Around the world, people dip boring foods in ranch dressing to make them taste better. Foods like carrots, celery, and Clark Matthews favorite, broccoli. In Oklahoma, we dip those foods in ranch, but we dip other types of foods, too. Foods that probably don't need it. Foods like fried pickles, hot wings, loaded chili cheese & bacon fries, and most notably, pizza.
Yes, Oklahomans like to dip pizza in ranch dressing. I'm not sure why we do this. Pizza tastes so amazing on its own "“ it's hard to screw up greasy dough, greasy cheese, greasy meats, and tomato sauce "“ that it doesn't need the support of a rich creamy dressing to improve its taste. Yet for some reason, Oklahoman's like me, you and probably even Toby Keith find the need to soak each and every bite of our pizza in enough ranch dressing to make an Italian think that we all own stock in buttermilk.
Maybe we do this in a subconscious effort to make pizza even more unhealthy. It's no lie that we're one of the fattest states in the country, so dipping a 500 calorie slice of pizza in 200 calories of processed buttermilk and spices just seems like the right thing to do. But if that were the reason, we would dip pizza in other things like blue cheese, chocolate and more pizza. You don't see anyone doing that.
Regardless of why we do it, our dependence on ranch is actually kind of comical. One time, I was stuck in an elevator with a group of people who were debating which pizza place to visit for lunch. During the conversation, someone mentioned they should go to Mazzio's because they "had the best ranch dressing." Everyone in the elevator agreed. They all seemed very sure of their decision; smiling and nodding like it was the right thing to do.
It wasn't.
Lost in the middle-management decision making process was the fact that a group of moderately intelligent professionals just chose a pizza establishment based not on the quality of the pizza, but on the quality of the ranch dressing that the pizza would be dipped in. That's dumb. It would be like choosing a burger joint because you like it's ketchup, or like buying a new car from Diffee because you like young blond haired boys annoying commercials...or something like that.
Anyway, since Mazzios is an Oklahoma-based company, I bet that one day it will be renamed "Mazzio's and Ranch Dressing" just to keep the business up. To one up them, I bet that Hideaway Pizza will then rename itself Hidden Valley Pizza.
Also, I bet a Pizza Ranch will finally open here. That's a no brainer.
