Today's Case:

Hickory Farms' Holiday Dip

Re: Hickory Farms' Holiday Dip Seasoning
From: Ashlee
Date: 10/3/2023, 10:36 AM
To: Phaedrus 

On 10/1/2023 11:23 PM, Ashlee wrote:

Hello, 
If at all possible, I would like your help finding a discontinued holiday dip 
made by hickory farms some 30 years ago. My family has loved this dip and used 
a packet at Thanksgiving and a packet at Christmas. Right before it was 
discontinued, my late grandpa bought us a big box of them. We are now down to 
4 packets. I have been searching for this recipe everywhere. I am desperate. 
Can you help my family please? 

Hi Ashlee,

Finding a recipe or a copycat recipe for a commercially created and sold seasoning blend is quite problematic. The companies that make them don't give out their recipes so you can make them at home. If they contain more than one or two  ingredients, they are extremely difficult to duplicate. You can't duplicate them by mixing the ingredients listed on the package - they don't give amounts or ratios, and the ingredients lists on the packages often lump several ingredients together and just list them as "spices." In addition to that, they may use commercial ingredients that we ordinary folks can't find. Even the professional copycat recipe creators avoid this kind of recipe.

This reminds me of a similar experience that I had in 2018 when someone asked me to find a recipe for Hickory Farms' "Garden Vegetable Spread." Same deal - no recipes or copycats anywhere and no products from Swiss Colony or other similar merchants that tasted anything like the Hickory Farms product.

I had no success at all finding even a mention of any useful information about Hickory Farms' Holiday Dip. In fact, most of the links that I got from Google for "Hickory Farms' Holiday Dip" turned out to be links to bogus sites that tried to install malware on visitors' computers. Thankfully, my protection was able to ward them off.

In over twenty years of doing this, I have never found any successful way to find recipes or copycats for seasoning blends like this. If the seasoning blend is something that is traditional in some part of America or in a foreign country, then it's sometimes possible to find a recipe or copycat, but if it's a creation of Hickory Farms or Swiss Colony or McCormick's or the like, then a search for it is usually a dead end, as this one is.

I will post this for reader input. There is always a small chance that someone can recommend a dip or a dip mix that tastes similar (a "tastes-like").

Phaed