• Dip for french fries.
• Hamburger condiment.
• Dipping sauce for breadsticks.
• Sauce for omelets.
• Topping in burritos.

And this is entirely in addition to classic use as a salad dressing and vegetable dip.

Cheap ranch dressing is ripe to miss the boat on real food. It’s a food processor’s wet dream: take water, toss in some inexpensive ingredients and artificial flavors, some xanthan gum, and you’ve got truckloads of ranch which can be sold with soda profit margins.

One of the more popular grocery store ranch dressing products is brought to you by Hidden Valley.

Here’s what’s in Hidden Valley’s ranch dressing:

Vegetable oil, egg yolk, sugar, salt, buttermilk, spices, garlic, onion, vinegar, phosphoric acid, xanthan gum, modified food starch, MSG, artificial flavors, disodium phosphate, sorbic acid, calcium disodium EDTA, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate.

Reading through the list, you probably felt fairly positive moving through the first 10. After that, however, the ingredients take a steady decline in the additive/preservative realm.

Still, though, it’s not as bad as it could have been. They could be using high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar.

Expect the ingredients of other ranch dressings to be similar to Hidden Valley, like Kraft’s ranch dressing and any ranch dressing served in a chain restaurant.

Take flour torillas, for example. Your standard flour tortilla recipe goes something like this: Flour, baking powder, salt, water, and lard (or shortening).

But these have a tendency to expire quickly. Grocery stores are not able to stock a product that is not good after a few days. So most ready-to-eat flour tortillas you find will be loaded with less-than-great ingredients designed to extend their shelf life.

That brings me to a recent stop at a Gordon Food Service. GFS sells food and cafeteria products in bulk. I was there to pick up non-food items, but after spotting some flour tortillas on the shelf I could not help but stop to examine them.

I was expecting something pretty bad, but this ingredient list was beyond my imagination.

Bleached enriched wheat flour, water, soybean oil, hydrogenated vegetable oil with mono- and diglycerides added, sugar, baking powder, salt, vital wheat gluten, potato starch, calcium propionate, monoglycerides and critic acid to preserve freshness, glycerine, fumaric acid, sodium bicarbonate, dextrose, dough conditioner, cellulose gum, potassium sorbate, enzyme complex, and dough relaxer.

For the sake of my wrists, I chose not to re-type several parenthetical expansions on these ingredients, including the enriched wheat flour, dough conditioner, and dough relaxer.

These guys take food science to a whole new level by going absolutely nuts with the minor ingredients. Figuring out what you are eating from the list of ingredients is a major challenge; I doubt many people would recognize that they were consuming a “tortilla”.

All I can say is that these tortillas were promptly set back on the shelf after the photos were taken.

In this post we break down the ingredients in a popular convenience store lemonade and what exactly they are doing.

Ingredients found in the convenience store “lemonade”

• Water
• High fructose corn syrup
• Sugar
• Lemon juice (from concentrate)
• Citric acid
• Modified cornstarch
• Glycerol
• Ester of wood rosin
• Sodium hexametaphosphate
• Sodium benzoate
• Potassium sorbate
• EDTA
• Yellow #5

Source: Some website

High fructose corn syrup: Heavy subsidization of corn has left the United States with too much of it. To eat up the surplus, scientists have found ways to extract all kinds of products by processing the plant. HFCS is one of these products, and acts as a sweetener. It’s also dirt cheap (at least when corn prices are low) and American beverage producers have found all sorts of ways to include it.

Citric acid: Used for tartness and preservation.

Modified cornstarch: As the name implies, modified cornstarch is cornstarch that has been treated to change one or more of its properties. In the case of lemonade, modified cornstarch is probably acting as a thickener to give the juice some texture.

Glycerol: Glycerol is colorless, odorless, thick liquid found in many beverages and household products.

Ester of wood rosin: Found in many beverages, ester of wood rosin is used to re-create an authentic lemonade taste. It’s also suitable as a stabilizer or emulsifier, helping keep various ingredients together. Ester of wood rosin is somewhat natural in origin, typically being derived from the stumps of longleaf pine trees.

EDTA: An abbreviation for ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, EDTA usually accompanies sodium benzoate and light acid in beverages. Why? Without it, carcinogenic benzene will form.

Yellow #5: Also known as tartrazine, Yellow #5 is a colored dye that makes Minute Maid’s lemonade look somewhat like lemonade. Due to research findings on tartrazine, the United Kingdom is currently phasing its use out as well as related color dyes.