A Guilty Pleasure: Homemade Ranch Dressing

Guilty food pleasures.

Mine are Ranch Dressing, Cheetos and refried beans.

Yours?

And about that Ranch Dressing…

The recipe here is a homemade version of the iconic dressing introduced in 1950 by Steve Henson under the name Hidden Valley Ranch. Henson was a former construction worker and cook in Alaska. Faced with a dearth of perishable ingredients to work with, Henson fiddled around with dried ingredients until he came up with an early version of what would come to be known as Ranch Dressing. By the mid 1950s, Henson and his wife had relocated to Santa Barbara, California, where they opened up The Hidden Valley Inn. The rest is history. Their dressing exploded in popularity with people reportedly visiting the inn with empty glass jars to fill with the dressing and take home. To meet the demand (and to build their business), the Hensons quickly decided to package the dry ingredients for sale. Henson sold Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing to Chlorox in 1972. Ranch Dressing’s really big breakthrough came in 1986 when Doritos began selling Cool Ranch Doritos. What started as a local dish became an international rock star and an multi-million dollar business.

Over the years, Ranch Dressing has become the most popular salad dressing in America according to The Association of Dressings and Sauces. (Yes. There is such an organization. In fact, they’ve been around since 1926.) According to a survey they conducted in 2017, forty percent of Americans identify Ranch as their favorite dressing. Clever people that we are, Ranch has become much more than a salad dressing. You can find it on pizzas, as a sauce for chips and fries, and on and on. A restaurant in St. Louis, Twisted Ranch, features a Ranch-infused vodka. (Whoa on that one!)

Here is a spicy tribute to Henson: Jalapeno-Ranch Dressing. 

This recipe is adapted from an Alexa Weibel recipe from the New York Times. You can find the original recipe here.