Have you ever wondered what the heck ranch dressing is? I have. It’s very tasty stuff, making almost anything better. According to Wikipedia, it was first invented in 1954 by the Henson family at their dude ranch, the Hidden Valley Ranch. Eventually, it became so popular that in 1972, it was bought by Clorox (yes, the bleach maker) and made commercially available. Internet-savvy cooks have managed to replicate the original recipe as follows:

1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 teaspoon dried chives
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried dill weed
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

Mix well and let sit overnight.

Ranch dressing is known for its ability to make just about anything taste better. Salad, snacks, baked potatoes, you name it, ranch dressing can probably improve it, which is why it overtook Italian dressing in 1992 as the best-selling salad dressing in the world.

It’s also known for being hideously bad for you in larger quantities, since 2 tablespoons clock in at about 145 calories, 94% of which is fat.

Finally, Clorox had to work some scary chemical magic to make it shelf-stable, since so much of the recipe is dairy-based and would otherwise spoil within days of making it. Take a look at your generally available commercial bottle of dressing and you’ll find antifungal drugs like natamycin in it. This is why it’s generally a better idea to copy the recipe above and make it at home when needed.

Here’s the thing about ranch dressing: its powers only go so far. Put ranch dressing on a salad and it makes for a better salad. If the salad is really good to begin with, you don’t need much dressing. If the salad is a pile of shredded iceberg lettuce that’s wilted, you’re going to be making ranch dressing soup in order to be able to eat it.

You can (though you shouldn’t) put ranch dressing on things like piles of paper shreddings. Again, it’ll be barely edible, but the dressing will manage to help you overcome what is otherwise something you wouldn’t eat.

So what does a very tasty salad dressing have to do with social media? In many ways, social media is just like ranch dressing:

1. You have to do a lot of crazy things to it if you’re not making it fresh yourself. The end product is okay, but not nearly as good (or good for you) as when you do it yourself.

2. It will improve just about any product or service to some degree to make it more palatable.

3. It’s bad for you in large quantities. After all, if you spend 100% of your time on social, you’re spending 0% of your time on your actual business.

4. If your product or service is bad, you can overcome it to some degree, but you and your company’s health are much better off making a better product or service first, and then adding social media to it afterwards.

Enjoy the salad and the social media!

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Want to take breakfast on the go but don’t want to pay exorbitant prices for pre-packaged snack bars?

Got a fussy eater in the house that won’t eat a decent breakfast no matter what?

Make ‘em pancake “snacks”!

Here’s how. Take the homemade or store-bought pancake batter of your choice and when mixing it, double the amount of liquid. For example, on a popular brand of pancake mix, it calls for 2 cups of mix, 1 cup of milk, and 2 eggs. Change it to 2 cups of mix, 2 cups of milk, and 2 eggs. If you want to go for a sweet taste to the final product, substitute the increased liquid volume or a portion of it with your favorite maple syrup.

For best results, stir until your arm aches or use common sense and a blender. Blend until smooth.

In a skillet, spray with your favorite non-stick coating. Pour just enough mix to cover 3/4 of the bottom of the pan, then swirl around to distribute the mix. If you’ve ever made crepes, it’s about the same amount of batter – very thin.

Cook on medium low heat for 3-4 minutes each side, flipping twice. It’s done when it’s somewhat stiff (but not rock hard) and golden brown.

Immediately slap it on a cutting board and cut it into slices, then let it cool. As it cools and the last of the moisture evaporates, it turns into pancake crackers.

If they’re not quite crisp, toss the cracker pieces back in the skillet at very low heat to dry them out completely.

The wonderful thing about this “snack” is that nutritionally, it’s the same as serving a regular pancake, only it’s a lot neater and the crispy texture appeals more to people (adults and kids) who like a “snack” feel. If you have special dietary needs like gluten-free or dairy-free, simply substitute your pancake mix with the one above, and you can make the exact same recipe.

Happy “snacking”!

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The recent kerfuffle over Ragu’s latest campaign illustrates the power of a simple cliche in social media: listen. Rather than rehash the entire thing, I’ll point you to CC Chapman’s blog posts here, here, and here about it.

So how would you, if you were a brand manager evaluating a campaign or looking for an idea to give to your agency, avoid this sort of thing? Here’s a recipe for using this social stuff to your advantage, rather than burning bridges.

