Is Ranch dressing the absolute best salad dressing of all time?
- Thread starter BlIIlken2
- Start date
Ketchup is OK in my book. I prefer it over ranch. I'm a sucker for a good honey mustard too.
My Dad used to make a homemade dressing with Heinz 57 as the base. We’ve all tried to copy it and come close but have never gotten it 100%. It was delicious.
Miss my Dad!
Miss my Dad!
I sent a salad back this week at an NYT top 50 restaurant in the US because it was tossed in some kind of creamy dressing, csb
You can't make all this with Ranch dressing
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Similar to the bbq sauce thread, I make a lot of my own salad dressings. At least once and frequently twice a week I’ll make a “dinner salad” for my wife and I in place of a typical dinner and I rotate through making from scratch including the dressings: 1) Ceasar Salad with either anchovies or chicken breast as the protein, 2) Tarpon Springs style Greek salad with a scoop of Greek potato salad added, 3) Salad Nicoise with jarred yellowfin tuna belly and all the French olives, pickled green beans, roasted potatoes etc, 4) Southern Livings fried oyster and bacon salad with red wine vinaigrette, 5) a clone of Columbia Restaurant in Tampa’s ”1905 salad” (kind of like a Cuban/Spanish antipasta), 6) the Brown Derby’s chopped Cobb salad, 7) Panfried goat cheese salad with pinenuts and lardons, and 8) just a big Italian antipasta salad.
When I’m not making full scale dinner salads and just making side salads, I’ll either make a fruit jam/jelly/preserve/marmalade or a balsamic vinaigrette, buttermilk and sour cream ranch or a honey miso dressing or else I WILL resort to a couple of commercial jarred stuff I think is pretty excellent. The commercial dressings I think are close to or on par with my homemade variety are:
1) Olive Garden Italian Dressing - it’s a classic that’s hard to improve upon
2) Marie’s Chunky Blue Cheese Dressing - blue cheese dressing is easy to make but to be exceptional you need to make it days ahead of time and I’m not usually THAT prepared, easier to just keep a jar around
3) Makoto Ginger Dressing either classic, orange or especially wasabi flavored - I‘ve yet to make an Asian inspired ginger dressing that matched Makoto’s already bottled varieties.
4) Marzetti Thousand Island - real 100k Island dressing recipes calls for a ton of ingredients compared to most salad dressings and like blue cheese needs a couple of days to setup if you’re not using a corporate variety.
When I’m not making full scale dinner salads and just making side salads, I’ll either make a fruit jam/jelly/preserve/marmalade or a balsamic vinaigrette, buttermilk and sour cream ranch or a honey miso dressing or else I WILL resort to a couple of commercial jarred stuff I think is pretty excellent. The commercial dressings I think are close to or on par with my homemade variety are:
1) Olive Garden Italian Dressing - it’s a classic that’s hard to improve upon
2) Marie’s Chunky Blue Cheese Dressing - blue cheese dressing is easy to make but to be exceptional you need to make it days ahead of time and I’m not usually THAT prepared, easier to just keep a jar around
3) Makoto Ginger Dressing either classic, orange or especially wasabi flavored - I‘ve yet to make an Asian inspired ginger dressing that matched Makoto’s already bottled varieties.
4) Marzetti Thousand Island - real 100k Island dressing recipes calls for a ton of ingredients compared to most salad dressings and like blue cheese needs a couple of days to setup if you’re not using a corporate variety.
The fried oyster salad sounds amazing. Is the makoto dressing like you get at a hibachi place? I love that dressing but have not found anything commercially available that is any good.
On a good salad, my preference is a good vinaigrette with some blue cheese crumbles sprinked in
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- Sep 13, 2002
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Blue cheese with a little vinaigrette for sweetness as a combo is my go-to.
Ranch is ok for dipping pizza crust or chicken wings in but kinda sucks as salad dressing. Blue cheese also the superior wing dip.
Not only is makoto ginger dressing similar to what you get at most sushi places, at a lot of smaller places they simply use it rather than make their own. Classic is what most will use but I slightly prefer the orange and wasabi versions. It’s not found on the normal shelves, it’s in the area where they keep refrigerated salad dressings like Maries.
