álarita salsa, the base for our salsa con queso

Salsa Con Queso: Our Easy 2-Ingredient Dip (and How to Make It at Home)

If you’ve ever sampled our salsa con queso at an event and walked away with a container of it, you already know this one. It’s the dip everybody asks for — and for years it was one of the only “fresh” things we made. Here’s the story behind it, and how easy it is to make at home.

Born from not wanting to waste a good thing

Back when we were making fresh salsa — the kind we sold in plastic containers, before we ever jarred a thing — we ran into a problem every small-batch maker knows. Fresh salsa isn’t shelf stable. If it didn’t sell, it went in the cooler… and then, well, to the chickens. We love those chickens, but feeding them our salsa got expensive.

So we got creative. We figured out that a little of our salsa stirred into nacho cheese — the kind you buy at the store — made the kind of salsa con queso people couldn’t stop scooping. We’d blend half mild and half medium for a gentle, easy heat — warm enough to be interesting, mild enough that everybody could enjoy it. We’d set out samples, and folks would taste it and buy a container on the spot.

When we moved from fresh salsa to our shelf-stable jarred salsas, we kept right on making the queso — and honestly? The jarred salsa made it taste even better. These days we only make it for one show a year, Smoke on the Water down in Washington, North Carolina. But there’s no secret to it, so here’s exactly how we do it.

Easy Salsa Con Queso

2 ingredients5 minutesNo cookingServes a crowd

Ingredients

  • 1 container of store-bought nacho cheese
  • ¼ jar álarita Mild Salsa
  • ¼ jar álarita Medium Salsa
  • Tortilla chips, for serving

Make it

  1. Spoon the nacho cheese into a bowl.
  2. Stir in the mild and medium salsa until it’s well combined.
  3. That’s it — no cooking. Grab the chips and dig in.

Make it your way: The half-mild, half-medium blend is exactly how we served it. Want a bigger burst of flavor? Just stir in more salsa. Keep it simple with a full ½ jar of only mild or only medium — or reach for our Fire Salsa if you want real kick (our favorite way to make it). Feeding a party? It scales right up: 2 containers of nacho cheese with ½ jar mild and ½ jar medium.

One more thing we learned the hard way: it keeps in the fridge for about three weeks, so don’t be shy about making a batch ahead of game day.

Shop our salsas

From our kitchen to yours — enjoy.

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