Wajos Café de Paris Dip Spice Blend. Garlic, tarragon and turmeric, yellow and bold – the spice blend for dips, herb butter and cream sauces.
Wajos Café de Paris Dip Spice Blend is a dry spice blend made from 22.7 percent garlic, onions, parsley, tarragon, turmeric, thyme and other spices, 95 g in a jar from Dohr on the Moselle. Not a ready-made dip, not a sauce from a bottle, not just a plain herb salt, but the base that you mix yourself with mayonnaise, yogurt or butter. Contains lactose and celery.
Café de Paris Dip Spice Blend by Wajos brings steakhouse-style butter into your own kitchen. In restaurants, Café de Paris butter is a secret with twenty ingredients that no one gives away. At home, it’s a jar with a yellow blend that already contains exactly these ingredients: garlic, tarragon, turmeric, herbs. We get many orders for this jar – we assume most are for the butter. Many people then get hooked on the dip for baked potatoes. The difference to the restaurant: You know what’s inside.
Garlic at the forefront, tarragon behind it, turmeric for color
The blend is yellow like curry powder, but it smells of garlic and herbs instead of India. Garlic makes up almost a quarter and is clearly at the forefront, followed by the slightly sweet anise note of tarragon – the herb that gives Café de Paris its character. Parsley, thyme, oregano and rosemary provide the herb garden, while turmeric primarily provides the color. A little chili and paprika are included, but the blend remains mild – more warm and spicy.
To be honest: in addition to the herbs, the blend contains lactose, celery, natural flavorings and condiment seasoning, and it is well-salted with just under six grams of salt per 100 grams. Therefore, no extra salt is needed when mixing the dip. And it is not suitable for anyone with a milk or celery allergy – both are listed in the ingredients.
Anyone looking for a simple, pure garlic blend is better served with Wajos' Aioli Dip. The Café de Paris Dip is the more complex, more French version – more tarragon, more herbs, less straightforward.
As a dip, as butter, on flammkuchen and in a cream sauce
Here is how to make the dip: let two teaspoons of the blend soak briefly in one tablespoon of lukewarm water. Then mix with three tablespoons of mayonnaise and two tablespoons of yogurt and let it sit for a quarter of an hour. The soaking is important – otherwise the herbs will remain dry and crunchy. The dip goes well with baked potatoes, fries, raw vegetables, grilled meat and bread for a barbecue evening.
The butter is the classic choice: knead 125 grams of soft butter with two teaspoons of the blend, form into a roll, and chill. A slice of it melts perfectly over steak, chicken breast, fried salmon or on a corn cob. For a family dinner, one roll is enough for six servings, and the rest keeps in the fridge for a week.
When heated, it becomes a cream sauce: sauté shallots in butter, add a teaspoon of the blend, pour in cream, and reduce briefly. For mushrooms, schnitzel, pasta or over gnocchi, this is the sauce that tastes like more than ten minutes of work. On flammkuchen, a teaspoon in the crème fraîche almost replaces the onions – with bacon and onions on top, it becomes the perfect flammkuchen for guests.
The blend is not suitable for sprinkling over finished food like a table spice: it is bland and salty when dry. It needs fat or liquid to develop its flavor. And it does not tolerate long cooking times well – tarragon loses its flavor when heated, so always add it at the very end or to a cold base.
Our tip: Keep a roll of Café de Paris butter in the freezer – then a slice is ready for every barbecue evening, and you don't have to mix it on the day.
Blended in Dohr on the Moselle, in a house with vintner roots
Wajos is a culinary manufacturer in Dohr near Cochem on the Moselle, named after Walter Josef Oster. He came from a family of vintners in Ediger-Eller, who have been making wine for 15 generations, and founded a liqueur factory alongside the winery in the 1980s. Peter Oster, his son, and Ulf Schwichtenberg turned it into the Wajos brand starting in the 2000s; the first store opened in Trier in 2008, and today they are located in many German cities.
The spice blends are among the items that Wajos puts together in Dohr itself – the company carries around 900 items, most of their own production, tested in their own laboratory. At Wajos, the Café de Paris Dip is one of the top sellers in the kitchen line. The family business with over 80 employees calls its way of working "controlled smaller work" – and the spice shelf with dips, rubs and blends shows just how many different jars come out of it.
The blend for barbecue evenings and for people who make their own butter
The Café de Paris Dip is the jar for everyone who serves more than just ketchup at a barbecue. No one needs twenty herb jars for that: one jar, one dip, one butter, one sauce. Those who prefer the sauce ready-made from a bottle will find it in the Café de Paris Sauce; those who only have butter in mind will find it in the Herb Butter Blend. The entire dip range is on our Wajos page.
The jar lasts a long time if stored dry and away from light; 95 grams is enough for a good twenty portions at two teaspoons per dip. As a gift, it is the perfect souvenir for a barbecue party, together with a rub or a barbecue sauce. It is not suitable for anyone who avoids garlic – it is the main ingredient here, and it remains so in the dip.
Garlic, tarragon and herbs, blended on the Moselle – the spice blend for steakhouse butter and dips for baked potatoes.
