Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Ranch Dressing

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why ranch dressing is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Ranch dressing. Known for being creamy. Famous for being dippy. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, you mentioned the other day that you are not into mayonnaise. You are not a fan of mayonnaise. You're not into it. Not a big fan. Not a mayonnaise head, as they are called. And that made me curious how you feel about today's topic of ranch dressing. To me, there's a huge texture difference, but still.

Well, so interestingly, ranch combines some of my deepest, darkest fears, which is mayonnaise. Also, sometimes ranch is like sour cream or yogurt based. And none of those things, things I would say I'm a big fan of. I am somewhat afraid of ranch. It is, in my opinion, sort of the nectar of Satan. So this will be an interesting episode. I like how you called it the nectar of Satan, as if you were giving it like a light criticism, like a mild note about the making of the dressing. The mouthfeel is a little bit satanic. Yeah. Thanks for coming along for this topic then. Got my barf bag and I'm ready to go. We're also, I'm going to link people to the past entire SIF episode about mayonnaise,

where among other things, we talk about that being a super common disgust food for lots of people. It's the texture, but also the suspension of oil and eggs and stuff. It is maybe one of the biggest food phobias or food. This is gross to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's gross. I don't like it. It's interesting because I can have like

ranch flavored things sometimes, but then the ranch dressing itself, the totality of it is horrifying to me. I don't know. Like I, cause maybe I've associated the smell with something bad or just the whole, the whole it's's whole, don't like its entire deal. Good. Then we, we bring many perspectives because I'm pretty into it. I don't think I'm as fanatical as some Americans, especially my fellow Midwesterners, but I think it's great. It's right up there with Caesar dressing and my favorite like creamy dressings and the flavor on snacks is amazing. It's just really good to me. Very into it. I feel like this is payback for that time I made you come on my podcast or wait,

was it on this one or mine where we talked about jellyfish and I love jellyfish and you're not a fan. No, you really came through there because it was this podcast, Sif, and then listeners picked it. And I basically chose you as somebody who could carry me through my worst animal phobia. And you did a really good job. So now I just owe you twice I think now we are facing my fear which is ranch dressing yeah and I I don't think this will be disgust inducing because it's mostly about its story and origin and stuff we're not gonna like describe it squelching around if you get like a like a salad that's coated in ranch and it dribbling down your chin and making horrible smacking noises. Sure. Sure. Fullying that in later. Sure. Well, you know what? Know thine enemies so I am ready to learn.

know thine enemies, so I am ready to learn. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. And many supporters wanted to hear about this. This was primarily suggested by longtime supporter of the show, Jay Smooks. Thank you, Jonathan. Also Y2K and the most Mortiest Morty. And those are Discord names, but lots of folks voted for this in the polls. And I'm not surprised. It's very popular among many people. And then also, I. It's very popular among many people. And then also, I feel like it's discussed also makes people want to know about it, too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like when you find sort of a turd and you're curious which dog pooped it out. Just coming in so hard anti-ranch dressing. It's satanic. It's turds. Perfect.

It's satanic. It's turds. Perfect. It's satanic turds. We'll end on every episode. Our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called. I wish you would listen to this segment, friends. You could learn stats and all the facts that are contained within. And if you find yourself at a pub quiz night, you might learn some stats.

Nice. Thank you. Is that going to Eurovision? I think Third Eye Blind are American, so they are probably not allowed to come. Is that going to Eurovision? I think Third Eye Blind are American, so they are probably not allowed to come. Yeah, what's up with that? And that name was submitted by Weig. And we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillion Wacking Band as possible.

Submit through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. You know, we're the American Eurovision, basically. So you want to get some ideas in here and participate. Yeah, we've got cool outfits and saxophones that we play and we go. That's a Eurovision. It sounds like the sexy sax man from that George Michael song where they did that on the Internet for a while. Oh, wait. I'm thinking of a different sax man.

The Eurovision sax man is like that. OK, well, anyways, the show is about horrifying ranch dressing, not really great saxophone. So I guess we got to move on. And and this is a very U.S. and by extension Canada topic, because the first number is 1992. The year 1992, that is when ranch dressing became the number one U.S. salad dressing. Yeah, this is actually why I left the U.S. I don't think it's authentic to the country necessarily, but Slate.com does say that ranch supplanted Italian dressing to get to the top of the

rankings. It was like Italian vinaigrette. The way we do it in the U.S. was number one before that. I'm actually a ranch dressing refugee. That's why I came to Italy. Because, you know, I was like, well, look, you've got your Italian dressing, and I can't deal with a ranch. Just going across the Atlantic at a big salad bowl. Like, help, help, paddling with a spoon. So why did, why, how did, of our many, many sins in the U.S., why did we go so wrong in this direction with salad dressing? We'll talk about the origin of the dressing later, but apparently every big survey and market analysis since then says ranch is still number one.

