The Consolidated "Salad Dressing" Thread
 

So, I find myself driving through north Georgia at lunchtime. The best choice is McDonalds - wouldn't consider the lesser choices. I order a cheeseburger, diet coke and side salad. My dressing choices: ranch or ranch.

If the Hidden Valley ads are to be believed, Ranch dressing is a recent phenomenon. And, if the ads are shot anywhere near the real ranch, it's a long way from the south. I'd say it looks more like Montana or Idaho. But, southerners have taken to Ranch dressing like no other geography. In addition to topping salads, it is used on sandwiches, to fill baked potatos, for a dip, and for all I know, as a sunscreen. At 75% fat, it's no surprise. Most people here wouldn't see the produce section of Winn Dixie if they didn't have to pass it on the way to the bacon department.

But, the stuff has no more flavor than mayonaise. Paul Newman should be ashamed of himself. I wouldn't put my name, let alone my likeness on a package of anything so bland. Yet, I'm in the minority here.

How 'bout y'all?

I'm not a big fan of ranch dressing either.
I don't eat a lot of salads but when I do, my dressing of choice is usually bleu cheese or Roquefort cheese if it's available.
One of my favorite dressings at home is Green Goddess but that stuff is very hard to find nowadays and I usually order it online.

Try what I do... when I make up a batch I like to add several dashes of Tabasco. ^

Whoa.....Now that speaks volumes about restaurant choices in north Georgia. Thanks for the warning.

That also speaks volumes....

I LOVE ranch, and I have no idea what's in it. Ranch + fries, please. I'll sometimes even request a Caesar salad, but with ranch instead. :D

Also, it seems like ranch from a restaurant/salad bar, without fail, tastes better than ranch from the market. Why is that?

Cholula, I'm with you. Until they rolled it out nationally, I had difficulty getting Ken's Steak House Lite Caesar where I lived. I once had to open my carryon at TYS security to show a dozen bottles of salad dressing and a dozen packages of Martha White raspberry muffin mix (since discontinued). When they wanted to open one of the muffin mixes to prove it wasn't heroin, I went the mail order route.

Some restaurants make their own Ranch dressing. When I was a salad bar attendant (yes, that was my title) for a summer as a teenager, I was schooled in making Ranch dressing "from scratch." The process is sort of gruesome (combining one part mayonnaise, one part buttermilk, and spices; we used to make it a gallon at a time so 1/2 gallon of each = bleh) but it does come out tasting pretty good and is less expensive than ordering a gallon of Ranch dressing from a supplier.

Bama, I'm with you. I don't get it either. I've tried it several times, only on salads, but I have not acquired a taste for it. Maybe Ii should try it on sandwiches or taters. Now that sounds interesting! :D

Depends on the ranch you get. I've found a lot that are pretty flavorless, but good ranch shouldn't be. I don't mind it from time to time. I will say, however, this whole trend away from bleu cheese in favor of ranch on Buffalo wings is an absolute disgrace. :)

And where is the HQ of this bizarre trend? :confused:

I don't know specifically, but it's got to be in the south.

I love Ranch dressing.

It's essential for my pizzas, breaded chicken... yum.

I usually do sprinkle some Tapatio (take that Cholula :D ) into it to give it a nice kick.

Hey, get your tapatio and tabasco out of my thread. This is Cholula country! :D

Yeah, no kidding. Was just travelling in SoCal with an associate who hails form Georgia. So, one night we just go to a pizza joint for dinner and beer. We get some breaded mozzarella sticks to split as an appetizer.

Waitress: Marinara sauce for the mozzarella sticks?

Him: Do you have ranch dressing?

Waitress: Sure. Want that?

Him to me: Ranch okay?

Me: You effing kidding me? No.

Me to the waitress: We'll take marinara.

Him to me: ~all crooked eye and stuff looking at me~

Me to him: You're disgusting.

