The Fugue

My wife is out of town and I'm fending for myself in the kitchen. This is of course the best part of playing bachelor, since I get to try all the weird things and seafood that my wife balks at. Still, I decided to be rather boring tonight and have salad. I like a salad with nice dark leafy greens (no iceberg thanks), cheese (feta and cheddar in this case), boiled egg, and ranch dressing. There is no substitute for ranch dressing. I don't smother my salad in ranch, but I do need ranch or maybe bleu cheese in a pinch. Caesar can be ok, and I've been known to eat other dressings to be polite (or none at all—a spinach, mozarella, and mandarin orange salad can stand on its own, for example), but for the purposes of this blog post, there is nothing but ranch. And I was out.

Now actually, though ranch is by far my favorite dressing, I am not well pleased by the ranch dressings on the shelf. My mom used to make it by hand (and I used to help). I don't remember much about it (I was pretty small), but I do remember buttermilk, some kind of mix, and lots of shaking. It was good stuff. Until a short time ago, I never found a ranch dressing that I liked in the store. Hidden Valley was as close as I could get, but it wasn't quite right. Some of the others were simply hideous. And most have MSG which I halfheartedly try to avoid.

A short while back, I came across a Kraft ranch I had never seen. Actually a whole line of them. Maybe I had just missed them before they changed the bottle, maybe they weren't stocked, maybe they sprung into existence overnight. I didn't know, but I checked and it didn't have MSG so I bought it. It was better than Hidden Valley, and it doesn't have MSG. So, my new commercial favorite. It was this bottle that had just run out.

So I jumped on ye olde internet in a quest to find out what makes ranch ranch. Near the top was a chowhound.com link, and I find that the chowhounds generally get things right, or are at least a good jumping-off place, so I beelined.

Some people on the thread believe that MSG is the flavor of ranch. Well, sorry, but my bottle of Kraft preemptively debunked that theory. My wife recently tried making ranch (I'm not sure what her motivations were exactly, but probably something to do with health and preservatives and MSG), and I don't know what recipe she used but it flopped. It lacked something we couldn't put our fingers on but we called "body", and for a moment as I read I feared that something was MSG. But I kept reading and let my senses return, and several people on the chowhound thread said it was nonsense and they had been making perfectly good ranch without MSG for years. I decided to try this one. I didn't have quite a full cup of mayo, and I was lazy about measuring the herbiage and it ended up a bit too biting (too much parsley probably), and I forgot the vinegar. But it turned out great. In fact, I tasted it when it was just mayo and buttermilk and it was instantly recognizable as containing the essence of ranch.

So, my recipe based off of MollyGee's is:

Ranch Dressing

1 cup mayonaise
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 t salt
freshly and coarsley ground pepper
1 t vinegar

garlic
dill
chives
green onions

Naturally, this is tailorable to your tastes. One thing I might try next time is replacing 1/2 cup mayo with 1/2 cup sour cream. Thickness isn't a big issue with me, but keeping it at least thin enough to shake well seems like a good idea, based on her observation that it gets "weepy". I seriously doubt it goes bad after 3 days. Mayo and buttermilk aren't prone to spoiling quickly. But I can see it needing remixing (hence the good shake).

Now go forth and eat salad.