I'll be honest: I didn't grow up eating ranch dressing outside of the occasional bag of Cool Ranch Doritos (this was back before they were "Cooler"), and I've personally never developed much of a taste for it. That said, there's a reason why it's the number one selling flavor of bottled dressing in America. Creamy, fatty, and tangy, it coats even the dullest-tasting leaf of iceberg lettuce or the most underdeveloped pizza crust with a salty, herbal tang. Instant flavor, just shake, squeeze, eat, and repeat. So which bottled dressing is the best? More

My wife loves salad dressing, particularly the that I keep in constant supply in a squeeze bottle in the fridge. I know the recipe by heart, but problems arise when I'm out of town, my wife has a brand new box of arugula, and the dressing's just run out. Here's a little trick I devised to make sure that never happens again: just write the recipe directly on the squeeze bottle. More

The directions are simple: boil a piece of tofu, drain it, and puree it in the blender with Saikkyo miso (a particularly sweet and winey variety) with a bit of mirin (sweet sake) and salt to taste. Three ingredients in all, and either firm or soft tofu works. More

For me, the big question about vinaigrettes has never really been "how?" but "why?" Is emulsifying the oil and acid really necessary? Does adding the olive oil and the vinegar to the salad bowl individually really make for an inferior salad? Could every red-sauce Italian joint with oil and vinegar jugs in the world be wrong? Well, stranger things have been true. I decided that a bit of hard-core kitchen work was in order. More