And one growing dressing right now is honey Dijon dressing. It's down in the rankings, but it could go up. And apparently ranch's dominance and honey Dijon's growth,'s down in the rankings, but it could go up. And apparently ranch's dominance and honey Dijon's growth, it's partly because they are both dipping sauces as well as dressings. So you just use more of it for that. Right. So people aren't exclusively destroying their salad with it. They're also destroying their carrots, their celery sticks. And as far as what it is, because I never really thought about it, the next number is three or four, because there are generally three ingredients in ranch dressing.

The ingredients are mayonnaise, buttermilk, and herbs. And then one of the key herbs is garlic, but not everybody classifies garlic as an herb. It's sort of a vegetable. It's sort of a vegetable. It's sort of a spice. So there's three or four ingredients depending on what you call garlic. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm with you at sort of garlic. I'm with you at herbs.

I'm even sort of with you at buttermilk. But then you add in the mayonnaise and you've got like this slick, slippery, it's like lotion that you put on food and I don't love it. Yeah, it's such a polarizing element of such a popular dressing. It's very weird to me. It's like me with tomatoes. I don't really like tomatoes,

but everybody around me in the whole world is into tomatoes. And I guess I'm sort of like you with this dressing. I can do tomato sauces and ketchups and stuff, but the texture of tomatoes really bugs me. And everyone disagrees. It's the most popular thing. That scene in The Lord of the Rings must have really upset you then, where Denethor is like chomping into a cherry tomato and he gets juices everywhere.

Yeah, I don't get the appeal of times people just bite into a tomato like an apple, but they do it. I don't know. Well, you know, to each their own. Some people like the lovely red delicious tomatoes and some people like Satan's milk. Yeah, I guess I'm a refugee the other direction. We passed each other in the Atlantic. I was paddling toward Illinois.

Like we passed each other in the Atlantic. I was paddling toward Illinois. But yeah, and this dressing, it's basically these three or four things and we'll talk about each of them. But I'm going to link that whole mayonnaise episode for mayonnaise. of usually green savory stuff. The New York Times says the first ranch dressing used garlic powder and used dried dill. And then further ranch dressings have used fresh garlic. They've also used green herbs like chives, mint, parsley, and tarragon. You're really going for any oniony allium kind of flavor. I mean, yeah, normally like those herbs kind of sound pretty good together. I love garlic. I love onion. I love mint. You lose me a little bit with that. Did you say mint goes in there sometimes? Yeah, sometimes. Which surprised me. I have never had ranch dressing and been like, ooh, mint. That's not an experience I've had. Fresh and minty. Maybe you could like make a little ranch dressing after dinner mints, pop them in your mouth, let them melt on your tongue.

I'm saying this very ironically and with disgust. No, you're not. You are starting a brand of mints right now. It is Andy's brand ranch dressing mints. It's happening right now. I have seen on the Internet ranch dressing gummy bears and, you know, there are a lot of things on the internet that were never really meant to be distributed so widely amongst humanity. And I feel like ranch dressing gummy bears should have stayed in that

sick person's house. I agree. And also I feel like that's almost more edible if the slippery throat lotion of mayonnaise. But the sensation of eating, basically, this is ranch dressing that is now a gummy bear is, I don't know, traumatizing. Yeah, that's true. I think I would also assume there's drugs in it. This is definitely marijuana. I would hope there's drugs in it. This is definitely marijuana. I would hope there's drugs in it. It's got to be worth it for some reason. Yeah.

With these three or four ingredients, there's kind of just two flavor experiences going on. There's the creamy base of mayo and buttermilk and then zesty garlics and herbs. Those are the two things working in combination. And also Thrillist.com says green herbs also provide a visual signal that this is ranch dressing. And they also pull one example of people feeling this way from British Reddit, because ranch dressing is not common in the UK. And Thrillist found a Reddit thread where a British Redditor says ranch dressing looks like, quote, salad cream with stuff in it. Yeah. Because it's the green flecks where you're like, oh, green flecks, that must be ranch.

It's not Caesar or salad cream. We've talked about almost all the ingredients. The last one is buttermilk. And the last number here is two because it turns out there are two different general processes for making buttermilk. Because you're like mildly curdling it, right? Yeah, and this fits into kind of a few past episodes because we've done a few fermentation-related episodes

with yeast and with pickles, and there is a butter episode of SIF, but until now we've never really talked about our friend buttermilk. And it turns out people made it a lot in the past because it was just an easy by-product of churning butter. If you were churning butter at home, you ended up with the materials for buttermilk and you could just let that happen. Okay. So how do you get, what is the buttermilk of the butter? Is it just like butter sweat or something? The buttermilk of the butter? Is it just like butter sweat or something?

The sweat that comes off the butter? It's like those 1990s Gatorade commercials where they had colored sweat on athletes. Oh, wow. Yeah, when I was a little kid, I saw those commercials and hoped that maybe drinking Gatorade would actually turn my sweat those colors, and it didn't work. I was lied to. First of many lies. And that adds for ranch dressing and you were like, I'm out. Paddle, paddle, paddle. Paddling to Italy. Yeah, there's several steps to processing and dealing with cow's milk that I never really think about. In order to get butter, what they would do is skim the fatty cream from cow's milk.

