Put that Pre-Made Dressing Down! Make Your Own Southwestern Ranch Dressing!

I recently read a nice message on Facebook from my Aunt the other day. You can read the result on my post over at my personal blog.

Today we concern ourselves with the nitty-gritty. How to make this difficult dressing that will KILL the competition!

The Competition:

Sure, the dressing itself might cost peanuts:

Sure, the stuff is 3.99$ for 500 mL. Not bad, a cost of 8.00$ per liter. Let’s look into the ingredients, shall we?

Straight from Renee’s site, here are the ingredients:

Fresh buttermilk, canola oil, vinegar, water, frozen egg yolk, salt, fructose solids, cultured, dextrose, whey powder, spices, onion powder, garlic powder, xanthan gum, flavour.

Wow.

The only problem I have is when you are paying for something that is just not all that convenient. Plus, when you are just getting vegetable oil flavored with milk products, I have a problem with that.

Why is canola oil the second ingredient there? If you read between the lines here, you get what looks like a basic vinaigrette – oil, vinegar, water, egg yolks, and seasonings, (including dextrose.) To that they have added buttermilk, whey powder (presumably to bulk up the milk flavor.) Finally, there are two things that disturb me – Xanthan gum, (a thickener and stabilizer,) and flavour.

What does flavour mean anyway? What kind of flavor?

A Caveat

Look – the point is not attacking this stuff – please keep that in mind. A lot of people will reach for this because it is convenient. I mean, who has buttermilk these days just hanging out in the fridge? (You Southerner’s DON’T answer that!)

What I want to offer is an easy alternative to buying that convenience product.

Go look over at my Personal Blog for a quick video on how the following recipe is executed. I made this recipe in 2 minutes, with a hovering wife in the background. It is not as convenient as grabbing it off the shelf, but I think you can agree that it’s not that inconvenient!

Southwestern Buttermilk Ranch Dressing

Servings: 10

Ingredients:

• 1 cup buttermilk (or 1/2 cup whole milk and 1/2 cup sour cream or yogurt)
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• juice from 1 lemon
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon mustard powder
• 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
• 1 teaspoon chopped thyme
• 3 chives (with flowers), minced
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1-2 drops hot sauce

Method

1. Grab a clean, tall mason jar with a lid. Combine all your ingredients together inside the jar, Cap the jar with the lid; shake vigorously while dancing. Ignore the looks from your spouse or partner. You’re making Southwestern Dressing, Baby!
2. Keep tightly covered in the fridge for up to the same expiry date as the buttermilk. If it lasts that long, it will keep.

A nutritional comparison:

Just for giggles, here is the nutritional breakdown for my recipe, based on Living Cookbook 2011 stats. Note that I don’t make the serving size 1 tablespoon because NO ONE only eats a tablespoon of dressing at a time!

Nutritional Information from the Competition?

With this Nutritional Information, keep in mind that a normal person would eat 3 times that amount in a salad just to make it taste good!

For a real serving of this stuff, we are looking at 180 calories, 3 grams of carbs from sugar, and not much of anything else.

Here is my version, both with and without buttermilk:

All natural ingredients in my recipe, A full 160 calories less, almost 1 gram of sugar carbs less, less sodium, and gasp! Less sat fat as well. Definitely a case to DIY – because it is so easy!

If you don’t have buttermilk, then by substituting the whole milk and sour cream:

As you can see, it still comes in at a 1/3 less than the competition, with still less carbohydrates!

There you have it! What do you think,will you be buying the “convenient” stuff, or will you make your own?

Tagged as: black pepper, Buttermilk, Chives, Hot Sauce, lemon, Mayonnaise, Mustard Powder, paprika, Parsley, Sea Salt, Sour Cream, thyme, Whole Milk, yogurt