Ranch is a buttermilk dressing, and that is the part most people skip. The bottled version leans on thickeners and dried herbs to imitate something that takes about fifteen minutes to make properly, and once you have made it properly the bottle stops tasting like anything. What you get here is thick enough to cling to a wedge of iceberg, tangy from buttermilk and sour cream rather than from vinegar, and green-flecked with herbs you chopped yourself. No cooking, no heat, one bowl.

The only real technique is restraint with the herbs and patience afterward. It tastes thin and a little flat the moment you finish whisking, and it tastes like ranch an hour later once the garlic and onion have had time to bloom into the dairy. Do not judge it early. It feeds four generously as a salad dressing and rather more than that as a dip.

Equipment

This is a whisking job rather than a blending one, because a blender shears the herbs into green paste and turns the whole thing an unappetizing gray. I use the Large Capacity Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl with Scale and set it on a damp folded towel so it stays put while I pour buttermilk with the other hand, and the built-in scale means the mayonnaise goes in by weight rather than by packing it into a measuring cup, which is where most people accidentally add too much. A balloon whisk is the right tool because you are loosening a thick emulsion with a thin liquid, and the wires cut the buttermilk in without beating air into it, so the Stainless Steel Whisk Egg Beater does the job a fork cannot. Ranch needs to rest cold before it is any good and it lives in the refrigerator for days after that, so it wants a jar that actually seals: the Le Parfait Super Jars with Wire-Bail Clamp Lid keeps the dairy from picking up everything else in there, and the wide mouth means you can get a spoon in without wearing it.

Ingredients

• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 cup buttermilk, well shaken
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1 tablespoon fresh chives, minced
• 1 tablespoon fresh dill, minced
• 1 tablespoon fresh flat-leaf parsley, minced
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground

Ingredient Selection

Buttermilk is the ingredient that makes this ranch instead of herbed mayonnaise, and there is no substitute that gets you all the way there. The cultured tang is the backbone of the flavor. Milk with lemon juice stirred into it is a common workaround and it is not the same thing: it curdles slightly and it brings acidity without the lactic depth culturing produces. Buy the real thing, and shake the carton hard before you measure, because the solids settle and the top third of an unshaken carton is close to skim milk.

Garlic powder and onion powder rather than fresh is a deliberate choice, not a shortcut. Fresh garlic in a raw dairy dressing turns sharp and then faintly metallic over a day or two in the refrigerator, and fresh onion weeps water and thins the dressing. The dried versions dissolve completely and hold their flavor for the life of the batch. This is one of the few places I will tell you the jar beats the fresh clove.

The herbs should be fresh and there are only three that matter. Dill, chives and parsley are the classic trio, and dried versions of all three are a poor trade here because they never fully rehydrate in a cold dressing and leave a papery texture. If you can only find one, make it dill.

On the mayonnaise: good store-bought is fine and this is not a place I get precious about it. If you want to make your own, the recipe is on this site and it will make a noticeably richer dressing, because homemade mayonnaise is close to pure oil and runs higher in fat than the commercial product.

Method

Mise en Place

1. Mince the herbs and measure everything out: Strip the dill fronds from their stems and mince them fine, mince the chives, and mince the parsley leaves only, discarding the stems which stay stringy in a cold sauce. Measure the mayonnaise, buttermilk and sour cream before you start whisking, because once you begin you want both hands free.

Build the Base

1. Whisk the mayonnaise and sour cream smooth: Combine them in the bowl and whisk until there are no streaks and the mixture looks uniform. Doing this before the buttermilk goes in prevents the lumps that form when you try to thin two thick things at once.
2. Add the buttermilk in a thin stream: Pour slowly while whisking continuously, until the dressing turns glossy and pourable and ribbons off the whisk rather than dropping off in clumps. Adding it all at once leaves you chasing lumps around the bowl.

Season

1. Whisk in the garlic powder, onion powder, salt and pepper: Add them together and whisk until you cannot see any powder sitting on the surface. Dried alliums clump if they land on a wet surface and sit, so keep the whisk moving as they go in.
2. Fold in the herbs and the lemon juice: Switch to a spoon or spatula here and fold rather than whisk, so the herbs stay in visible pieces instead of bruising into the dressing. The lemon juice goes in last because it brightens the finished balance and also loosens the dressing slightly.