Hey, everybody to his/her own preferences.
Tapatio is "Mexican" hot sauce made in South Central Los Angeles.
Cholula is made in the State of Jalisco, Mexico with authentically grown peppers and by workers who tenderly massage each pepper before it is converted to hot sauce. :p
But, as I think of it and considering the demographic makeup of Southern CA, Tapatio may well be the more Mexican than Cholula. ;)

Ranch dressing is basically straight fat. The appeal is in the hypothalamus or limbic system.

I'm shocked at how so many people use Ranch Dressing on EVERYTHING, more so for the 15-28 year old crowd. Since I'm in the food biz I see it, and we go through 3-4 cases of packets/gallons a week.

For me, the only thing I like to use it with is Chicken Fingers/Chicken Tenders & Fried Zucchini. I see people that will not eat pizza unless they dip it in Ranch (yuck) others that won't eat chicken wings without dipping in ranch or bleu cheese, Some ordering Caesar Salad wtih Ranch instead (another yuck) and, well just about everything else (Fries, Onion Rings, Fried Cheese, Burgers, Sandwiches on and on) Then there are folks that mix salsa and Ranch and call is South Western Ranch....To me creamy and tomato-ey don't mix.

Ranch Dressing is Mayonnaise (Oil, Eggs, Lemon Juice, Seasoning) Butter Milk, and the Seasonings are mostly Garlic Powder, Onion Powder and and a few other Spices. It's Very Dairy for sure.

Damn, BV...having a tough Southern week, are you? Between dogging out the local populace for being too fat and for using too much ranch dressing...next thing you know you'll be hacking away on the family trees. :D

Mmmhh... good choice! :cool:

(seriously)

apples and oranges
 

Tamazula and Tapatio and such have more herbal presence -
epazote, comino, whatever; you can drink them like soup,
they're mild enough. Cholula is more a pepper sauce. I prefer
Cholula to most sauces in its class (I've been using it
for a couple decades and have no particular interest, as you
know, in flogging the products of my FT brethren, so am fairly
unbiased) - but Tapatio has its place, too, such as on wings or ribs
(I've been using it since it was made in some guy's garage
and had his home phone number on the label).

Well, since you're obviously in a different league when it comes to south-of-the-border flavor enhancers, it's ok. :D

I read your title and thought you were going to tell me you dipped apples and oranges in ranch dressing! Now that I have not seen.

Let no one get the impression that I am unhappy here. My first move south to SC from MA opened my eyes. My values are more in line with southern culture than that of my home state. I especially like many southern foods, but I wish for their own sake, that folks here would cut back a little on fat and large portions. I will miss some of then when they predecease me.

I always feel a little out of place among people whose family bible traces back ten or more generations. 2 short anecdotes:

When I worked close to the Sevier (TN) county line, I glanced through the phone book one day to discover more pages occupied by Ogles than any other name. Someone told me 4 surnames made up 25% of the population. Tell me how you accomplish that without a lot of inbreeding?

Soon after we moved here, my 2 youngest sons came home after a Friday night at the mall with friends. I asked who they had hung out with. the youngest one told me, and added that they had incremented their crowd with several cousins of friends. "Isn't that weird", he said, "I thought cousins were supposed to live in another state."

It's not just you - that stuff is preferable to bleu cheese, but that's about it. I'd rather have margarine on my baked potato first.

Doesn't MacDonald's offer standardized choices of dressings - even in GA?

I think plain mayo has more flavor than ranch dressing. An idea: could you mix in a packet of Mickey's catsup as "homemade" French dressing to jazz up the ranch a bit? ;)

I suppose there are standards, but possibly with local options. I notice Subways vary in their 3rd cheese selection. I've seen provolone and pepper jack and maybe more? I might be worried about the expiration date on anything but ranch where I was. That's probably why the manager opted for one dressing - he couldn't afford to throw out half a case of something every year. I'm guessing he doesn't sell a lot of salads to begin with.

The ketchup's an idea. My late MIL used to mix mayo, ketchup and relish for "homemade" Thousand Island. She may have added something else, but I was never watching that closely.

I suspect that ranch dressing is "surprisingly low in fat"

According to the packet of Newman's I was given by Mickey D's, 130 out of 170 calories came from fat. Surprised?