And then they'd beat or churn the cream. And they'd get two things from that. When they churn cream, you get a solid fat, which becomes butter. And then you get solid biceps. And then you get a leftover milky liquid. And that is what eventually becomes buttermilk. You just take that leftover liquid and leave it out to ferment. And if folks heard the fermentation episode, we talked about fermentation being the transformative action of microorganisms.

It's basically the farts and the poops of bacteria. Yeah, farts and poops of bacteria. Delicious little tiny farts. They eat the milk sugar and they poop out lactic acid and you get a sour acidic kind of milk. And it's pretty easy to get if you're already making butter. You just leave this liquid out. And if it's unpasteurized, there's bacteria there.

They do the job. Delicious. Yeah. And when people made a lot of their foods at home, that meant lots of people in places like the United States or Europe were just generating buttermilk whenever they wanted to. That would be an incredible power to have. Yeah. Anytime I want, I can have buttermilk, just drink it all chunky and raw. I'm imagining somebody in Star Trek using the replicator really distractingly. Like you're trying to have that little boardroom meeting about the alien of the week and they just

keep getting more buttermilk from the replicator. It would change the vibes if instead of Earl Grey hot, if Picard just did a big jug of buttermilk and was like drinking it, gulping it down in meetings, and he had like a big buttermilk mustache. It would be a different show. Buttermilk, large. And then it just comes. Buttermilk, large, chunky chunky and then data wants to be more human

so data is also drinking it and doesn't understand and the other crew are like we don't get it either man i don't know it's just him right this fan fiction definitely exists on the internet and i don't want to think about it anymore. Yeah. So buttermilk back in the day had two big advantages. It was relatively easy to make and it lasted longer than regular milk because of fermentation. It lasts a little bit longer. That was really advantageous until modern times because the thing where lots of people had leftover liquid from butter making, that sort of went away as we turned to large farms and processing facilities for stuff like butter. And then about 100 years ago, U.S. homes started buying and popularizing home refrigerators.

Atlas Obscura says by 1950, more than 90% of U.S. homes had an electric refrigerator. So then also that shelf life advantage was less of a thing because we could just keep everything chilled. So now we can have a big jug of cold buttermilk instead of a big jug of room temperature buttermilk. Great. Yeah, it's the future Jean-Luc Picard dreamed of. Yeah. And so kind of within the last hundred years, a lot of U.S. homes suddenly were not generating buttermilk. Now we tend to get buttermilk from the same fermentation process, but done in an industrial way on purpose. It's usually companies taking regular milk and then adding a bacteria culture to it for fermenting into buttermilk and for specific orders and scales in the food supply chain. And the taste and the flavor and the texture is a little bit different, but

that is the second and usual modern way to get buttermilk, especially in a country like the US. And the last buttermilk thing to say is that it turns out it's very global food. And in the U.S., our mental picture of buttermilk is an ingredient in Midwestern baking and so on, which is great. Yeah, like biscuits, pancakes, flapjacks. That might just be another word for pancakes. I'm not sure. Never been clear on that. Pancakes would be a great episode topic. And I should make the first number

nicknames for pancakes. It's some humongous hundreds of thousands number. I am going to do the research for the pancakes episode for sure. And by research, I mean, eat pancakes. Yeah. And with buttermilk, it turns out that is pretty common as a straight up beverage in parts of the Middle East and South Asia and West Africa and Eastern Europe. You know, I hadn't really thought about how buttermilk is all over the world in all sorts of different cuisines and for a lot of people just a straight up drink because you can drink it. It's milk. It's good. I actually, an on on brand fact about me is I don't like drinking milk in general. Um, just like, I think the only time I will actually drink

milk out of a glass is if I have a cookie that I am eating and I'm dunking the cookie and now I'm drinking the cookie flavored milk. Right. You've transmogrified it sort of like cereal milk. With some foods, you can transform them into a form. Even if you don't like the original form, you can kind of enjoy the transformation like tomatoes into tomato sauce. But with ranch dressing, I don't know if there's any way you can transform that into something that is anything other than the devil's cream. I mean, it's like, I guess if you, the seasoning,

I guess, is salvageable, but the mayonnaise part and the buttermilk part, I don't know what you can do with that. Yeah. And that concept of separating it out like that, that's why I front loaded the episode with the ingredients because it leads into the origin of ranch dressing here in takeaway number one. Ranch dressing was invented by a construction worker in Alaska who opened a actually hard to find California dude ranch. So, okay. What's his name? I need it for time traveling purposes. I'm not going to do anything evil.

