Beef Bites with Three Dipping Sauces
Nothing makes an appetizer more enticing than being able to dip it in a sauce. From salsa to sauces to cheese fondue, people love to dip their foods.
One of my favorite dippable appetizers are simple, little beef bites, which I serve with three amazing sauces. These sauces are actually good on chicken, too, but I prefer beef. There's just something so decadent about a little cube of steak!
Let's start with the sauces.
Spicy Garlic Dipping Sauce Recipe
First on tap is one of my husband's favorites -- the spicy garlic sauce. This is a very strong and powerful sauce with a huge garlic punch, and it is SO good!
Start with an entire head of garlic, and peel all the cloves.
Mince the garlic finely. You don't want people to eat big chunks of raw garlic, so smaller is better. However, don't grate or press it, because that will make it too hot.
Then put 2 tablespoons of butter in a bowl and microwave it just until melted (don't let it get too hot). Add the garlic to the bowl and stir in 1/4 cup of Frank's Red Hot Sauce.
Stir it well and it's ready to serve.
Blue Cheese Dipping Sauce Recipe
Next we have a wonderful and creamy blue cheese sauce. This one not only tastes great on beef, but it's pretty awesome on pasta, too!
Put 2 ounces (1/4 of a standard 8-ounce package) of cream cheese in a pan with 2 tablespoons of butter and 1/2 cup of cream.
Heat over LOW heat, stirring constantly, until melted and smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Remove from heat and add 1/4 cup of crumbled blue cheese.
Stir and it's ready to serve either warm or at room temperature. Note that it will thicken as it cools, so if you serve it at room temperature, you may need to add a little more cream to thin it out.
Cilantro Pesto Dipping Sauce Recipe
Last but certainly not least is my favorite of all -- cilantro pesto. I make this almost every time we have steak at home, and My Honey lovingly calls it "green sauce". This stuff was just destined to go with beef and the taste is out-of-this-world awesome. Assuming you like cilantro, that is. And I LOVE cilantro!
Add 1 clove of garlic and 2 tablespoons of oil (vegetable or olive, your choice) to a food processor (I can't live without my Cuisinart mini food processor). Pulse it a few times so that the garlic is chopped and mixed with the oil.
Then shove in a giant bunch of cilantro (stems removed). Squeeze in the juice of half a lime.
Sprinkle in 3 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Let the food processor do its thing until the sauce is fully blended. Depending on how big your bunch of cilantro is and how big your lime is, you may need to add the juice from the other half of lime to get it the consistency you want.
Pour into a dish and serve.
Three sauces that go great on steak
These three sauces make quite a set. They not only taste fantastic, but they look so pretty lined up in little bowls! Each recipe above will make about 1/2 cup of sauce.
The blue cheese sauce will keep in the fridge for about a week and can be reheated as needed, but the other two sauces taste best when fresh, so don't make them more than a couple hours ahead of time.
Beef Bites Appetizers Recipe
Okay, the sauces are ready. Now we need the beef! Start with any cut of steak you like and cut it into 1-inch cubes.
Pat the cubes dry with a paper towel.
Season the beef cubes with salt and pepper and put them into a hot, dry, skillet.
Cook on medium-high heat, and when that side of the cube is seared, turn it to another side.
Continue cooking and turning the cubes until all sides are seared and yummy.
If you will be serving them right away, cook until desired doneness. If you are cooking them ahead of time, leave them on the rare side and reheat in the oven when ready to serve. This reheating will cook them a little more, so be careful not to reheat them for too long!
If you've got a lot of beef to cook and not a lot of time, you could also skewer the beef and cook it on the grill. And as I said before, chicken works well with these sauces too, but if you use chicken, be sure to cook it all the way.
Arrange the beef bites on a platter, add a toothpick to each one, and serve with the sauces. Oh man, these are so yummy!
4 comments so far:
yummy! That looks really good. It's sad to see all those wonderful brown bits on the bottom of your pan go to waste though. Maybe you can make a risotto in the bottom of that pan!
Very good point, Lauren. When I pan-sear a steak for dinner, I'll often deglaze the bits with red wine and then whisk in butter, making a fantastic sauce to drizzle on the steak. I should've done that as a fourth sauce for these bites!
What's good on steak is surely good on steak bites! lol. I like to deglaze the pan with some white wine and throw in some mushrooms and then add some cream and butter. yummy. Mushrooms are probably one of my favorite things in the whole entire world. That and bacon. I'll definitely try these for my Valentine's party though. They'll be so good!
Ooooohhhhhhh, YUM!!!
That looks so good. I'm going to definitely look into preparing this!