This 3-Ingredient Homemade Cocktail Sauce Is Perfect In A Pinch

It's such a tragedy when you run out of your favorite store-bought cocktail sauce during a Saturday night shindig with your friends. Cocktail sauce perks up the taste and mouthfeel of shrimp or oysters, making those seafood morsels the party-in-your-mouth they deserve to be. Fortunately, three ingredients that you probably already have in your kitchen -– ketchup, lemon, and horseradish –- puts shrimp or oyster cocktail back on the table.

All three ingredients have a strong enough flavor to tone down tasty but fishy shrimp or oyster flavors, a must if you want to refine the taste of your shrimp or oyster cocktails. Horseradish, in particular, is enough to add balance to the myriad flavors in these recipes without adding a heavy residue. 

Traditional cocktail sauce recipes, usually include a few more ingredients that embolden the taste of the dip even further. Chief among them are Worcestershire sauce and a hot sauce of some sort, like Sriracha or Tabasco (one of Queen Elizabeth's favorites), as well as salt and pepper. In a pinch, the three-ingredient cocktail sauce works. The ratio of ingredients for the simplified recipe comes down to something like one cup of ketchup to one to two tablespoons (each) of horseradish and lemon juice. Just pour those ingredients into a small bowl, mix, and presto! The food spread at the shindig is viable again.

However, without the Worcestershire sauce your homemade cocktail sauce will lack the umami flavor that really gives this popular red dip a bit of a savory flare to bring balance to the myriad flavors of the sauce and the seafood. While most meats and seafoods naturally have quite a bit of umami overtones, the addition of sauces like Worcestershire amp up the flavor volume even more. For those who love the savoriness of the umami flavor in traditional cocktail sauce recipes, the three-ingredient cocktail sauce might be a smidge disappointing.

If you're feeling a bit creative and want to put some umami back into the sauce, add Worcestershire sauce if you have it. If you don't, soy sauce, oyster sauce, or fish paste offer some viable substitutes. Granted, Worcestershire sauce contains a fairly complex roster of ingredients, including cured anchovies, vinegar, molasses, cloves, mustard seed, garlic, and more. Soy sauce, oyster sauce, and fish paste offer much simpler flavors because their ingredients lists are simpler and unlike Worcestershire sauce, they're not fermented. Still, they have enough to offer to give you a bite of that umami goodness you love.

As for the spicy nip you'd get from the hot sauce, you might want to put this in an "optional" category. The horseradish already makes the three-ingredient recipe plenty spicy. While Sriracha and Tabasco lovers might argue that more is more when it comes to spiciness, less is more works in this case, too.