Lighter Copycat Love Dip, GF, Grain Free

Have you heard of Love Dip? If you aren’t from Texas, chances are you haven’t. But if you are from Texas, you’ll know that Central Market’s Love Dip is like crack. It’s a creamy, tomatoey, tangy dip with a cayenne pepper kick. And we've never had anything like it.

Since we have the ability to eat the whole tub in one sitting, we decided to make a from-scratch healthier version made with Chobani Greek Yogurt.

Prior to living in Texas, we had never heard of Love Dip. We happened to try it at a party when we first moved here and our immediate thought was “WHAT IS THIS GLORIOUS DIP!”. One of the guests at the party explained that it was called Love Dip and kind of looked at us like we were crazy for not knowing what it was. Or maybe it was because of how enthusiastic we were over a dip. haha

We were instantly obsessed. And we had to know more.

After some Love Dip research, we found out that you can buy it at Central Market. Which is our favorite grocery store in Houston. And we also found that making it involves lots of cream cheese aka lots of fat. Whyyy?!

So we decided that a healthier version of this dip, with the same great flavor, needed to happen.

To make this Lighter Copycat Love Dip, we used fresh tomatoes, avocado, and garlic. And then we mixed those veggies with salt, tarragon, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, black pepper, onion powder… and greek yogurt.

The greek yogurt here is key to why this Lighter Copycat Love Dip is healthier than the original.

Normally Love Dip is made with cream cheese. 10 ounces of cream cheese has 970 calories and 100 grams of fat in it. Here, 10.6 ounces of Chobani Greek Yogurt ( 2 containers) is only 180 calories and 0 grams fat. This is a huuuge difference.

A huge difference that means you can eat way more of this Lighter Copycat Love Dip! Which tastes wonderful. It even tastes healthier than the original.

And in keeping with the lighter theme, we like dunking carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, cucumber, and plantain chips into this dip instead of chips.

We think the only thing that has to change is that this dip shouldn’t just be a Texas thing. It’s too good to be regional.

Check out Chobani for more Greek yogurt recipe inspiration. 🙂

Now we know that we normally post Paleo recipes, but we want this blog to reflect our real life. We eat Paleo 70-80% of the time, and more if our fiancé is having an auto-immune flare. The other 20-30 % of the time, we try to incorporate lighter foods like oatmeal, greek yogurt, hummus, and quinoa. We've noticed that our body can easily tolerate those foods and we enjoy eating them from time to time.The key for us is to make sure that what we are eating is non-processed.

On that note, we're currently testing a Paleo version of this Dip and if successful, we'll be posting it soon. 🙂