American · Condiment
Ranch Dressing
A buttermilk-and-mayonnaise dressing seasoned with garlic, onion and fresh herbs. The batch dresses a large salad or a platter of vegetables for a group.
CC BY 2.0. Cropped and colour-adjusted for this site.
Method
Whisk the 200 g mayonnaise, the 150 ml cultured buttermilk and the 60 g cultured soured cream together until smooth. Stir in the 1 garlic clove (5 g), the 20 g white onion, the 5 g dill, the 5 g flat-leaf parsley, the ½ spring onions (10 g), the 10 ml freshly squeezed lemon juice, the 3 g fine sea salt and the 2 g ground black pepper, over 5m.
Cover and refrigerate for 1h before serving, to let the flavours come together.
Ranch dressing began as a way of getting a work crew fed, not as a restaurant invention. Steve Henson developed the buttermilk-and-mayonnaise dressing, seasoned with garlic, onion, pepper and dried herbs, while working as a plumbing contractor for remote crews in Alaska in the 1940s [2].
In 1954, Henson and his wife Gayle bought a dude ranch above Santa Barbara, California, and named it Hidden Valley Ranch. Guests who tried the house dressing liked it enough that the Hensons began selling seasoning packets by mail order, and demand eventually outgrew what the ranch itself could produce [1]. Production moved off-site, the ranch became a corporate office rather than a working guest ranch, and in 1972 the Hensons sold the business to the Clorox Company [2].
The dressing did not become a household default until Hidden Valley introduced the first shelf-stable, pre-mixed bottled version in 1983, removing the need for a buyer to add their own buttermilk to a packet at home [2]. It has been the best-selling salad dressing in the United States since 1992, a fixture the original recipe's Alaskan work-crew origins give little hint of [1].
Sources
- Ranch Dressing Originated in Santa Barbara's Mountains, Santa Barbara IndependentLocal account of Steve and Gayle Henson's Hidden Valley Ranch and the dressing's commercial start.
- Ranch dressing's secret history literally includes a Hidden Valley, FortuneOn the dressing's Alaskan origin and its sale to the Clorox Company.