National Ranch Dressing Day & The History Of Ranch Dressing
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Updated June 2026 March 10th is National Ranch Dressing Day. Based on sales of bottled dressing, Ranch is America’s favorite. It surpassed the previous favorite, Italian dressing, way back in 1992. Ranch dressing is made of buttermilk, mayonnaise, seasonings (black pepper, garlic, ground mustard seed, lemon juice, paprika), and herbs (chives, parsley, and dill). Sour cream or yogurt are sometimes used for all or part of the buttermilk or mayonnaise. Here’s some little-known food history: You heard it here first: ranch and buttermilk are the same dressing. Buttermilk dressing, which has been made in the southern U.S. for centuries, has the same recipe. Look closely at recipes and packaged dressings. Many have both “buttermilk” and “ranch” in the title or on the label. Below: > Homemade ranch dressing recipe. > The history of ranch dressing. > Is buttermilk dressing the same as ranch? > About Hidden Valley, the #1 ranch dressing brand. Elsewhere on The Nibble: > 10 ranch dressing variations to add texture and excitement. > The year’s 18 dip, dressing, and sauce holidays. Tip #1: Did you know how easy it is to make your own buttermilk. You don’t have to buy a quart of buttermilk if you only need a cup. Tip #2: Turn buttermilk/ranch into blue cheese dressing. Just stir in 1/2 cup crumbled quality blue cheese at the end of blending the ranch dressing. Ingredients For 1.5 Cups Dressing There are many variations on the original ranch recipe. Anyone can adjust the seasonings in the recipe above to bring out the flavors you like. You can also switch them out; for example: 1. WHISK together the buttermilk and mayonnaise in a medium bowl. When fully combined, blend in the other ingredients. That’s it! 2. COVER tightly and refrigerate. It will keep for a few weeks. Ranch dressing is common in the U.S. as a salad dressing and a dip for crudités. It is also popular: |
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 [7] If the dressing is too thick, thin it with buttermilk or a buttermilk-water blend (photo: Pixabay). BOTTLED RANCH DRESSING & WHY YOU SHOULD MAKE YOUR OWN Be Food Smart researched America’s favorite dressing, Hidden Valley Ranch, to point out the brand promise vis-à-vis the actual ingredients. Here’s their full article, but the highlights: What the brand’s website says: Our Original Ranch® recipes are made with wholesome ingredients and the perfect blend of herbs and spices. Enjoy the farm fresh taste of Hidden Valley® in our ranch dressing mixes, dips and salad toppings. The actual ingredient list: INGREDIENTS: Soybean oil, water, egg yolk, sugar, salt, cultured nonfat buttermilk, natural flavors (soy), spices, less than 1% of dried garlic, dried onion, vinegar, phosphoric acid, xanthan gum, modified food starch, monosodium glutamate, artificial flavors, disodium phosphate, sorbic acid, and calcium disodium EDTA as preservatives, disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate. Not exactly wholesome or farm fresh! So, time to really know how good ranch is, by making your own. Agreed? By the late 1800s, the naturally-occurring sour milk, called buttermilk, was popular in baked goods, for marinating chicken, as a health food at spas and sanitariums, and other applications. Printed recipes for buttermilk dressing go back more than 100 years in southern cookbooks. The original was a boiled dressing made with eggs, vinegar, buttermilk, herbs, and spices. (Famed restaurant critic Craig Claiborne, a Southern boy, hated it.) With the advent of commercial mayonnaise in the 1930s, it became easier to make, and no boiling was required. As modern refrigeration (in the form of the icebox) became commonplace in homes, the milk no longer soured. Commercial dairies began to culture it, and sold the buttermilk we know today beginning in the 1920s. But before then, the dressing became popular among cowboys. With a wealth of cattle, buttermilk was more available on the High Plains* than vegetable oils. The chuck wagons dished out creamy buttermilk-based dressings for a long time [source]. Here’s a longer discussion of the evolution of buttermilk. In the early 1950s, Steve Henson, a Nebraskan working in the Alaska bush, created a dressing for his crew from buttermilk, sour cream, mayonnaise, and seasonings: garlic, herbs and spices, onions and salt. In 1954, Steve and his wife Gayle opened Hidden Valley Ranch, a dude ranch in the Santa Ynez mountains, near Santa Barbara, California. They served the dressing to guests and called it ranch dressing. Aha! It was very popular, and guests asked to buy it to take home. The Hensons sold it both as a finished product and as packets of dry mix to be combined with mayonnaise and buttermilk. Demand for the dressing grew much more than demand for bookings at the ranch. The Hidden Valley Ranch Food Products was incorporated and a factory was established. The dressing was first distributed to supermarkets in California and the Southwest, and eventually, nationwide. The brand was purchased by The Clorox Company in 1972 and the ranch was sold. And now you know how old-fashioned buttermilk dressing turned into the more intriguing-sounding ranch dressing. Hidden Valley was still a relatively small mail-order/dry-mix business when Clorox acquired it. Multiple sources say the deal was for $8 million. In the early days of the dry mix, consumers needed to add mayonnaise and buttermilk to create the “Original Ranch” flavor. As the brand grew in the 1970s, Clorox introduced variations to make it more convenient: Bottled Hidden Valley Ranch came later. Clorox spent years reformulating the product for convenience and shelf stability, and introduced its first bottled salad dressings in 1983. Hidden Valley’s most recent packet dressing recipe requires the consumer to add buttermilk, mayonnaise, sour cream; minced chives, dill, and garlic; and lemon juice. In 2026, when this article was updated, there were 20 Hidden Valley Ranch flavors: Avocado Ranch, Bacon Ranch, Blue Cheese Ranch, Buffalo Ranch, Buttermilk Ranch, Chipotle Ranch, Cilantro Lime Ranch, Coleslaw Ranch, Cracked Pepper Ranch, Creamy Jalapeño Ranch, Garlic Ranch, Green Goddess Ranch, Hot Honey Ranch, Kickin’ Cajun Blackened Ranch, Parmesan Ranch, Pickle Flavored Ranch, Sizzlin’ Nashville Hot Ranch, Spicy Ranch, Sweet BBQ Ranch, and Yum Yum Ranch, the latter a new introduction currently available only at Walmart, which priomises the sweet, smoky and tangy flavors of garlic, onion, paprika. Buttermilk and ranch dressing are very similar; think of them as fraternal twins. They’re interchangeable in recipes. The difference is that ranch dressing often includes sour cream in addition to mayonnaise and buttermilk, which makes it a bit more tangy. It’s also a little more herb-forward. Buttermilk dressing was established long before ranch existed. One source mentions reading buttermilk dressing recipes from the 1920s, which were boiled dressings made with eggs, vinegar, buttermilk, herbs and spices. The predecessors of today’s recipes first appear in print as early as 1937 in Texas. They appear to have emerged among Texas cowboys, as buttermilk was more readily accessible on the High Plains than vegetable-based fats. So thanks to the chuck wagon cook who put it all together. (Note that often recipes exist for years before they find their way into newspapers, magazines, package labels, and advertisements.) As noted above, ranch dressing was developed as its own dressing in the 1950s by Steve Henson at Hidden Valley Ranch in California. And the rest is…an empire of ranch dressing, with bottled ranch reaching $1.3 billion in 2024 U.S. retail sales. It surpassed bottled ketchup, which was a bit lower, around $1.26 billion. According to a 2022 IGA article quoting a Clorox executive, roughly three out of four U.S. households have ranch in the pantry or refrigerator. ________________ *The High Plains comprise southeastern Wyoming, southwestern South Dakota, western Nebraska, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, eastern New Mexico, western Oklahoma, and south of the Texas Panhandle. CHECK OUT WHAT’S HAPPENING ON OUR HOME PAGE, THENIBBLE.COM. |
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