Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Yes, food friends and mortal masticatory enemies, it is that time of the month again, when Britain’s most fearless food blog, How to Eat, rolls up its sleeves, drops a Rennie and gets stuck into those dishes that other, so-called serious food writers wouldn’t touch with a pair of Joseph Joseph 12” serving tongs (heat resistant to 270C).  For HTE, there is no topic that is too hot to handle, which is why, for October, it is tackling, in its usual dogmatic/idiotic style [delete to taste], that most divisive buffet item, chips ’n’ dips. As ever, please use more carrot than breadstick BTL or your fellow raitas will deem you crackers. Cheesy puns are welcome, but please avoid any unnecessary crudities.  The chip ’n’ dip moment comes in many, many forms. However, this blog will limit itself to the discussion of chips ’n’ dips eaten, to use that most nauseating phrase, as “party food”. That is, as pre-dinner nibbles or as a part of a buffet. “Chips” will, of course, refer not merely to tortilla chips, but any vehicle used to deliver dip.  If How to Eat has ever offered any ideological substance, any intellectual meat, among its cheap, bony gristle of intolerant diktat and juvenile innuendo, it is this: there is no objective hierarchy in homemade or shop-bought goods. One is not better than the other, they are simply different options. The enjoyment of either is primarily a matter of time, opportunity and context.  One of the biggest HTE fault lines is between readers who insist you must make everything from scratch (“To make your own pestle and mortar, all you need is some granite – northern Italian is best – and an introductory course in stonemasonry. Et voilà, perfect guacamole every time. It’s so easy!”), and those who see such advice as smug cant.  However, in dips, there is no debate: you should make your own. Unless you have access to an amazing north African/Mexican deli, anything you buy will be but a pale shadow of the dips that, with minimal practice, you can whizz up at home. The sad, lifeless salsas and guacamoles that sit on supermarket shelves have been pasteurised and bastardised beyond all recognition, while even the fresh, “deluxe” versions of, say, baba ganoush or taramasalata, are often awful – too sweet, too salty, weirdly acidic. The one exception is hummus. No matter how you tinker with it at home, the result is always comparatively heavy, thick and granular. It may taste interesting, but you will burn out the motor on your blender long before you achieve the creamy texture that even the most basic shop-bought hummus boasts.  Given the almost endless variables in the flavours of the chip and the dip and how they interact, it is impossible to create cast-iron rules here. For instance, carrot’s sweetness is a nice counter to the nutty, earthiness of hummus, but it jars disastrously with guacamole or salsa. That said, clean, bland carbs that do not interfere with the flavours of the dips are, obviously, the best all-rounders.  Flatbreads still warm from a wood-fired oven or slices of billowing pitta are difficult to beat, with lightly salted tortilla chips or crackers a decent substitute. Some modest flavouring of the latter two, a little lime on the tortilla or a cheese-infused cracker, can, in the right circumstances, add depth and complexity. Warning: Carr’s cheese melts and Manomasa’s pumpkin seed-reinforced tortilla chips are so addictive you must only buy them as you are about to use them. If you have them lying around the house, you will soon be the size of one.  With its almost spoon-like contours and cool cleanliness, celery edges out watery cucumber as the preferred vegetable delivery mechanism, but either is acceptable. Radishes offer the satisfying crunch of the carrot, but the more peppery, mineral radishes clash with many dips. Poor-quality radishes are actually preferable, here. Incidentally, I have also heard of curls of pork crackling being used as scoops, which sounds both amazing and – for those of us whose arteries already resemble a kettle in urgent need of descaling – like the last thing we need in our lives.  Tortilla chips and thinner crackers work because of they are mere millimetres thick. They provide a firm base, but let the dip dominate. Many of the other, stouter bakery items you see offered as chips – breadsticks, cheese twists, crusty loaves, pretzels – are just too much bread in each bite. The flavour of the dip is lost in a mouthful of dry carbs.  Pringles are useless for the opposite reason: they are too flimsy for all but the drippiest of dips. Tangy cheese or hot tortilla chips tend to offer too much flavour, as do Scandinavian crispbreads. All that bullying, gravelly rye flavour is wrong in this context. As, for similar reasons of overt, individual flavour, are any number of the vegetables that you see dragooned into use as crudites, most prominently the dreaded sliced bell pepper, sprouting broccoli or even sugar snap peas. Raw cauliflower florets are baffling. If you cannot easily cut a vegetable into practical batons, that is, surely, God’s way of telling you that it has no place here.  1) Hummus. Any augmentation must be regionally authentic (eg dukkah, paprika), none of this barbaric lemon and coriander, caramelised onion, piri piri nonsense.  2) Intoxicatingly smoky, faintly sharp baba ganoush.  3) Luxuriously creamy, residually hot and spritzy guacamole.  4) Smoked cod’s roe. The northern European taramasalata and, in an island nation, a food that should be everywhere.  5) Genuinely refreshing, just-blitzed salsa, along the lines of pico de gallo.  6) Something involving peas, mint and possibly crumbled feta.  7) Sour cream and chive, the only dairy dip worth the calories.  1) Anything described as reduced or low fat. Pointless. And not in a Weight Watchers way.  2) Any dip-riffs on the abysmal thousand island dressing.  3) Anything involving blue cheese, which is only edible in its “raw” state. Indeed, any cheese dips (particularly hot ones) are essentially trading down from, simply, a piece of cheese.  4) Cream cheese. Way too dense – it has been the graveyard of many brave, brittle tortilla chips.  5) Black olive tapenade. Exotic in 1995. But, come on, honestly, who likes black olives that much?  6) Any broad/butter bean dip. They always feel too fibrous, filling and worthy.  7) Challengingly hot salsas. This should not be an endurance test.  The atomisation of western society and the uptight selfism of its citizens is nowhere more vividly expressed than in the drama around “double dipping” – that is, dipping, taking a bite of the chip and then going back in for a second dip with the – OMFG! Call the hygiene police!!! – same half-eaten chip. Double dipping was the subject of a famously fraught scene in Seinfeld (“That’s like putting your whole mouth in the dip”) and it has inspired pressure to “dip ’n’ flip” in the US (that is, flip the chip around from the eaten end, on the second dip). Even the boffins have got involved, producing scientific data about how double dipping spreads bacteria, but with little context about how dangerous that might be.  How to Eat’s view? Live a little. Take a chance. For the greater good of love, life, laughter, friendship. This is “party food”, remember? And nothing kills a party like calling out your guests for double dipping, or insisting, in mildly hysterical tone, that they portion out individual spoonfuls of dip. How to Eat is firmly in favour of sharing sips of beer, bites of snacks, etc, with anyone that comes into its social orbit. It is the open, welcoming thing to do. The vast majority of people do not have any major communicable diseases that you might catch. Although How to Eat does draw the line at using your fingers to retrieve bits of broken tortilla chip from a communal dip. Use a teaspoon. You animal.  So, chips ’n’ dips, how do you eat yours?
How to eat is back and is loitering at the buffet table by the dips. From the best vegetable baton to the vexed topic of ‘double dipping’, there is much to consider