The best salad dressing? Fancy ranch

I love a good vinaigrette. I mean love it — in the way one loves a very specific pen, or a particular font of sparkling water: a devoted, slightly niche affection, underlined with ritual. Every few months, usually on payday, when the world feels flush and possible, I make a pilgrimage to the fancy Italian sausage shop in the next neighborhood over and buy a new-to-me vinegar. White balsamic, pomegranate, one that tastes like garlic in a velvet cape. I like the drama. I like the tang. I like a dressing that makes your mouth do a little gasp.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ll happily eat a bowl of arugula with nothing but olive oil and lemon, feeling clean and little smug and mildly French, like a woman who writes her grocery lists on notecards and lives near a goat. But, and I think you may agree with me, there are few things more viscerally satisfying — more undeniably correct — than dragging a crisp radish slice or a ridged potato chip through something cold, creamy and tangy enough to make your salivary glands seize.

Ranch dressing is a sensory shortcut to pleasure: multiple alliums, acid, umami, herbs, suspended in a plush, mayo-forward cloud. It’s comfort. It’s nostalgia. It’s maybe a little trashy, in the best possible way.

Which is why I’m a little embarrassed, but mostly evangelical, about what I’ve come to believe: ranch dressing is the best dressing. And the best ranch, I’m starting to think, might be fancy ranch.

I’m talking miso-spiked tahini blends from the Bon Appétit test kitchen. I’m talking lemony labneh swirled with cilantro-chili oil. I’m talking $9 tubs of “green goddess” dips from upscale grocers that still hit the ranch part of your brain like a gong. Velvety, herby, tangy creations that feel like little edible love notes to the original.

Before it was America’s sweetheart-slash-punching bag of condiments, ranch dressing was a solution to a logistics problem. In the early 1950s, plumber and construction foreman Steve Henson was working in the Alaskan bush, where perishables like fresh herbs and garlic were hard to come by. So he did what any practical man with a taste for creamy salad dressing might do: he made do. Using what he had — dried herbs, powdered garlic and onion, black pepper — he whipped up a blend that could be stirred into mayonnaise and buttermilk to make something tangy, herbaceous and addictive.

A few years later, Henson and his wife, Gayle, opened a dude ranch in Santa Barbara County called, in a stroke of eventual marketing serendipity, Hidden Valley Ranch. There, Henson served his house dressing to guests in mayonnaise jars. It became a hit. Demand spread, and within a few years the Hensons were selling envelopes of the seasoning mix by mail, so people could recreate the magic at home. Just add buttermilk and mayo, and you had a little taste of California dude-ranch hospitality — no horse required.

By 1983, ranch had gone shelf-stable and truly national, available in squeeze bottles, pump dispensers and foil-topped tubs across the country. It became the people’s dressing: a dunk for baby carrots, a drizzle for pizza, equally at home next to a pile of atomic-red buffalo wings or a crisp wedge. According to a 2017 industry study, ranch remains the most popular salad dressing in the U.S., beloved by 40% of Americans. (Italian dressing trails behind at a distant 10% like a politely clapping runner-up.)

However, ranch’s overwhelming popularity has also been its greatest liability.

It is, without question, one of the most widely consumed condiments in the United States — a fact that would, on its face, suggest greatness. But in the strange math of food culture, popularity often equates to suspicion. Like iceberg lettuce or American cheese, ranch has become shorthand for everything supposedly wrong with the national palate. In one Washington Post op-ed, a columnist declared ranch “what’s wrong with America,” adding, “fancy restaurants need to stop experimenting with this revolting milk-rot.” And in Delish, one contributor simply wrote: “Keep your processed AF, globby dressing away from me.”

The criticism isn’t without merit. The squeeze-bottle version of ranch — stabilized, shelf-stable and engineered for maximal cling — is not exactly what anyone would call elegant. But there is another ranch. And it is good.

Now, I actually first started noticing this during the height of the New Southern movement. You may unfortunately remember the era through the parts that quickly calcified into cliché: $14 cocktails in Mason jars, the monoculture of pork belly, a nationwide proliferation of flaccid fried green tomatoes. However, as a displaced child of the Midwest, I quietly delighted when the dressing began appearing in places it hadn’t quite belonged before. There it was, adorning $18 iceberg wedges at bistros with Edison bulbs and reclaimed-wood banquettes; served alongside housemade chips in ramekins barely larger than communion cups; slicked like a balm onto spicy Nashville-style hot chicken sandwiches that made your fingers shimmer with grease.

They weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel. More often than not, these were just simple ranches made with care — good buttermilk, what was probably Duke’s and a handful of punchy herbs snipped into a stainless steel mixing bowl. Nothing fussy. Just cold, creamy proof that someone had paid attention.

But the version that got me thinking differently — that nudged me toward the edges of what ranch could be — was Chris Morocco’s tahini ranch, published in Bon Appétit in 2017. It’s built on tahini, lemon juice, miso, maple syrup and water, punched up with spices. The result is velvety and plush, with a kind of savory-luxurious sweetness that clings to everything it touches. I make it at least twice a month, mostly as a dip for sugar snap peas or thinly sliced cucumbers, though it’s also played supporting actor in one of the best chicken salad sandwiches of my life , built on toasted sourdough with butter lettuce and a few rings of red onion.

That dressing opened the door. From then on, I was game to try anything with a vaguely ranch-adjacent profile—a curiosity that inevitably leads to questions about where, exactly, ranch begins and ends. Calvin Eng’s take (another favorite) anchored by Kewpie mayonnaise, garlic chives and a pinch of MSG, falls squarely within the bounds.

Allison Roman’s “The Dip” stretches the category a bit further. She calls it “a very high-brow version of ranch dressing,” though its components — scalliony chile oil, briefly sizzled with cilantro stems (or chives), folded into thick, lemony labne — may read as a departure. Still, it hits the same emotional notes: creamy, tangy, herbal.

In the end, that’s what ranch comes down to: not the ingredient list, but the feeling.

Ranch doesn’t need a rebrand. It just needs a little respect — and maybe a few upgrades. The good stuff isn’t cloying or gloopy or overly complicated. It’s sharp and creamy, cool and salty, built with care and a little imagination. Maybe it’s tahini. Maybe it’s labneh. Maybe it’s mayonnaise and a packet of seasoning, stirred together in a quiet kitchen on a Tuesday night. Whatever the form, the point remains: ranch is a dressing worth dressing up for.