The secret ingredient is...

Cafe Society
1

I finally realized… the secret ingredient in most things is…
Italian Dressing.

I was watching the news and they had someone from a local pork festival talking about the marinated pork chops they feature… Marinated in vinegar, seasoned salt, and (looks around sheepishly) Italian Dressing. My Dad had a recipe for Blue Cheese dressing that he got from LBJ’s personal chef. One of the ingredients was “the last 1/4 inch from a bottle of Italian Dressing” or a packet of Hidden Valley Italian Dressing.

We had a cook out yesterday and the two dishes that got the most complements and mentions were the petite gold potatoes quartered and seasoned with seasoning salt, pepper, Italian dressing, and Parmesan Cheese then baked, and the grilled vegies, marinated in… oh, you get it by now.

2

And Italian dressing is basically vinegar & oil, so…

3

Well, Italian dressing is oil and vinegar and spices. Salt, pepper, garlic, and oregano feature prominently, though you can add different spices according to taste. Other common spices include basil and parsley, and a lot of people put some sort of sweetener in it, too.

4

I thought the secret ingredient was love!

5

Huh, I thought it was PEOPLE! :eek:

6

,nothing.
“To make something special you just have to believe it’s special.”
Mr Ping

From Kung Fu Panda

7

Commercial mass market Italian dressing is so loaded with sugar/HFCS, I’d rather eat my salad dry. It is not too bad in a marinade but since I don’t have it around for salads, it is easier and often tastier to make it from scratch. I’d think the thickeners in Wishbone and the like would work against the marinading action, too.

8

*Good lord! According to the spetrolyzer, Spragel’s secret ingredient was… water! Ordinary water!

<SNIP>

Yes, ordinary water, laced with nothing more than a few spoonfuls of LSD. *

9

This is why I steer away from low fat dressings or make my own.

10

Garlic! Garlic! The best of all the cries!
It is the noblest physic, 'gainst all of paradise!
It is my chiefest wealth, this garlic for to cry!
So if you love your health, my garlic then come buy!

11

[Marge Simpson]
You might say the secret ingredient is…salt.
[/Marge Simpson]

12

For my entire life whenever someone has asked me to guess the secret ingredient, I’ve always said Oregano. I’ve been right about two-thirds of the time. YMMV.

13

Try an experiment: For the next two years, alternate “oregano” with “nutmeg,” and see if your average goes up or down.

14

Yeah, nutmeg was most of the other third.

15

There’s generally not much overlap between dishes where you’d expect to find oregano and dishes where you’d expect to find nutmeg. And it’s also really hard to add nutmeg to a dish in quantities large enough that it could be relevant, but also small enough that you can’t immediately recognize it.

16

I’d have thought the secret ingredient would be soy sauce.

17

My secret ingredient is horseradish.

18

To the extent that I have a single secret ingredient, it’s probably crushed black olives. They add a pleasant zing to all sorts of things.

19

Mine is lemon juice. Occasionally lime juice.

20

I think we’ve done this a few times before, but, as far as “secret ingredients” go (which I really don’t believe in), for me it tends to be one of the following: fish sauce, vinegar or other acidic element (could be lemon or lime), a fragrant spice (like cloves, nutmeg, or allspice), an herb that isn’t used typically in day-to-day cooking (like tarragon or chervil or even lovage), or straight up MSG.