Right. He won't be harmed. You'll just talk him out of it. You'll be like, think about mayonnaise for a second. Right. I'm going to meet him as a baby and then I'm going to like make him afraid of buttermilk somehow. And then when you're in their house, you should also just steal something just to make it seem normal. Like, oh, that's why they were in the house. Okay. They're a burglar. Right. Knock some things over. And then I just say future. And then I returned to the

ranch dressing list future. This story surprised me. It's it almost seems too cute to be real, but it's solidly sourced. There's no alternative story. And this is the origin of not just ranch dressing, but also the brand Hidden Valley. There's a Hidden Valley ranch. It happened. Did he like trip in a valley and spill his buttermilk all over some wild dill or something?

Oh, that would be so sweet. Yeah. Yeah, this is a dressing that was invented in Alaska, but then that exact same inventor moved to Southern California in the Santa Barbara area and started an actual ranch and popularized it at the ranch. Wow. Okay. So he had, was the ranch in a hidden valley? And yes. Yeah. The inventor of ranch dressing is a guy named Steve Henson. He and his wife Gail moved to a ranch that they bought in 1954, purchased a fixer upper ranch in the San Marcos Pass in the general vicinity of Santa Barbara, California. It's a ranch in this kind of mountain pass, mountain valley, and they renamed it, they coined the name Hidden Valley,

because they felt like it was a remote valley where ranch was. Okay. So they weren't like covering the valley up with a big sheet. It was just sort of tucked away. So they've got this ranch. How does he get the twisted idea to combine all of these ingredients into one unlikely dressing? dressing. Right. So Satan appeared to him in a vision. No, I'm just kidding. He seems fine. But the invention was a circumstance in Alaska because this guy, Steve Henson, he's originally from rural Nebraska. His whole teen years and early adulthood were the Great Depression. So he just spent his time roaming the US finding odd jobs. Apparently he ended up in Hollywood via rail, that kind of... It's not quite hobo stuff, but it's almost hobo stuff from the Great Depression. Right, right. It's a little rascals type situation. And by the way, key sources here are an amazing piece for tedium.co,

awesome website, tedium.co, this piece by Ernie Smith and also a piece for the New York Times by Julia Moskin. They say that Steve Henson worked various places as a plumber and a construction worker. And then he basically got rich by doing dangerous, difficult Alaska construction. In 1949, he and his wife moved to Anchorage, and Alaska was a US territory at the time. And at the time, Anchorage was a town of about 11,000 people. So they did difficult out in the wilderness, not a lot of roads, construction work, and made a ton of money. So that worked out. Okay. So I feel like this is leading up to like,

he was so tired and hungry from moving huge logs that even he would eat something like ranch dressing. Kind of, sort of, because the upshot is that this crew did not have a lot of what they considered regular restaurants or regular, I don't know, takeout catering, whatever. And so he and the fellow crew members rotated a lot of jobs, including cooking meals for themselves. So Henson starts becoming a cook for roughneck Alaska construction workers. And in a 1999 interview with the LA Times, Henson said, quote, if they don't like something, they're as likely to throw it at the cook as they are to walk out cursing. I had to come up with something to keep them happy. End quote.

It sounds more to me like he was creating something soft and gushy that when they throw it at him, it doesn't hurt. Because if he's like, this is a hard biscuit I've made, and they throw it at him, it could take out an eye. But if he's like, here's some buttermilk mixed with some stuff, you throw that at him, it makes a mess, but no concussion that time. Oh, man. Cooking elvish whey bread for the crew was a huge mistake. That stuff's so hard. Ow, ow. You can just use those as shurikens.

Yeah. And so Henson also wanted to specifically get people to eat vegetables on this crew. So they just stayed healthier and didn't get sick. And between that desire, a lack of fresh ingredients and wanting to make something particularly tasty, that challenge led him to invent ranch dressing. He combined mayonnaise and buttermilk, which apparently he did have access to, with powdered garlic and whatever dried herbs he could get. And that was the dressing. It was probably first served to a remote Alaska construction crew working out of Anchorage. I mean, I get it. That does add some like fat and flavoring to vegetables. So like if you're just eating a carrot, that might not be so satisfying.

But if you're adding like, you know, the proteins and the fats found in buttermilk and mayonnaise with the herbs. Yeah. I mean, I get it in theory on paper. I get it. Exactly. Yeah. You're you're doing a good job getting into the shoes of those of us who think this stuff tastes good. I'm trying so hard to empathize with you weird, weird people. No, I mean, you know, different strokes for different folks. If you want to have, you know, carrot slime, that's that's cool. I you do you. Yeah, because I think this dressing gets looked down on by some people as, quote unquote, making vegetables unhealthy. And then the alternative argument is if you're going to have vegetables with dressing versus no vegetables at all, that's more healthy. Right.