First, decide what you’re looking for. In this case, let’s say you’re a spaghetti sauce company that ultimately wants to increase sales. You’ve got this idea in your head that you want to highlight that your products make cooking dinner so easy, anyone can do it. Fair and good. Don’t throw it to your agency just yet. It’s time to do about 10-15 minutes of homework.

Start collecting data. Aggregate stuff from a bunch of different data sources – Twitter, your own Facebook page, competitors’ Facebook pages, etc. In this case, let’s start by collecting things about spaghetti sauce and people making dinner.

Next, look for common word and phrase frequencies. Free tools like Wordle and WriteWords can give you raw passes at the frequency of words and phrases. In this case we’re examining how many people are talking about making spaghetti sauce.

The third step is to choose a social construct to try out. There are literally hundreds to choose from in the field of behavioral science. In this case, let’s go with normative social influence, which is basic bandwagon theory. In normative social influence, we tend to conform to the norms of the people around us. The more we see a norm, the more we are likely to conform to it.

In this case, we see a number of conversations about people making spaghetti sauce, especially meat sauce. There’s a social norm at work here: people who do or don’t make their own spaghetti sauce. 5 minutes of reading publicly posted conversations about it demonstrate that there are those folks who make their own and those folks who wish they could make their own but instead have to buy a packaged product.

Furthermore, another 5 minutes of reading reveals that the general sentiment around pre-packaged sauce tends towards negative while the general sentiment around homemade is very strongly positive. Interesting! If you wanted to capture strong positive sentiment around your product or service, you’d want to find a way to harvest some of that positive sentiment around the act of making homemade spaghetti sauce.

Let’s take a quick look now at a list of products available in the manufacturer’s spaghetti sauce line:

Do you see the opportunity here yet? There’s a large void between “make my own sauce from scratch” and “buy a jar of stuff”. The void is the same void that Betty Crocker and many others filled with cake mixes years ago: a make your own spaghetti sauce kit. Right now as a consumer your choices are to either buy a pile of raw materials or buy a finished product. There’s no middle ground. If you wanted to harvest the sentiment around homemade sauce, there’s an opportunity to engage the consumer in the actual process of making something while removing a lot of steps that tend to discourage cooks who lack confidence in themselves.

Suppose instead of bashing any one particular group for being inept in the kitchen, you gave them a gateway towards becoming a better cook (using your product, of course)? A homemade spaghetti sauce box set would fill that need precisely. What’s more, a quick glance around at the various competitors in the space reveals that this is a product that no one else has:

This all came from 10 minutes of listening, a little Google searching, and a basic understanding of one aspect of human nature. Where would you go from here? Start following everyone talking wistfully about their mother’s homemade spaghetti sauce that they can’t make, and put together a focus group to see if they’d find value and happiness in a product that served their emotional need to make something homemade while not requiring them to demonstrate culinary expertise. If it passed the focus group, roll it out as a product and see how it does.

I’d be willing to bet that there’s a very large untapped market of folks who want to make something that feels homemade but lacks the complexity of actually making it from raw materials. This is the power of social media; as Tom Webster says, it’s the world’s largest focus group.

Before you go roll out your latest campaign, product, or ad, take 10-15 minutes to listen, look to see if you’re on target, and whether there are additional, more lucrative opportunities to take advantage of. You’ll save yourself potentially a lot of reputation damage and you might just change your entire industry.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a spaghetti sauce recipe, here’s mine.

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One of the best disaster prep foods I’ve always found to be reliable is good ol’ brown rice. It’s dense, full of nutrition, keeps reasonably well (not as good as white rice, but you sacrifice nutrition for longevity), and is relatively easy to make, especially with a rice cooker.

In advance of Hurricane Irene, in addition to all the other sensible disaster prep stuff, I put on an extra large pot of rice as well. Now that the hurricane has blown through, I have a lot of cooked rice on my hands. Luckily, there’s a great rice salad that you can use the leftovers with, using ingredients familiar to anyone who knows the middle Eastern dish tabbouleh.

Ingredients

• 1 large pot of cooked brown rice
• 1 large cucumber
• 2 medium onions (medium = tennis ball size)
• 1 medium carrot
• Basil
• 1 teaspoon Salt
• 1/2 teaspoon Pepper
• 1/4-1/2 cup lemon juice
• Jalapeno sauce or other spicy sauce

Directions

• Chop up all the vegetables into small cubes.
• Mix in a large bowl with the rice.
• Add in the rest of the ingredients except the jalapeno sauce.
• Stir.
• Add in jalapeno sauce to preferred spicyness.
• Let sit overnight.
• Eat.

