Buttermilk ranch dressing is, at its core, buttermilk, mayonnaise, and spices. The Ranch ingredients start with water, soybean oil, vinegar, sugar, salt. According to the label there's only 380mg of salt in the dressing, and ingredient lists are always done by volume. So anything else in the container has a REALLY low volume. That would include items like "buttermilk powder".
For people with allergies, it warns that it contains milk, eggs, and was made in a facility that processes anchovies, wheat and soybeans.
How does it taste? This is a very basic ranch. They are going for the most common denominator of flavors. You could easily add spices to this to jazz it up - some garlic bits, some fresh dill, maybe a splash of lemon or a hint of oregano. It will turn the basic ranch dressing into something personal and tasty.
You could do this with each salad, creating a "garlic ranch" one day and a "dill ranch" on another.
The price is $1.50 per bottle, so it's fairly cheap too.
The serving size is 2 Tbsp which I always complain about - servings on salads are definitely larger than this. I suppose some people have tiny salads, but still, they could at least have a chart of tiny salad vs normal salad.
For each serving there is 110 calories, 11g of fat (2g saturated), 5mg cholesterol, 2g of carbs, 0g of protein. There is pretty much no vitamins in the mix.
I think this is a great value. Sure, it's a simple taste, where other dressings have complicated tests with a variety of flavors. I'm all for having other dressings in your arsenal too so that sometimes you have Flavor A and at other times you have Flavor B.
But there's also the thought of frugality here. You can get this ranch dressing at a very cheap price, then each day jazz it up in a different way. They've made the base for you, and you customize at whim. That certainly has its appeal!
Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books