But either way, I think this is pretty famous for making vegetables delicious, like overwhelmingly delicious. And that's kind of what he found making it. Yeah. delicious, like overwhelmingly delicious. And that's kind of what he found making it. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I think that like the ranch dressing, right. The, the, the main ingredients, they are, they're very fatty, right. They're very high in fat, like the buttermilk. Um, but and mayo. Yeah. But it's, you know, fat is not inherently a bad thing to eat. It is something that, you know, we need some fat in our diet. So if you're having a little bit of it with like some carrots and stuff, I don't necessarily think that's unhealthy in moderate amounts. I just my my my disdain is born from a much more primal fear than that.

Am I like am I a coastal elite if I'm now living on a different continent? I, first of all, Italy has coasts, but second, this, uh, it was exciting to learn this dressing is from the West coast, Alaska and California. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I'm from the West coast, but that's where my and ranch dressing similarities end. And yeah, and this dressing is not being promoted widely from one construction site in Alaska. But so Henson is super successful at his years of doing this work. Apparently, they built about 2,500 homes and they made humongous money doing it. And this was the US economy of the 1950s. And so the upshot is he and his wife made enough money to retire in their mid-30s. They were like, great, we're so rich, we can stop.

But instead of fully retiring, they semi-retired, purchased this ranch that they named Hidden Valley Ranch and ran it as a dude ranch. And the plan was, we'll be semi-retired. This will just make enough for us to live on. And that's that. Side question. Another thing that I embarrassingly kind of don't know, what's a dude ranch? Is it just a ranch to hang out with your dudes? I do. I had to kind of look this up. I had the gist of the idea from the Nickelodeon television show Hey Dude. But a dude ranch is like a tourist ranch. It's a ranch where people pay to stay there and do cowboy stuff for fun, but in an amateur way. So it is a ranch to hang out with your dudes.

Pretty much, yeah. The word dude means someone from a city is the specific meaning they're going for. But in practice, you and your dudes are doing one round of lariating something badly and then drinking yeah hey dude come ranch it up we got some mayonnaise and some buttermilk that one's free that one's just a little taste folks submit your dude ranch songs for when Dude Ranch has come up on the show through Discord. Yeah, they run this Dude Ranch and the plan is, okay, cool, we'll just kind of break even. However, it didn't get that many guests. And apparently it was partly Henson's unwillingness to purchase advertising.

Also, it's relatively remote and hidden location. And so they were sort of risking their retirement money, like they might have to work again was the upshot. Because also as part of this, you have guests staying and also you can just do that. They opened a steakhouse. So that was the restaurant for guests. Also, anybody from the area could come.

And the one super popular thing at Hidden Valley Ranch was the salad dressing that Henson kept making from Alaska. And people also enjoyed the flavor combo of just the seasoning, either mixed up in the dressing or used as a seasoning on steaks and vegetables. And it was so popular, one ranch guest from Hawaii requested 300 bottles to ship home. And Henson said, no, you can't really do that. But why don't I give you the dry seasonings? You can take them home, mix them up into dressing. Ethically, I can't let you do that.

Right. Even I, a man in league with Satan, cannot allow. There's limits. There's limits even to me, the progenitor of ranch, what I will allow to be used with my spawn. But yeah, and so they had a hit restaurant with this dressing and with this seasoning. They sold it at a couple local businesses and it did great there too. And then that started to just build up into a business. Henson's son, Nolan, says that they started selling batches of the dry seasoning packed

and used mayonnaise jars. By the late 1950s, they were taking mail orders. They would put the dry seasoning in envelopes and mail it out to people. I mean, yeah, I'll mess with the seasoning itself, right? That's cool. But I know where that seasoning is going to end up. It's in a big jar of sloshing around emulsion. The people who like it were thrilled. Nolan Henson says the dressing seasoning operation, quote, pretty much took over the ranch. He remembers spending long hours as a kid helping pack envelopes. And then from there, Steve Henson said, okay, we're not a ranch anymore. We're a dressing business. He closed the ranch to guests so he could use the building as the first facility

for it. And then he expanded to actual production facilities. By the early 1970s, he fully retired. In 1972, he sold his new Hidden Valley brand of ranch dressing to the Clorox company for $8 million back then. Clorox? Of Clorox wipes and other bathroom cleaning necessities? Clorox wipes and other bathroom cleaning necessities? Yeah, it turns out that's the one and only sale of this brand. Clorox owns the brand to this day. And in 1983, they came up with a shelf-stable version of the bottled dressing.

So until then, it was mostly seasoning packets and stuff. And then they figured out how to sell it as bottles. And that's the main way it sells now. From there, Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing has taken off. It remains the top version. It has about half of the U.S. ranch dressing market share. Also, Henson copyrighted Hidden Valley, but he didn't copyright or trademark the concept of ranch dressing. And so all kinds of competitors copied it and called it ranch dressing.

And that also built up this style of food. I see. So it was sort of propagated on a ranch. So that's why it's ranch dressing. Yeah, I was generally excited to learn that there's a real Hidden Valley Ranch and the dressing is from a ranch. And the whole origin story is real, more or less. It's not some kind of invented thing where they applied it to the pastoral idea of a ranch later.