This makes as little or as much rice salad as you want. It’s very tasty and super easy to serve. It’s best cold, which also means that it’s great for taking to work. It works on the same principles as bulgur wheat, so any recipe for tabbouleh can also use brown rice instead of the wheat.

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I made lemonade today, and said lemonade got me thinking. Why? The lemonade I made looked like cloudy water. It was a pale yellowish milky color with little random bits of stuff floating around in it, absolutely nothing like lemonade is “supposed” to look. But when I drank it, it was like getting face-punched by a citrus-flavored Tyson, which is exactly what I wanted.

Compare that to the nearly radioactively yellow lemonade that gets served all over the place. Looks exactly like lemonade is supposed to look, but tastes deeply artificial – overly sour or overly sweet, with hints of preservatives, colors, and stabilizers in the mix. Why do we drink it? Why do we buy it? The packaged stuff looks like the ideal of what lemonade is supposed to look like, and as a result, we tend to like its flavor by our appreciation of the ideal.

One of the words we bounce around in social media so often that it’s nearly meaningless is authenticity. My question to you is this: are you making a judgement about authenticity based on its faithfulness to what is real, or what is the ideal?

Authenticity to the real means showing the ugly parts. It means heirloom tomatoes that look like produce accidents. It means employees saying something stupid on Twitter from time to time. It means relationships that have strife. That’s being authentic to what is real. The more you can be that, the happier you’ll be, because you’ll spend less and less time and energy pretending to be something that you’re not – at the cost of dealing with the consequences of who you are.

Authenticity to the ideal means showing what people expect to see. It means lemonade that is perfectly colored, even if it’s imperfectly flavored. It means the brand is more important than the product, and your time and energy are best spent on building the brand, not the product. It means relationships that tolerate no strife or disagreement. It means social media presences that are practically 140 character embodiments of Norman Rockwell. It means being who people want you to be, at the cost of never being permitted to show who you actually are.

Which you choose depends on what result you seek. There isn’t a right or wrong here, because the real and the ideal each provide value. If you only had the real, you might never chase the ideal, might never strive to be more than you are. If you only had the ideal, you might never value what you already have, might never see just how fortunate you are. Neither is better than the other.

The only danger is confusing the two. If you want the ideal but you demand “authenticity” from someone who provides the real, you will always be disappointed and let down. If you want the real but your vision of authenticity is tied to the ideal, you will always be dissatisfied and nothing will ever be good enough. Know which you really want if you demand authenticity, whether in social media or in life.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a pitcher of cloudy, pale lemonade to go drink.

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At every steakhouse I’ve ever been to, they tout how their dry aged steaks are the best thing since Moses brought tablets off a mountain. Most of the time, they are reasonably good, but not worth the price of admission. For those unfamiliar, dry aging a steak is effectively partially dehydrating it, on the premise that less water in the steak means more flavor when you eat it.

After much Googling, the general idea behind DIY dry aging is to put your steak in the fridge, and let it pull some of the moisture out. Not satisfied with just a culinary experiment, I decided to do an actual A/B test, the same as I advocate with marketing. A couple of friends wryly noted this as well:

Yes, I A/B test my meat.

So here’s the basic setup for dry aging a steak:

1 or more steaks (I used a relatively cheap chuck steak cut)
1 teaspoon of kosher salt per steak
1 plate
2 cloth kitchen towels

To start, lightly sprinkle a bit of the salt on each side of the steak, ideally using up 1/4 of the salt per side. You’ll salt twice each side total. Once you’ve salted, wrap it in the towel so that both sides are touching the meat and let it sit for 12 hours. After 12 hours, remove from the fridge, re-salt, change the towel, and let sit for another 12 hours. Do this and you’ve got dry aged steaks, or at least partially dehydrated ones that function the same as at a high end steakhouse.

To make it a true A/B test, I started another set of steaks in a salt and pepper brine at the same time the dry aging process started. Same exact cut of meat (from the same package), same treatment, same duration, except that it’s in a wet brine rather than a towel.