I’ll see if I can find the recipe and give you proportions for the fried oyster salad because I just make it from instinct by now. But it’s a very simply but absolutely delicious salad. First you render all of the fat out of bacon or lardons and keep the crispy bits for adding to the salad later. Then using the rendered pork fat you add some extra oil if necessary and make a red wine vinaigrette. Seperately, I fry some oysters dredged in seasoned flour with a little cornstarch in it at a high frying temp. You want to get the outside crispy while keeping the inside of the oyster as wet as possible (that’s what she said) to add their juice and brine to the salad dressing once you cut into them so two quick plunges into a high temperature oil will get that done. Then you assemble the salad by doing a mix of spinach and other salad greens as the base then topped with some raw onions, grape or ripe sliced tomatoes, some grated fresh Parmesan or preferrably pecorino Romano, the fried oysters, the rendered bacon or lardons crushed small and the red wine vinaigrette. It’s not part of the original southern living recipe but adding some dollops of fresh goat cheese and/or some fresh grapes works well in the base salad.
So I found the physical recipe it’s from 1994’s annual recipes edition of Southern Living. According to the blurb in front of it “Wolf Hanau of Miami Florida won the 1991 Buck Briscoe Memorial Award at the National Oyster Cook-Off in Maryland with a similar version to this recipe.” It calls for two 12 ounce containers of oysters to be fried against 1 thinly sliced fresh onion and six slices of bacon. Their recipe for the red wine vinaigrette is 3/4 cup of EVOO, 3 tablespoons of Burgundy or other dry red wine, 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon of Grey Poupon Dijon mustard, 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce and 1/8 teaspoon of freshly cracked pepper.
The key to this great salad is making sure the oysters are fried properly ie still have a fresh wet interior to go with the crispy outside. Overcooked oysters where they are cooked through and get that mealy texture will not be nearly as good.
Fun fact.....in Just Say OV's house as a kid growing up, we called Western dressing "Cow Dressing" because of the longhorn on the bottle....never called it Western Dressing until I was an adult (and still call it cow dressing in my own house)
And now you guys know. You're welcome.
- Sep 13, 2002
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That is a Steer, not a cow.Fun fact.....in Just Say OV's house as a kid growing up, we called Western dressing "Cow Dressing" because of the longhorn on the bottle....never called it Western Dressing until I was an adult (and still call it cow dressing in my own house)
And now you guys know. You're welcome.
To be fair....
.....one could argue the image of said bovine on the bottle does not allow for enough detail to determine if the testicles have been left intact or been castrated, thus one can not determine if it is a bull or a steer from the bottle only.
AND both female and male longhorn cattle have horns. So it could indeed be a cow.
https://starcreekranch.com/everything-you-need-know-about-texas-longhorn-horn-length/
To be fair....
.....one could argue the image of said bovine on the bottle does not allow for enough detail to determine if the testicles have been left intact or been castrated, thus one can not determine if it is a bull or a steer from the bottle only.
AND both female and male longhorn cattle have horns. So it could indeed be a cow.
https://starcreekranch.com/everything-you-need-know-about-texas-longhorn-horn-length/
To me it just depends on mood. If Italian sounds good then Caesar or Italian dressing sound good. If a steak sounds good then blue cheese sounds good. I like a ranch salad with chicken. And so on.
Its amazing the vast differences in the tastes of members on this board. Some would probably consider hamburger helper a delicacy.
I like to think of myself as having culinary range. No, I am not going to forage for mushrooms or buy beef and pork from boutique farms like @FSUTribe76. But, I enjoy everything from ballpark food to sushi, and if something makes something else taste better, I am for it. As for ketchup, it makes hotdogs, hamburgers, fries, onion rings, and hash browns taste better. It is good as a base for bbq sauce, shrimp cocktail sauce, and thousand island dressing. Although I have been mocked here before for this, I maintain it makes bratwurst taste better, along with mustard and onions. I agree with you that ketchup does not make eggs taste better.
I have a dog that is bred to find truffles. Problem is truffles are only found in south central Iowa and after doing some litigation down there and seeing the amount of neckbeards, I'm not going down there.
Side note: I've never had a truffle. I just know that they are expensive.
I have two dogs that are bred to look longingly into the eyes of anyone eating food. That's all I got.
We have the same problem. Our dog just begs for "people food". Really doesn't each much dog food.
Lemon poppyseed is really good. Can’t go wrong with a balsamic vinaigrette. Ranch is for children. Grow the f up OP!😁