Is that ranch still around? Perfect question, because I want to stake out a brief takeaway here. Takeaway number two. The precise location of the Hidden Valley Ranch appears to be hidden. I couldn't find it, literally. Because they don't want me traveling back in time to stop the production of the ranch dressing. Right, yeah. They kept having to fend off time travelers, and they're like, all right, we got to make this address unknown in the future.

And they're like, all right, we got to make this address unknown in the future. All the time travelers show up with a souvenir from stopping baby Hitler. And that was their first stop. Now they have the T-shirt or the tote bag. And now they're here for ranch dressing. There are definitely people who used to know and probably living people who still know where that ranch is. But I wanted to provide people Google Maps directions, right? I wanted to say, it's here, go here.

But today that location might be abandoned because in 1972, Steve Henson sold the dressing brand. And then the following year, 1973, he sold off the ranch building and the land, moved to regular digs in a few places. Back in 1999, the LA Times covered Henson. They sent reporter Sergio Ortiz to the ranch site. And Ortiz said, quote, There's not much here anymore, a few cabins and a main house crying for some tender, loving care. house crying for some tender loving care. Most afternoons, the only sounds come from the wind wrestling the trees and from a nearby creek splashing over rocks, end quote. That sounds incredibly haunted. I feel like if anyone builds on that land,

they're going to get some kind of ranch dressing like poltergeist situation. Yeah. I want to also say whose native land it is, but I don't know where it is. So I don't know that either. It's just probably definitely abandoned now because it was in 1999. And every internet source I could find had just general information like near San Marcos Pass or in the area of Stagecoach Road attached to Santa Barbara. So if you, the listener, know some older person who went there back in the day or know where it is, we'd love to know. Send that in.

But for now, the location of Hidden Valley Ranch is literally hidden. I don't know. There's got to be a murder that happened there that they're like, we can't let anyone know that the secret ingredient to ranch dressing is murder. You know, Satan stuff. Come on. Come on.

Follow along. Keep up. If we could just keep this generation's satanic panic kind of consolidated to hating ranch dressing, that would be nice. And that's two takeaways into all our numbers. We're going to take a short break and then come back with some more modern incarnations of ranch dressing flavor. Folks, members of Maximum Fun are the reason this show exists. Thanks for watching! good artistic and business thing is happening at all. So thank you all so much who do that and who makes if a thing. On top of that, to supplement that, we're getting support this week from

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So learn more about the game and see it in action at upperstory.com slash Turing Tumble, use the coupon code SIF for 10% off your total purchase, that's upperstory.com slash Turing Tumble, and code SIF, S-I-F, for 10% off. Support also comes from Wild Grain, which is a sponsor that has been feeding me and making me real happy for a while now. Because let me tell you, Wild Grain is the first ever company sending a bake-from-frozen box of sourdough breads, amazing, fresh pastas, also amazing, and artisanal pastries. The three best foods. Sourdough breads, fresh pastas, artisanal pastries. Every item bakes from frozen in 25 minutes or less. I also really love that Wildgrain is based in Boston and very rooted in the city of Boston. For every new member,

Wildgrain donates six meals to the Greater Boston Food Bank. So you can eat good and do good all at the same time. As you're hearing in this episode, I enjoy eating. Folks, you know, we all do. But I especially got hungry as I was working up this ranch dressing episode of the podcast and taping it with Katie here. And I was really glad I had some wild grain products that bake quickly because I went and had lunch on delicious, fresh, warm sourdough bread, made myself a sandwich there, kind of got that bakery experience all at once. It's a pretty unbeatable thing to get in the mail and be excited about. I highly recommend it. Now, for a limited time, you can get $30 off the first box, plus free croissants in every box. You heard me, free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box, plus free croissants in every box. You heard me, free croissants in every box

and $30 off your first box when you go to wildgrain.com slash SifPod. That's wildgrain.com slash SifPod, or you can use promo code SifPod at checkout. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls.

We're back with a couple more takeaways. Takeaway number three. Ranch dressing helped popularize the U.S. snacking experience of flavor dust. Flavor dust? Yeah. This takeaway is mainly the story of Cool Ranch Doritos. Ah, yes. Which are a Dorito dusted with ranch dressing flavor.

Yes. So why is it called Cool Ranch Doritos? Like, is there some kind of coolness to the Dorito? I'm trying to remember. It's been a while since I've last had the Cool Ranch Dorito because I think initially my reaction was repulsion. And I think I tried one once and it was fine because it's like, you know, it's like just the seasoning. It's not like a bag of loose Doritos sort of submerged in mayonnaise. Right. It really extracts the zest element in a perfect way.

As far as the coolness, there's no specific explanation. But based on the story we're going to go through here, I believe it's because they were less spicy than the other Dorito flavors. It's a more cooling feeling in your mouth. So it's sort of Doritos are about the spices you don't play. Oh man, little kid Alex was so into two things, jazz and Doritos. Those two favorite things. He'd be so excited to be hearing this. He wanted to be a jazz trumpet player and eat Doritos.

