Hey, I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and we're the host of Stuff. You should know the podcast that's right, And if you're into understanding cool and unusual and seemingly ordinary and even boring things that are made interesting, you should check us out. Please and thank you. We're on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, anywhere you get podcasts. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, This is Christian Seger. If you have spent time in the US
or Canada, then you have heard of ranch dressing. It was invented by a guy named Steve Henson in the late forties to the early fifties when he worked as a plumbing contractor in Alaska. In the fifties, he and his wife moved near Santa Barbara, where they opened the Hidden Valley Dude Ranch sounds cool, right, Visiting guests like the ranch itself, but they loved Steve salad dressing. Eventually, the Henson's just started telling that and the rest is history.
Since ranch salad dressing has been the most popular dressing in the US. But ranch isn't a flavor, right, okay? People outside of the US and Canada, Thanks for bearing with me through the history lesson, but you may have tasted ranch flavoring before, just under a different name. In the Netherlands, for instance, cool ranch doritos are called cool American doritos. That weird American flavor you see advertised in the grocery store. That's ranch, and the main taste in
ranch is buttermilk. I know, I know, but it's not quite that simple. Otherwise people would just pour buttermilk on stuff, right. The original ranch recipe also includes mayonnaise, parsley, pepper, salt, a little time, garlic, onion, powder, and msg. It's a dairy heavy recipe, which means the original version doesn't keep very well, and that means, in turn, the famous ranch dressing flying of shelves today is not the same stuff that Steve was whipping up for his guests. Instead, the
result is some heady, complicated work by the eggheads at Chlorox. Yes, that Clorox. They bought Hidden Valley in ninety two. They had a huge problem though. You can't just plot bottles of buttermilk and mayo on an unrefrigerated shelf and hope for the best. So they started tinkering around with the recipe,
practicing the arcane art of food science. They needed something that's still pretty much tasted like Steve's recipe, but was shelf stable, meaning it could sit around on a truck or in a grocery store long enough for customers to find and buy it. The details of Clorox's work remained secret, but it is a safe bet that Steve's original recipe didn't include things like calcium dis soda, mine ethel leah dah sanda. I can't even say this word. It's safe
to say that he didn't do it. By three, they had cooked up a version of ranch that could stay on shelves for up to one hundred and fifty days. The first four ingredients of modern ranch dressing are vegetable oil, water, egg, gilk, and sugar. You'll also see disodium phosphate xanthem gum and the ever popular calcium disodium m M. Sounds good, right, and if you ask food reviewers like j Kenji Lopez Alt, most shelf stable recipes end up sacrificing flavor at the
benefit of convenience. But you've probably also noticed that numerous companies make different ranch dressings. There's the Kens Steakhouse stuff that Paul Newman Guy. The list goes on and given ranches popularity, more competitors will enter the fray. It's inspiring when you think about it. A multimillion dollar industry sprang up because a guy in Alaska apparently decided he was
tired of eating mayo and buttermilk. Separately, check out the brain suff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com