The Best Ranch Dressing: A Bottled Ranch Taste Test

Ranch dressing: Kids will dip almost anything in it, salad-fearing adults douse their daily greens in it, and Melissa McCarthy drinks it by the bottle. Commercials for Hidden Valley Ranch would make you think the stuff is the nectar of the gods -- and to some people, it is.

But if you've ever had homemade ranch dressing, it's hard to go back to the bottled stuff. We decided to conduct a taste test to see if anything comes close to the homemade kind.

The ingredients in some of the brands tested below may be enough to make you quit bottled ranch, cold turkey. The kind that sits at room temperature on store shelves includes a ton of unpronounceable preservatives. But there's good news: check out the refrigerated produce aisle of your grocery store, and you'll find a few preservative-free brands that ended up performing far better than the rest of the competition.

For the health-conscious consumer, we included a few brands of ranch made with yogurt. We were hoping we'd love them, in order to spare ourselves some future caloric intake, but alas … check out the results below.