That's all he wanted. Those things are trumpet player and eat Doritos that's all he wanted those things are kind of hard to do together because your fingers get the Dorito dust on it and you try to play the the trumpet and then and then you get Dorito flavored spit coming out of the spit valve it's a situation so but flavor dust I just assumed flavor dust has always been around, like sort of the basic elements of the universe. Yeah, it's been around a long time. And I don't mean to overstate it, but Cool Ranch Doritos were not the first flavor dusted snack. The New York Times says that in 1986, Cool Ranch flavor of Doritos debuted. They were not the first Dorito.

of Doritos debuted. They were not the first Dorito, but they were one of the key snacks for expressing the idea that instead of chips and a separate dip, you could just have a really flavor-dusted chip and skip that dipping step and not need to deal with that. Skip the dip, flavor the chip. Yeah, that's a perfect slogan for what they did in 1986. So they weren't the first, but that really was one of the prime times when in their minds, people said, oh, I don't have a dip or a ranch flavored thing that I need to put these in. I can just enjoy them straight up. I mean, it is, we are all about eliminating any kind of extra effort or steps when it comes to our snacks. We got to make just basically like a tiny can and that fires little cheese balls into

your mouth is going to be the next big thing. That sounds great. That's why I paddled here, man. Oh, yeah. It does sound great. Yeah, that's our deal. And the Cool Ranch Dorito, it was, again, not the first Dorito. It just turns out Origin of Doritos is very interesting. They were first created at a restaurant based at Disneyland in California. Huh. Wait, Doritos were created in Disneyland?

And they were not Disney intellectual property. How did that happen? I thought the mouse had an iron tight grip on anything that happens on his establishment. Yeah. Apparently in the mid 60s, when they were getting Disneyland going, Disney was pretty willing to partner with companies for the food service instead of owning it. And so, yeah, that's one of probably the last times Disney didn't own something they had a hand in. They must have seen the success of Doritos and realized that the mouse got to keep it in house. They could have been Goofitos, but we missed that timeline. Yeah. And the companies that came up with it, I was very surprised that the company

that truly invented it is named Alex Foods. What? Is it me? Wow. You own Doritos? My Doritos fortune is coming out. Yeah. And they were partnered at this restaurant with the founder of Frito-Lay, the famous snack company that now owns it. And from what I read from journalist and author Gustavo Arellano, it sounds like Frito-Lay a little bit pushed out Alex Foods in the process here. But they ran this restaurant. The Dorito chip was a hit item at this Disneyland restaurant. And then from there, they spun it up into a national tortilla chip launch in the mid-60s. What is sort of the OG Dorito is like a spicy seasoning? What is it? Like

chili powder or paprika and a huge amount of salt? It turns out the OG Dorito is no seasoning. What? It was a flavor they called toasted corn and it was simply a corn chip. Huh? I know. It doesn't make any sense. What? How did it get so popular if it was just toasted corn chip? I mean, I love, don't get me wrong.

I mess with tortilla chips like nobody's business. No dip, just the chip. I love them. Me too. tortilla chips, like nobody's business. No dip, just the chip. I love them. But then how were people like this tortilla chip in particular? I love it. Yeah. So what happened is apparently a lot of the U.S. outside of the Southwest said, oh, this is a pretty good experience because many of us are pretty unfamiliar with corn chips in general. I see. And then people in the Southwest said, this is flavorless. It's not good.

And then within a year of launching the General Dorito, Frito-Lay made a taco flavor. They made a nacho cheese flavor. They started flavoring the chip, and then it became the hook of Doritos, where it's not just that texture, but it's a flavored tortilla chip. Right. Flavor blasted, I believe. Or is that Cheetos? Which one blasts them with flavor? Is it Goldfish?

Oh, you're right. It's hard to keep all these U.S. snacks straight. They blast the Goldfish. I like that the Goldfish extended universe has a bunch of different flavors. And in their little Goldfish commercials where you empathize with the snack food that you eat, they're all like, oh, we're adding a new character to the Gold Avengers. This one's a pretzel. Yeah, it's very Saturday morning cartoons that were just commercials for toys.

But it's for food. But it is a commercial yes kind of makes me respect it a little bit more where it's just you know it is just a commercial that is a commercial but yeah so we're we're flavor blasting things now uh so that we can salt our mouths with uh the strong and powerful taste of a chip without the dipping because nobody needs to do that motion. It gets obnoxious. But then somehow Cool Ranch kind of weasels its way into the chip situation. I feel like this is a very U.S. heavy topic. If people don't know, today there's basically two default Doritos, the nacho cheese and the cool ranch. And then

there's plenty of other flavors like spicy sweet chili. But those to me as a kid were the two defaults. And you have the a little bit spicy nacho cheese with a red bag like, ooh, red spice. And then the blue cool ranch bag to tell you a whole different flavor experience that is calming, to tell you a whole different flavor experience that is calming, even though it's zesty. That is interesting. I think that like, there's a whole thing too, I think in psychology where like bag, bag colors, like mean certain things in certain countries, and you get so used to it that like, if you go to a different country, and you find a bag of like hot chips that are in a blue bag, it blows your mind. Right. It's like we are truly different, aren't we?