Rest and Finish

1. Refrigerate at least 1 hour before tasting again: This is the step that is actually doing the work. The dried garlic and onion need time to hydrate and disperse, and the dressing tastes flat and disjointed until they do. An hour is the minimum and overnight is better.
2. Adjust the seasoning and the thickness: Taste cold, since cold mutes salt and a dressing seasoned warm will taste underseasoned on a salad. Add salt if it needs it. If you want it thinner for pouring, whisk in buttermilk a tablespoon at a time; leave it as is for a dip.

Serving and Application

Ranch does two jobs and wants a different consistency for each. As written it is a dip, thick enough to hold on a carrot or a wing. Loosened with a few extra tablespoons of buttermilk it becomes a pourable dressing for a wedge salad or a chopped salad, which is where the iceberg it is usually paired with earns its place: the point of iceberg here is that it is cold, wet and crunchy and carries a heavy dressing without collapsing. It is also the standard partner to anything fried and anything with chile heat, because the fat and the dairy blunt capsaicin in a way an acidic dressing cannot.

Popular Variations

• Buttermilk ranch, thinner: Increase the buttermilk to 3/4 cup for a properly pourable salad dressing.
• Peppercorn ranch: Double the black pepper and use coarsely cracked rather than ground, so you get discrete heat rather than a uniform background note.
• Chipotle ranch: Whisk in a minced chipotle in adobo with a little of its sauce. This is a widely made variation and it wants the thicker dip consistency.
• Greek yogurt substitution: Replace the sour cream with an equal amount of plain whole-milk yogurt for a tangier, slightly lighter dressing. It thins the result a little, so hold back a tablespoon of the buttermilk.

Make Ahead, Storage and Reheating

This is a raw dairy preparation and it is never heated, so it is treated as perishable from the moment it is made. Get it into a clean airtight container and into the refrigerator at 40F or below straight away. It keeps for about a week, and it is genuinely better on day two than on day one once the alliums have fully bloomed. If it separates slightly on standing, that is normal and a quick stir brings it back.

It does not freeze. The emulsion breaks on thawing and the dairy goes grainy, and no amount of whisking recovers it.

When you put it out for a crowd, watch the clock rather than the bowl. Perishable food should not sit out of refrigeration for more than 2 hours, and only 1 hour if it is above 90F, which is exactly the situation a summer cookout creates. Serve it in a small bowl set in a larger bowl of ice and refill from the jar rather than putting the whole batch out to warm up.

History

Ranch has an unusually well documented origin for a dressing, and it is a genuinely American one. Steve Henson, born in Thayer, Nebraska in 1918, worked as a plumbing contractor in Alaska starting in 1949 and developed the dressing there while feeding the work crews he managed. He retired at 35, bought Sweetwater Ranch on San Marcos Pass above Santa Barbara in 1956, and renamed it Hidden Valley Ranch.

The dressing was originally something he served to guests at the ranch, and demand for it outran the guest business. By 1957 local stores were carrying his dried herb packets, and a mail order operation that started at 75 cents a package was filling orders from all 50 states and more than 30 countries by the late 1960s. The guest ranch itself was effectively replaced by the dressing business by the mid-1960s. Henson sold to the Clorox Company in 1972.

What is worth noticing is that the thing that conquered American refrigerators was the dry packet, not the dressing. Henson's product was herbs and seasoning that you stirred into your own mayonnaise and buttermilk, which is exactly what you are doing here, just with your own proportions and fresh herbs instead of dried.

Nutrition

An estimate, calculated ingredient by ingredient from USDA FoodData Central entries by hand rather than measured in a lab. The recipe makes about 1 3/4 cups, and the figures below are given per 2 tablespoons, because that is a realistic amount of dressing on a salad rather than a share of the batch.

References

• FoodSafety.gov: 4 Steps to Food Safety, on the 40F to 140F danger zone and the 2-hour rule
• FoodSafety.gov: Cold Food Storage Chart, on refrigerating at 40F or below

Related Guides

This dressing is built on Mayonnaise and Aioli, and making that yourself first changes what ranch tastes like more than any other single decision here. If you want to understand why a thick cold emulsion behaves the way it does when you thin it, The Five Mother Sauces covers the structure that everything on this site's sauce pages is built from.

Thank You

Thanks for making this one from scratch instead of reaching for the bottle. If you end up preferring it thinner, or you land on an herb ratio you like better than mine, I want to hear it, because ranch is a recipe people hold real opinions about. Drop me a note through the contact page. There are more dressings coming, so tell me which one you want next.

Chef Alan
Wine Drop Cookery
35 years, Six Four Diamond Awards