The Ingredient That Will Take Your Homemade Ranch To The Next Level

Ranch is the most popular salad dressing in America, and some people enjoy its application as a condiment well beyond the usual suspects of greens, wings, and potato-based products. It can be added as an all-purpose tangy sauce to enhance sandwiches, burgers, pizza, and pretty much anything edible dropped into a fryer.

Supermarket brands have their own converts, but if you find a recipe you like and don't mind putting in the prep work, making your own homemade version can elevate your ranch-dipping game. The Food Network notes the most common ingredients included in ranch are buttermilk, salt, garlic, and onion, generally combined with mayonnaise and/or sour cream. Part of the fun of crafting your own ranch is experimenting with alternative ingredients, such as herbs. Sometimes it's the uncommon and unexpected ingredient that delivers the biggest flavor boost.

Kitchn raves about a ranch recipe containing a secret ingredient that they call a "total game-changer." The ingredient is Worcestershire sauce — the thick, fermented sauce that Guy Fieri loves to playfully mispronounce on "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives."

The source for this Worcestershire tip comes from a ranch recipe written by a Utah-based food recipe blog called Together as Family. Its founder and author, Jessica, acknowledges that Worcestershire sauce sounds like an odd choice to incorporate into a homemade ranch recipe, but she emphasizes that it's a critical component to ensuring the dressing's great taste. The difference-maker is that Worcestershire adds another savory component to the dressing that takes it to the next level.

Together as Family recommends adding in a ½ teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce (for a serving size of 16) while qualifying that those who fear that this amount will overwhelm them can start out instead with a ¼ teaspoon and tweak it as necessary to meet their personal preference. She mixes the Worcestershire with the other ingredients of mayonnaise, sour cream, buttermilk, and dried herbs including parsley and dill weed, onion and garlic powder, dried chives, salt, and pepper.

Whether you want to drizzle the finished product over salad, pour it over pasta, or use it as a dip for, well, almost anything — the choice is up to you. Judgment-free zone here.