Wow. There's no way we can bridge this cultural gap. Well, and folks, the entire bonus show this week is about further frontiers of Cool Ranch Doritos. So hang out for that if you'd like to. Maximumfun.org slash join. This is ominous. I'm scared. Katie, come back.

But there's one more takeaway for the main show here. Takeaway number four. Domino's Pizza kind of sort of invented dipping pizza into ranch dressing. Oh, Domino's, why? It was such a little thing they did, and it doesn't really seem like they precisely knew they were doing it. Yeah, there was a time in 1994 when Domino's accidentally started putting pizza and ranch dressing next to each other all the time. And then people took it from there. And then they ran wild with it.

I'm telling on them to Italy because that's got to be a no-no. Hey, Italy, are you cool with ranch dressing? No? War, you say? Uh-oh. Okay. All right. Well, that didn't go well.

I feel like I'm going to finish taping this, open Google News, and it's just going to say war, like those big headlines in the past of newspaper times, like Italy and the U.S. at war. That's it. Italy, what have you done to our delicious pizza? What's the matter with you? delicious pizza. What's the matter with you? Because the New York Times is the main source here. They say that the key switch was partly that 1980s stuff where stuff like Cool Ranch Doritos is expanding people's minds as far as what ranch dressing can be on. But then in 1994, Domino's expanded its menu to include buffalo wings. And by 1994, there had been enough ranch dressing experimentation where people were pairing ranch dressing with buffalo wings as a sauce to dip them in and kind of cool off that buffalo hot flavor. Well, there is something to like things with fats, especially like milk. I think it has a cooling effect right on spices.

Yeah. Milk, I think it has a cooling effect right on spices. Yeah. Horchata is also a delicious option to stop your mouth from burning when you overestimate how much spice you can handle. Yeah. So I guess Cool Ranch is a version of that, except that I don't approve of it personally. I can't ever make a statement in this podcast without reiterating that I don't like ranch dressing. I hope it hasn't gotten old by this point, but it's the truth. It's not it's not a bit. It's not a bit that I'm playing up.

I truly I truly can't deal with it. Buddy, it's like me with jellyfish. It's it's authentic and people are getting real stuff. You know, it's great. Yeah, this is the real deal. If you can't tolerate me at my most anti-ranch dressing, you don't deserve me at my something blessing. I guess there could be a version of this podcast where it's WWE logic and we write two sides to it every time. But then that would play so weird.

Like, what's a recent episode? Like, we'd be talking about crows and you're like, I like crows. And I'm like, a crow attacked my family or some like bonkers version to be bad, you know? But yeah, ranch dressing, it had already become a friend of buffalo wings in US eating by 1994. And so when Domino's put buffalo wings on the menu, they also automatically included a side of ranch dressing. That was all they did. That was the only change they thought about was let's add wings with ranch dressing to the menu. But that meant that more than a thousand Domino's franchises across the US and several other countries all started pushing customers to order pizza and wings, which meant ordering pizza and

wings and ranch dressing. And then customers took it from there. They said, hey, what if I do a thing that I think people know about? Maybe it's too American, but a lot of Americans straight up dip their pizza, sometimes just the crust, sometimes whole elements of the pizza into ranch dressing and sauce it up in order to eat it like that. And that's how World War IV started. How many wars are, oh, three? I don't, I actually don't know which war we're on right now.

It depends how last week's show about beavers goes. Because the US and Canada, we get butt heads, you know what I mean? So, 3 or 4. Yeah. We'll find out. You know, they say the last war will be fought

with sticks and ranch dressing, I think is how that saying goes. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, ranch dressing was invented by a construction worker in Alaska who opened a hard-to-find California dude ranch. Takeaway number two, the precise location of the Hidden Valley Ranch appears to be hidden.

Takeaway number three, ranch dressing helped popularize the U.S. snacking experience of flavor dust. And takeaway number four, Domino's Pizza kinda sorta invented dipping pizza into ranch dressing. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly

fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the strangest frontiers of Cool Ranch Doritos. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 12 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun thing, check out our research sources. On this episode's page at MaximumFun.org, key sources this week include a piece for tedium.co by Ernie Smith,

a piece for the New York Times by Julia Moskin, and a piece for Orange County Weekly by Gustavo Arellano. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. For example, the city of Anchorage, Alaska came up on this show. That area is the traditional land of the Dena'ina people, who are also still here, still around, and still living in that location. That feels worth doing on each episode, And hey, join the free SIF Discord,

where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 77. That's about the topic of bananas. Fun fact, bananas are berries that grow from herbs. Wow, more herb talk, right? Ranch dressing, now bananas. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly

podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.