Hot Vegan Spinach Dip (Cheezy + Healthy)

A cheesy, bubbly vegan spinach dip for dunking your favorite crackers and crudites!

This creamy vegan spinach dip is secretly healthy and you can chow down without any guilt at all. The creamy base is made with vegan yogurt, white beans and nutritional yeast. Stir in sweet caramelized onions and spinach, then blanket all that goodness with panko bread crumbs and vegan cheese shreds, and bake until hot and bubbly. Yum. This is a soy-free recipe and you can easily make it nut-free and gluten-free.

This hot vegan spinach dip is the perfect indulgence. Especially if you are like me and love to snack while watching TV and at the end of the game or movie the only thing you can think about is how much you ate and how awful you feel.

Well, worry no more! This baked vegan spinach dip is loaded with so many things that are great for you, you will feel perfectly saintly by the time you've polished it off.

There is so much amazing goodness in this dip. When you dip a cracker or a crudite you will break through a crispy, golden layer of seasoned panko bread crumbs and vegan cheese to scoop up a creamy, fluffy dip with sweet caramelized onions, spinach, vegan yogurt and white beans. And it tastes just good as it sounds: slightly tangy, cheesy, perfectly seasoned and quite delicious.

Why you'll love this vegan spinach dip recipe

• It tastes amazing. The dip is slightly tangy, cheesy and has so many great flavors from the sweet caramelized onions, garlic, paprika and nutritional yeast. You won't be able to stop dipping, guaranteed.
• It is so good for you. Veggies, white beans, yogurt, nutritional yeast. Does it get any healthier than that? There is no vegan cream cheese or vegan mayonnaise required for this dip recipe although we will use a handful of vegan mozzarella shreds.
• It is crowd-pleasing and crowd-friendly. This dip would be enough for a gathering of 10-12 people and you can use the slider in the recipe box to scale up--or down. The dip can easily be made nut-free by using a nut-free yogurt (I used my vegan cultured cashew yogurt) and gluten-free by using gf breadcrumbs for the topping. It is already soy-free. My friends tend to eat healthy so they appreciate food that's fun and healthy, but if you have that person at your gathering who loves putting down vegan food you don't even have to tell them what's in here--until after they've eaten it all, of course. 😉 (You can also try making this vegan Frito pie for them to shut them up for good!)
• It's easy to make. There's really not much to making this dip and it's a pretty foolproof recipe even if you're not an experienced cook. The only step you need to focus closely on is slicing the onions thin and caramelizing them without burning them.

Ingredients

• 2 ½ tablespoons extra virgin olive oil. You will need two tablespoons to caramelize the onions and half a tablespoon for the crispy panko topping. You can cut the oil needed for the onions to one tablespoon if you want to, but I find that two tablespoons are needed to caramelize the onions perfectly without burning them.
• 2 medium onions. You can use yellow onions or red.
• 3 cloves garlic
• 5 oz spinach. You can use baby spinach, as I did, or regular spinach. You can also use frozen spinach. Defrost it thoroughly and press out any excess water.
• 2 cups white beans (about two 15 oz cans, drained of all liquid). I used cannellini beans but any white bean would work here. If you cook your own beans strain the beans of all excess liquid but reserve ¾th cup to use while processing the beans.
• 4 oz vegan mozzarella shreds (divided). You will stir half of these into the dip and reserve the remaining half for the topping.
• 1 cup unsweetened vegan yogurt. Any non dairy yogurt is fine. Use a nut-free yogurt if nut-free. Try and use a yogurt that's not too tangy (unless you like your dip very tangy). You can also use vegan sour cream.
• ¼ cup nutritional yeast
• ½ teaspoon onion powder or dry onion flakes
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon paprika. This won't add much heat but you can definitely skip it. For more heat add half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper.
• 2 ½ teaspoons dried oregano and/or sage, divided. I used a mix of the two. You can also use dried thyme or rosemary. You will mix 2 teaspoons of the herbs into the dipping and reserve the other ½ teaspoon for the panko topping.
• ½ cup panko breadcrumbs. Can use regular breadcrumbs or gluten-free breadcrumbs, if gluten-free.
• Salt and ground black pepper.

How to make the spinach dip

• Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit/190 degrees Celsius.
• Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a wide skillet or saucepan. Add the thinly sliced onions, a generous pinch of black pepper and salt and cook, stirring frequently, for about 10-12 minutes over medium heat until the onions are nicely caremelized and a rich golden-brown.

• Stir in the garlic and saute for a few seconds.
• Add the roughly chopped spinach to the skillet and stir for a minute or so until the spinach has wilted. Turn off the heat.

• Place the beans and yogurt in a food processor bowl with the nutritional yeast, nutmeg, onion powder or flakes, paprika, if using, two teaspoons of the dried herbs and salt to taste. Add ¾ cup of water (or the bean cooking liquid, if you cooked the beans from scratch). Process/blend until you have a very smooth paste with no graininess--this will take a few minutes depending on how powerful your food processor is. The dip at this point should be a bit runnier than you want the final dish to be because it will thicken up as it bakes.

• Add the spinach and caramelized onion mixture to the food processor and pulse a few times. You can choose how chunky or smooth you want the dip to be at this point--pulse just three or four times if you want discernible pieces of onions and spinach in the dip. Or pulse a few more times until everything has broken down and is still discernible but not chunky.

• Add half the vegan mozzarella shreds to the food processor and pulse 2-3 times to mix.
• In a bowl, mix the remaining mozzarella shreds with the breadcrumbs, the remaining half a teaspoon of herbs, the remaining ½ tablespoon of olive oil and salt and ground black pepper to taste.

• Scrape the dip out of the food processor and into a 1 ½ to 2 quart baking dish. Smooth the top.
• Sprinkle the breadcrumb-cheese mixture evenly over the top. Place the baking dish into the preheated oven and bake 25 minutes or until the dip is bubbling at the sides. Turn on the broiler for two minutes so the panko-cheeze topping turns golden-brown. Remove the dip from the oven.
• Serve hot with vegetable crudites or crackers or wedges of toasted pita bread.

What to serve with the spinach dip

• Serve with an assortment of crackers and crudites so there is something for everyone to dip. Baby carrots, celery, wedges of cucumber, bell pepper and iceberg lettuce are all great choices. Slices of toasted baguette would also work beautifully with this dip.
• I love scooping up this dip with wedges of toasted pita bread or pita chips. Yummy.

Storage and freezing tips

• You can assemble the dip early, cover the baking dish with cling wrap and bake the next day. Or you can freeze it, unbaked, for up to three months. Uncover, thaw and bake as instructed.
• Leftovers of the baked dip can be refrigerated for up to three days. You can also freeze the baked dip for up to three months. Defrost and reheat in a 375-degree oven for 10-15 minutes or until bubbly.

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