Pizza Ranch? No. Pizza Ranch.

It is time for the Midwest to live up to its promise.

I am both a gullible person and a literal one, which means I am frequently disappointed by the realities of figurative language—“pea soup fog,” “hogwash.” When I was a child, one phrase disappointed me more than any other: “pizza ranch.”

In my home state of Iowa, Pizza Ranch was neither a condiment nor a grange for Italian cowboys but instead a disappointing chain of pizza buffets. The chain now has more than 200 locations in 15 states, but if you’ve been to one Pizza Ranch, you’ve been to them all. They all have the same mural of a Conestoga wagon and a fretful-looking horse. Their buffets offer the same dewy, heavily cheesed pizzas nestled under heat lamps in an okay corral. They serve a streusel dessert pizza inexplicably called “Cactus Bread” and have a very affordable party room. I know this because my family gathered in the party room of a Waverly, Iowa, Pizza Ranch after my beloved granny’s funeral—fitting, as she would never have been caught there alive.

But I do not want to dwell on Pizza Ranch as a business. Many talented political journalists have already chronicled its weekly blog of Bible verses, its importance as a campaign stop for Republican politicians, and its co-founder’s arrest for trying to collect semen samples from teenage employees for a fake research study.

I am more interested in its semantic deficiencies. The ultimate betrayal of the Pizza Ranch is that it serves neither ranch-flavored pizza nor pizza-flavored ranch.

Like a lot of Midwesterners, I grew up dipping my pizza in bottled ranch dressing. Before you speed off on your Vespa in a fit of pique, silk scarves snapping menacingly in the breeze, consider the pizza in question. The “default” pie in my hometown was much thicker, softer, and less wholesome than its Neopolitan ancestor. A doughy slice of Casey’s pepperoni could be transported by a tangy splort of ranch. The dressing’s acidity seemed to cancel out the grease, the buttermilk and cheese balancing like a math equation. Central Time pizzaiolos have mostly embraced the combo. Today, many of the region’s higher-end pizzerias make and sell their own ranch for dipping.

To be clear, many people outside of the Midwest also enjoy ranch dressing on pizza. I’m not trying to be one of those people who region-locks basic human experiences, like owning a lawn goose or experiencing weather. But in other regions, the pairing seems more controversial. It has enough national fans that Bath & Body Works made a pizza and ranch candle last year and enough national haters that they almost immediately stopped making it. (If anyone tracks down that candle, I will send you my mailing address with such speed, there will be no time for me to check CaseNet to see if you are a murderer).

I will let the haters adjudicate whether ranch dressing on pizza is “allowed.” This is a question on par with “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” in that it was designed to be answered at excruciating cocktail parties attended by the most boring people you know. My view on this is known. I have done far worse things to ranch dressing for this newsletter.

It was time to do something good to it. For too long, pizza-on-ranch lovers have struggled like goons in an infomercial, fumbling their slices and sauce ramekins with oafish hands. It was time to fuse the flavors. It was time to make the pizza ranch.

My first few batches were needlessly fussy. I tried augmenting a buttermilk base with fresh Italian herbs and homemade tomato powder, or the brine from some lacto-fermented tomatoes I had vac-sealed and then forgotten about for a few months. In recipe development, we call this “the Coward’s Gambit”; the goal is to appease food snobs by reminding them you own The Noma Guide to Fermentation.

But this is not a recipe for the snobs. My ultimate goal was a dressing that tasted not like funky chef bait but like a ‘90s scratch-and-sniff pizza sticker. For that reason, the final dressing augments a classic buttermilk-and-mayo base with mostly dried herbs, powdered alliums, a little fresh parm, and both tomato paste and tomato sauce. The paste and sauce combo was crucial to unlocking the requisite pizza-sticker must.

Yes, that combo also means that I’m going to make you open two different cans and only use parts of them. This is the kind of thing that drives my husband, a more practical recipe developer and benevolent soul, completely crazy. He would go out of his way to scale or adjust the recipe so that you wouldn’t have to put two unfinished cans in the fridge.

But I am a hostile recipe developer who believes in struggling against her readers like Jacob wrestling God.

RECIPE: Pizza Ranch

The end result is worth it—pizza- and ranch-essenced, a multi-dimensional meal rendered on a single plane. It’s a Willy Wonka invention without the sinister finger-wagging. We are all gluttonous children, sprinting toward whatever wild and wonderful things this violent world still holds.

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