#Catalina July 2

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Today for the 30-Day Ingredient Coach4aday Challenge my food is CATALINA Salad Dressing.

It may be very obvious, but Ranch Salad Dressing is the most popular choice in the United States. Surveys often have 40% of Americans stating it is there #1 choice. Inventing Ranch Dressing is credited to Steve Henson. Fantastic historical article on this condiment in the NY Times by Julia Moskin if you are interested.

Top Salad Dressings in the US

The Food Channel produced a list in 2019 on the Top Ten Salad Dressings. See below.

Looking at this list I realized my favorite Kraft’s Catalina Dressing was not Top 10 Worthy.

Ingredient of the Day-Modified Food Starch

Catalina can best be described as a type of French Dressing. True French dressing is a vinaigrette, made with three parts oil to one part vinegar. The vinegar is usually red or white wine vinegar, and the oil is olive oil. 

Comfort fell over me as I went ingredient hunting with my bottle of Catalina and discovered vinegar and oil were included. Yet there were items in their recipe I needed to get educated on especially Modified Food Starch

Article on Modified Food Starch

I read an article on this topic written by Merinda Teller who is a clinical researcher. It was written in 2020 and can be found here.

The takeaway from the article was educational to say the least. Even discovered a recipe that I might try one day soon.