After the 24 hours were up, I put both sets on the grill.

You could see a visible difference in speed of cooking as well as how the meat reacted to high heat; the dry aged steak warped a little since the outer layers had less moisture content.

How did it taste, though?

There was a noticeable differential in taste, but to my admittedly untrained palate, one wasn’t worse than the other. The dry aged steak had more flavor consistently during chewing, but was less tender. The brined steak had more initial flavor and was more tender, but lost flavor faster during chewing.

Which would I choose? I think it’d depend on the cut of the steak as to which application is better suited for any given piece of meat. For a thicker cut, like a T-bone or a porterhouse, I’d probably go with a brine as it’d get the salt to the interior faster, and wouldn’t require 48-72 hours to dry out. For thin cuts like the chuck, a top sirloin, or a London broil, I’d lean towards dry aging.

The true A/B test, however, isn’t between wet brine and dry age, but between dry age at home for the price of the meat vs. a 300-900% markup at the steakhouse of your choice. You absolutely can get the same results at home for a price tag that is significantly less…

… beefy.

/sunglasses

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If you’re not familiar with the traditional Japanese dish onigiri, you’re missing out on one of the handiest portable foods there is. Onigiri date back at least to the 11th century, if not older, and were a food used by many Japanese, especially in the military, since they stored and traveled well. Onigiri are traditionally rice balls filled with some salty food to act as a preservative, such as pickled plum or bonito, but since modern technology has given us refrigerators and such, the need to restrict fillings to preserved items is somewhat less mandatory.

This recipe is, as far as I know, original. That’s not to say that putting bacon in things is an original idea, but this application isn’t something I found at a restaurant and tried to imitate. It’s fairly straightforward to make and is wicked tasty.

Filling:

• 2 strips of finely chopped, crispy thick-cut bacon & the rendered fat
• 1 tablespoon of finely chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise
• 1 tablespoon of panko Japanese bread crumbs
• 1/4 teaspoon or to taste Sriracha chili sauce (adjust depending on how spicy you like spicy)

Onigiri:

• 1 full pot of cooked, cooled short grain white rice, ideally sushi rice
• 1 package of nori seaweed sheets

Instructions:

• Cut the nori in half diagonally with a pair of scissors.
• Take all the filling stuff, put it in a bowl, and stir very well.
• Form rice “patties” with your hands that are about a half inch thick and about 2 1/2 inches across.
• Take a small spoonful of the filling, put it on one patty, put a second on top, and mould into a ball or triangle shape, depending on how traditional you like your onigiri
• Fold the triangular piece of nori around the rice ball when you’re ready to eat. (don’t put it on in advance or it gets soggy and nasty)
• Enjoy!

The filling is something that should be a little sparse but spread across the tongue as you chew; that’s why I make this with two rice patties instead of the traditional method of putting an indentation in the rice ball and filling it. Using two flat patties lets the filling spread out a little more and be more present in every bite.

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We love the crispy crunch that fried foods have, don’t we? We also do not love all the calories, fat, and other unpleasant stuff that comes with fried foods, right? Here’s a crispy quesadilla secret that can transform nearly any sandwich into a crisp, golden, delicious wonder with virtually no extra fat, gobs of oil or butter, or other stuff that you’d prefer not to eat all the time. Here’s a way to get the crispy crunch without the oily punch.

Start with your average store-bought tortillas, whatever will fit comfortably in your non-stick frying pan. Grab some decent shredded cheese. Have a cutting board, large knife, clean towels, plate, frying pan, cooking spray, and spatula handy. If you have other pre-cooked ingredients you normally put in quesadillas (onions, shredded chicken, etc.), have that all ready as well. Put a towel down on the cutting board and have the knife nearby. Put another towel on the plate. Mise en place, or everything laid out in advance, is vitally important to making this work well, so make sure all supplies are ready.

Spray the pan lightly with the non-stick spray. If your pan is not non-stick, spray not so lightly. Turn on the heat to medium-high; on a scale of 1-10, it should be around a 7. If you have one of those weird stoves like I do where the burner knobs are numbered 1-6, go for about 4 1/2. Put down a tortilla, grab a handful of shredded cheese and spread it out quickly and evenly over it, quickly put in any other fillings you like,then cover with another tortilla.