Sometime last year, I went to a weekday FT luncheon at Don Pepe's in Newark. I believe I was the only woman at this luncheon. Anyway, I think it was ozstamps who gave me a bottle of Cholula sauce to take home. I'm not a hot sauce fan but my husband is. Let me tell you, he LOVED it. We need to get some more. Ok....back on topic. :D

Now wait a minute - if a salad dressing does NOT have most of its calories come from fat - doesn't that just mean it has a lot of sugar?

Anyway...I do remember when ranch was a new item. (But can't exactly remember what year it began its ascent.)

Growin' up here in Texas, it seems like Thousand Island and French dressings really took the hit from Ranch's popularity. (As child - in the 60s - it seems like Italian, French and Thousand Island were the top choices.)

Same thing I remember growing up in Mass. I worked at mid-scale restaurants as a high school and college student. We would have a 3 bowl serving dish for dressings with those 3. There was also vinegar and oil in cruets on the table. I don't see those much anymore either.

Interesting that when McDonalds launched their new salads they claimed they were very healthy - "balanced" was the term used. Then of course people realised with the dressing the chicken salad was the most fattening product on the menu. Ranch dressing - might be nice - but it isn't healthy!

Apparently the real stuff does taste good, just not what they sell. From a recent New Yorker article full text here:

This was a reflection of what might be called the Hidden Valley Ranch principle, in honor of a story that Samson Hsia often told about his years working on salad dressing when he was at Clorox. The couple who owned Hidden Valley Ranch, near Santa Barbara, had come up with a seasoning blend of salt, pepper, onion, garlic, and parsley flakes that was mixed with equal parts mayonnaise and buttermilk to make what was, by all accounts, an extraordinary dressing. Clorox tried to bottle it, but found that the buttermilk could not coexist, over any period of time, with the mayonnaise. The way to fix the problem, and preserve the texture, was to make the combination more acidic. But when you increased the acidity you ruined the flavor. Clorox's food engineers worked on Hidden Valley Ranch dressing for close to a decade. They tried different kinds of processing and stability control and endless cycles of consumer testing before they gave up and simply came out with a high-acid Hidden Valley Ranch dressing -- which promptly became a runaway best-seller. Why? Because consumers had never tasted real Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, and as a result had no way of knowing that what they were eating was inferior to the original. For those in the food business, the lesson was unforgettable: if something was new, it didn't have to be perfect.

Eww. As a native Southwesterner I would like to register my strong objections to this combination. :td:

Ranch dressing is disgusting. So is bleu cheese. Come to think of it, there is no "creamy" dressing I like.

Pizza bones go in ranch
Red Robin french fries go in ranch
Buffalo wings go in bleu cheese

Meat goes on a pizza
Vegetables go in a salad

All is right with the world :cool:

Pizza bones :confused: the crust after all the gooey stuff has been nibbled off? Interesting expression. Stuffed crust pizza has "marrow"?

Are sure that they did not just put Clorox in it? :)

It's not just the south: Ranch is slowly taking over the rest of the world, too. If you ask for ranch around here (Wisconsin) they'll bring you a huge clear ketchup style bottle of it, but any other dressings will come in a tiny paper cup. In fact, the local mexican restaurant serves it with their nachos in addition to salsa...weird.

I admit I love to dip onion rings into ranch, but prefer french for my salads...well, I actually prefer honey mustard, but good luck finding that at most restaurants :(

Ding! Ding! Ding! At least in Houston, you get ranch all the time with wings. I hate it. I have finally found a bar down here that not only does pretty good wings, but also gives you a boat of bleu cheese dressing with it. BW-3 down here offers ranch by default. You have to ask specifically for bleu cheese. That seems to be the norm.

So I'd say Houston is in the running for ranch weirdness HQ on the wings front.

And, yeah, ranch is so full of fat. When I succumb to the temptation of dipping say, a fry, in ranch dressing, I say, "Could I please have some fat to dip my deep fat fried fat in?" Yeah.

How is it a Ceasar salad if you use ranch dressing?

I tried dipping my buffalo wings in Clorox, but it just was not the same! :D

Steve