Our Favorite Fast Food Ranch Sauce Is One You Might Not Expect

We are of the belief that fast food sauce is a culinary art. The geniuses at Kentucky Fried Chicken figured out how to make an excellent honey mustard that strikes the ideal balance between sweet and tangy while bringing a scientifically perfected viscosity. Don't even get us started on Burger King's Zesty Sauce or Chick-fil-A's eponymous sauce. During the world's best work assignment, we decided to find out which fast food restaurant has the best ranch sauce and surprised everyone, including ourselves with the answer.

In our humble opinion, Taco Bell has the best ranch sauce out there. We did a side-by-side comparison of sauces from 11 popular fast food chains including, in order of ranking; Chick-fil-A, Sonic, Burger King, McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Wendy's, Shake Shack, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, Wing Stop, and of course, our number one winner: The spicy ranch from Taco Bell. We ordered fries from each restaurant as the ranch transport vehicle and Taco Bell's win was so unexpected that we didn't realize until the last minute that they don't even serve fries (their nacho fries were not on the menu at the time of our test), so we used cheesy fiesta potatoes. The kiss of heat, the tangy hint of vinegar, mixed with the cooling sour cream, is the perfect combination for honestly anything. You'll have to check with your local Taco Bell, but from our research, a single serving of Taco Bell's ranch dip will run you 0.50 cents. 

If you can't get enough of Taco Bell's spicy ranch sauce, then there's good news for you, there are various internet recipes out there. They all have slightly different tips for getting to the tangy-ranchy-spice promised land, they all feature some sort of homemade ranch combined with a hot sauce. Because this is a sauce that's spectacular with everything from fries to a bean burrito, your probably won't notice a little variation, so we say go with your favorite ranch mix and hot sauce when giving it a go.

Homemade ranch is not that hard to make, especially if you keep a jar of ranch powder around, which is also really easy to make from scratch. To make ranch dressing, we recommend combining 2 tablespoons of dry powder with ¾ cup of sour cream or Greek yogurt and 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise. You can adjust either of the last two ingredients if you'd like a thicker or thinner sauce. For the hot sauce, we recommend adding a couple of tablespoons of your favorite habanero sauce (more if you like spice). If you're feeling really ambitious you can also make the habanero sauce from scratch and give Taco Bell a run for their money.