Cook the quesadilla like this for about a minute, shaking every so often. Flip it over at the minute mark and check to see if it’s lightly browned. With quesadillas and sandwiches, it’s okay to pick them up and check them more frequently than, say, eggs. Dark brown or burned means your pan is too hot. Unchanged in color means your pan isn’t hot enough. Cook both sides until they’re lightly browned.

Now here’s the secret. Grab a smaller handful of cheese and sprinkle it very quickly and evenly around the pan itself. You don’t need much – just enough to add a little cheese all around. Put the quesadilla on top of this cheese and cook it for 15 seconds or so, shaking frequently.

If you do it right, the cheese should turn a medium brown to golden brown crust on the outside of the quesadilla. Lift it out of the pan, put down another handful, and cook the other side the same way for about 15 seconds or until the cheese looks like the picture above.

When done, move the quesadilla to the towel-covered cutting board and cut into quarters, then move it to the towel-covered plate. The enemy of all things crispy and delicious is steam, moisture buildup that changes crispy to mushy within seconds. That’s why we cut and plate on towels, so that the towel absorbs the moisture and keeps the quesadillas crisp and delicious.

You now have quesadillas that are covered in a golden, crispy cheese crust that, depending on the cheese you use, is likely to be much healthier and more nutritious than a batter-fried food. It delivers wonderful flavor and crunch without the bad stuff that comes along with deep fried foods. The best part? This dish is dirt cheap to make. You can plate up 5 full quesadillas or 20 wedges for about $5, depending on how inexpensive tortillas and cheese are near you.

Take the cheese crust idea to things like tuna sandwiches and other dishes where you want crispy but not oily. You’ll be amazed at how you can make crispy and delicious without oil and grease.

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I’m on vacation for the first time in years, out in Seattle. During this time, I’ll be doing much, much less online, but on those few occasions when I feel like firing up the machinery, I’ll post stuff.

Today’s topic is easy: hotel coffee. One of the most common and accurate complaints is that hotel room coffee sucks, and if you use the coffeemaker as designed, it does indeed. Coffee needs 3 things to work well: time to brew, water close to boiling temperature, and sufficient quantity of coffee grinds. Hotel room coffeemakers generally fail at all 3.

To remedy this, there’s a relatively easy fix that addresses 2 out of 3. First, if you can, double up the individual serving packets of coffee. Typically hotels provide one regular and one decaf. If you’re going for flavor, use both. If there isn’t room, wait for the next step.

Process the coffee like normal. Then after it’s done brewing, remove the filter packet and put it in the cup or carafe. If you have the decaf packet, put it in now as well. Let it steep for another 2-3 minutes, then pull both packets. Voila! You’ll have coffee that tastes like coffee. It may lack the double strength caffeine boost you’re looking for, but at least the flavor will be there.

Bonus tip: if you get a chance during your travels to scoop up a couple of the little individual serving size salt packets, grab a few. Take the barest punch of salt and add it to your hotel coffee and it will dramatically reduce any of the bitter flavors. The reason for this is simple: salt partially blocks the neuroreceptors on your tongue that detect bitterness, making a bitter coffee a little more palatable.

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One claim I’ve heard repeatedly about lighter fluid and grilling is that it imparts a flavor to your food. Sorry folks, I’ve got to call Bravo Sierra on this. Let’s hit the science!

Most lighter fluid is an aliphatic petroleum distillate of some kind, similar if not identical to naphtha. While individual manufacturers don’t disclose the exact ingredients of their lighter fluids, it just takes a quick Google for the MSDS (material safety data sheets) for just about any consumer product to at least get an idea of what’s inside, if not exact composition.

So let’s look at some of the properties of this class of chemicals:

• Most boil in vapor below 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Most ignite below 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Most charcoal grills cook at temperatures from 500 – 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Basic chemistry says that even if you dump an entire bottle of lighter fluid onto your grill, unless the food is on there while you’re pouring on the fluid (which is stupid for different reasons), there will be no trace of it left by the time you’re actually ready to cook. I can’t think of a single part of a charcoal grill interior that would be less than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which is when these fluids would boil away.

The basic truth is this: lighter fluid, unless you’re pouring it on while the food is on the grill, simply boils up and burns away far too quickly for it to have any impact on the food you’re cooking.

Full disclosure: no one from the lighter fluid industry paid for this post. It’s just me getting cranky at misconceptions fueled [pun] by lack of science knowledge.

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