Homemade Ranch Dressing

I recently heard about budget101.com.  How is it possible that I am just now hearing about this site?  It's a fantastic site with a lot of money saving tips.

One of my favorite things about that website is the mixes list. It has a ton of recipes for dry mixes that are easy to do and save you money on your grocery bill.

 Ranch salad dressing.- For ingredients and directions please see the original website.



I was impressed at how well the dry ingredients blended together in my cheap-o-matic blender. 

Keep the dry ingredients in an air tight container until ready to use: combine 1 Tbsp. of dry mix, 1 cup of mayo  & 1 cup of buttermilk. Mix it all together and enjoy. (I used homemade mayo, but that's for another post)

I halved the dry recipe from the website and I got about 16 Tbsp. of dry mix.  That gives you about 32 cups of Ranch dressing.  Unless you drink this stuff by the gallon (which is tempting), it is going to last you a very long time.

The verdict: It tastes nothing like ranch.  Nothing!  But I love it, and so does my husband. I was afraid that all the garlic was going to be over powering but it wasn't.  The consistency is pretty runny, which at first I thought would bother me but I really like it.  When I pour it on salad it actually runs off the pieces and coats every bit of the salad. This is a really nice change from the usual Ranch glob I get in the center of my salad that seems to latch onto 5 pieces of lettuce and nothing else.

Also, when I dip veggies in it, it just lightly coats it so I get the flavor without a big glob.  And in my mind that means less calories.  Yahoo.

It does seem to lose some flavor the longer it sits in your fridge, so I now just make half.  I still get 1 cup of dressing, which lasts a few weeks in our house.

So I love it, my husband loves it, but a couple weeks ago I really put it to the test.  I went to a small get together at a friends house and brought cut up carrots and the ranch.  People started eating it and said "oh, this is good" but I couldn't tell if they were sincere.  For all I knew they were really thinking "wow, this is horribly disgusting and I'm going to toss it in the fake tree when your not looking."

But then a pregnant woman came in.  I've been pregnant 4 times, I fully understand how a pregnant woman's sense of smell and taste become heightened and it's hard to hide that heightened sense of taste.  When she got a plate of carrots and dip I started to watch her out of the corner of my eye (just call me a stalker). She ate it, then got more and ate that, then she started dipping popcorn in the ranch.

So there you have it, Homemade Ranch Dressing: Jannie tested, pregnant women approved.

 UPDATE: I tried a batch where I substituted the buttermilk with plain Greek yogurt.  I didn't notice any change in the flavor but it did make it a lot thicker.  So depending on what consistency you like, the buttermilk or yogurt both work great.