As dipping sauces go, ranch dressing might be the most versatile condiment the world over.
It balances the tang of buttermilk with the tongue-coating heft of mayo, a few aromatic herbs, and a generous balance of salt, and it’s uniquely American. No other country in the world can guarantee it on shelves (though it’s somewhat popular in Germany) like we do in the states.
More than being uniquely American, ranch dressing has become the iconic condiment of the Midwest. We put that sh*t on everything, from pizza to burgers and coleslaw. But how did a sauce born in California come to dominate the culinary landscape of the heartland? Thanks to a culture made of working parents, corporate influence, and the Midwest’s history as America’s fast food test kitchen.
Written by Sarah Murrell
STEVE & GAYLE HENSON
Steve Henson was a hardworking Nebraskan. He spent part of the early 50s in the Alaskan bush working as a plumbing contractor, fiddling in the kitchen during his time off. It was there in Alaska that Henson came up with a new kind of sauce, a blend of mayonnaise, buttermilk and dried herbs that dressed up a lot of the bland camp food he was stuck with. He could put together the dry ingredients and mix them with buttermilk and mayo as needed and decided this idea was a potentially profitable one. After saving up his pay from that work, he decided to open a business where he could sell his new sauce.
Henson and his wife Gayle purchased a property formerly known as Sweetwater Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. The couple renamed it Hidden Valley Ranch and opened it to the public as a dude ranch and restaurant, serving the sauce on just about anything customers wanted. They also made the ranch dressing available as a dry seasoning, which customers could take home and mix with buttermilk and mayo.
At first, the mix was sold to local grocery stores as both the mix and the refrigerated sauce, starting with the Southwest, then nationwide within a couple of years. Their rapid growth caught the eye of the Clorox company (in the days before they were acquired by P&G), who purchased the company in 1972 for $8M (or about $47M in 2018).
Clorox reformulated the powdered product so that home consumers only needed mayo and milk to make Hidden Valley Ranch at home. This was a revolution for multiple reasons: not only could consumers make ranch at home, but restaurants could buy the mix in bulk.
We’re spoiled now by lightning pace of modern logistics, but there was a time when the Midwest was flavorlocked by the inability to get anything to Indiana that wasn’t grown locally, and that meant things had to be canned, frozen, or shelf-stable. The west coast had sushi in the 70s and 80s, while the average Hoosier diner wouldn’t taste a non-questionable slab of raw fish until the 90s. To this day, the (incorrect) joke about the quality of Hoosier seafood persists, though we get our fresh ingredients on the same timeline as Chicago chefs. With an Illinois-based plant, mom-and-pop shops could have it made from scratch and served with salad and wings just like their Cali counterparts.
Dry bulk ranch mix meant that Midwestern restaurant owners slinging diner food could mix it up with ingredients that were easy to come by: whole milk and mayonnaise. And just like no one takes to faux “beach culture” like Midwesterners, we were keen to guzzle it down on salads, heaping it on our food like it was sunshine in a sauce tub.
Clorox reformulated the bottled product again, turning it into a shelf-stable product in 1982. They split production of the sauce between Los Angeles and Wheeling, IL, a suburb of Chicago. Now the new sauce was available in bottles, dry envelopes, and little sealed tubs, primed for mass distribution across the Midwest and Plains. Clorox marketed the product as both a salad dressing and a seasoning that could cut down on working moms’ meal prep time, just as a couple of regional pizza chains were poised to capitalize on the limited time afforded working families.
Four years earlier, the Ypsilanti-based Domino’s pizza corporation had celebrated the opening of their 200th store, most of which were highly concentrated in and around Michigan. Between 1978 and 1983, the Domino’s empire exploded from 200 franchises to 1,000, growing south from the Great Lakes region.
In fact, it was a time of explosive pizza chain growth all around Michigan. At the same time, Little Caesar’s was rising to prominence just a few miles away in Detroit. Little Caesars would kick off the “sauce wars,” as the first retailer to offer breadsticks with a variety of dipping sauces in the 80s. The bridge from there to dipping pizza in sauce was obvious.
Columbus, Ohio now stands as the fast food test market of America, but Indianapolis was once the favored son of garbage food test runs. As such, Hoosiers likely got their hands on the first round of commercially-sold fast food ranch, dunking their fries and anemic burgers in the dressing.
The final push came from the Doritos company, which released Cool Ranch Doritos in 1986, and for the rest of the 80s, the ranch craze was on. All kinds of snack companies came out with their own version of ranch, from chips to pretzels to nuts, and chain pizza restaurants offered a variety of ranch or ranch-like sauces to go with their products.
For most of us Midwestern Millennials, ranch was the flavor of our childhoods, and it became the sauce by which our parents conned us in to eating salads, baby carrots, and cucumber coins. We can thank the adaptability of ranch to turn nearly any weeknight dinner into an exciting explosion of “fresh” California flavors, and everyone from latchkey kids to stay-at-home-moms doused their veggies in the green-flecked white stuff. During the low-fat craze of the early 90s, people mixed the ubiquitous green envelopes into their canned tuna, pasta salads, and baked potatoes.
And thanks to that Wheeling, IL plant, Midwesterners are only ever a couple of trucks away from having shelves packed with that famous Hidden Valley Ranch.
Ranch was not invented in the Midwest, but thanks to our parents blanketing any food most of us breadbasket kids used to eat, it was deeply ingrained in our psyche as an all-purpose utility sauce. We associate it with nights with a babysitter when we ate pizza and stayed up late watching movies, with drunken college munching and backyard barbecues during the glory of the Midwest summer.
Other American food cultures blanch at our liberal application of ranch on “non-regulation” bar foods (pizza, nachos, french fries, chicken), as if the addition or subtraction of 25 of 350 grams of saturated fat is the benchmark of health. No, America, depriving yourself of the tang of ranch on your artery-clogging favorites doesn’t lower the heart attack risk, only the flavor quotient.
As Vonnegut’s Hazel Crosby said, “You can’t go anywhere a Hoosier hasn’t made his mark,” and wherever they go, and whatever they order, Hoosiers will ask for a side of ranch, bringing the good news to another table of astonished diners.
