love:

• Best Homemade Guacamole
• Tomato and Bocconcini Appetizer
• Bacon Wrapped Green Beans

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