Bell Sauce Dipping Sauce Recipe

Bell Sauce is the dipping sauce Taco Bell created for its crispy chicken nuggets: creamy and tangy, made with tomatoes, red chiles and garlic. This copy stirs two tablespoons of tomato paste with water and vinegar, adds ancho chile powder, grated garlic, sugar and smoked paprika and folds in a third of a cup of mayonnaise. It makes about two thirds of a cup.

What is Bell Sauce?

When the nuggets launched on 19 December 2024, Today reported Taco Bell's own description: a familiar, rich, creamy and tangy signature blend with tomatoes, red chiles and garlic. It was one of three dips, with a Hidden Valley Fire Ranch and a jalapeño honey mustard.

The description says no more than that. The recipe below is built from the four things it names, creaminess, tang, tomato and red chile with garlic. It is a reconstruction, and MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Taco Bell.

Recipe

Bell Sauce

A reconstruction of Taco Bell's Bell Sauce — a creamy, tangy dipping sauce of mayonnaise, tomato paste, ancho chile, garlic and vinegar. About 2/3 cup, five servings of two tablespoons.

4.5 (2)Print

Prep

5 min

Total

35 min

Serves

5

Cuisine

Tex-Mex

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 2 teaspoons ancho chile powder
• 1 small garlic clove, finely grated
• 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

1. Stir the tomato paste, the water and the vinegar together until smooth.
2. Stir in the ancho chile powder, the garlic, the sugar, the smoked paprika and the salt.
3. Add the mayonnaise and stir until the sauce is evenly brick red.
4. Cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes before serving.

Nutrition

Calories:

115

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Red chile: ancho, not cayenne

Ancho chile powder is ground dried poblano: dark, mild and a little sweet. It gives the sauce its colour and a chile flavour without much heat. Ordinary chili powder, the blend with cumin and oregano, works in the same amount and pulls the sauce towards taco seasoning.

For heat, add 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne. For none at all, replace the ancho with sweet paprika.

Creamy and tangy

The tang is the vinegar and the tomato paste; the creaminess is the mayonnaise. Mixing the paste with the water and vinegar first matters, since tomato paste stirred straight into mayonnaise stays in streaks.

For a lighter sauce, replace half of the mayonnaise with sour cream. It is tangier and thinner, and it keeps 4 days where the mayonnaise version keeps a week.

Taco Bell's three nugget sauces

Sauce	As described at the launch	On this site
Bell Sauce	Creamy and tangy, with tomatoes, red chiles and garlic	This page
Hidden Valley Fire Ranch	Fire sauce blended with ranch	Fire ranch sauce
Jalapeño Honey Mustard	Honey mustard with jalapeño	Below

For the third, stir 3 tablespoons of honey mustard with 1 tablespoon of finely chopped pickled jalapeños and 1 teaspoon of their brine.

What to dip

The sauce was made for the Taco Bell chicken nuggets. It also suits the Popeyes chicken nuggets, fries and quesadilla wedges, such as the Taco Bell cheese quesadilla.