We tried out Taylor Swift's Chiefs game meal of chicken with 5 'seemingly ranch' condiments. The winner was clear.

Libby: 5000/5. Ranch is, put simply, God's gift to earth. The creamy, herby — dare I say, zesty — condiment is my preferred dipping sauce for chicken tenders, pizza, fries, and basically anything you'd find under the food section of a sports bar's menu. To me, this was the highlight of the dipping experience, and I later combined ketchup and ranch (perhaps like Swift herself did at the Chiefs game) to form an even more elite sauce combination. 

Sadly, things only went downhill from there.

Palmer: 4/5. Ranch is not my preferred chicken dipping sauce and I'll rarely seek it out in any case, but I don't really find it offensive. It's obviously pretty good on a chicken tender. Easy control group, middle of the road, but I feel like I should rate it high because I'm already pretty sure that it's going to be the best thing on this list.  

Libby: 3/ 5. Normally I am a blue cheese fiend, but this particular sauce was too runny for my liking. I prefer a blue cheese dipping sauce that's chunky and rich, and this one was thin and sort of bland. Plus, I think blue cheese lends itself better to a spicy, vinegary Buffalo wing, which these tenders were not. 

Palmer: 3/5. I love blue cheese proper, but am not always a blue cheese dressing person, and it's not going to be my first choice for a naked chicken tender. If I had a spicier sauce like buffalo on the tender itself, like Libby said, it'd be a different story for me.

Libby: 2.5/5 Somehow, this wasn't the worst dipping sauce of the bunch, although the thought of shoveling more cultured dairy onto a chicken tender is making me feel nauseous. Luckily, sour cream is so mildly flavored that once I got over the initial horror of the combination, I was able to pretend like I was eating something else. Also, no one in their right mind would mix up sour cream and ranch. 

After trying the sour cream + chicken combo, I had to palate cleanse with some ketchup. 

Palmer: 2/5. From the moment that I scooped up the sour cream to the second I put that tender in my mouth, something felt incorrect about this. Sour cream goes hard. It does not go hard on a chicken tender, for me personally. Also, looking at it on the plate, I think this is a hard one to give the "seemingly ranch" descriptor. 

Libby: 3/5. I only had Japanese kewpie mayo in my fridge, and I think this is why I enjoyed the combination as much as I did. It's not the first thing I would reach for while eating chicken tenders, but the umami-ness and slight tang of Japanese mayo paired with the tendies reminded me of the mouth-watering karaage fried chicken + unctuous mayo the Japanese spot in my neighborhood serves. That version is far superior to this, but still, I didn't hate the mayo as much as I expected to. 

Palmer: 2.5/5. This is where my resolve started to flag. Maybe I still had some sour cream in my mouth or something, but raw mayo on this raw chicken tender did not land for me. As a reward, I drank some water for the first time during this chicken tasting and also tried a tender with some slightly sweeter Kewpie mayonnaise, and it was a bit better. Like Libby, I now want karaage. 

Libby: 0/5. I almost threw up while eating this. I elected to eat the Alfredo sauce cold, straight from a jar, and from the minute the cheese sauce-coated tender hit my tongue, all I was focused on was trying to keep it down. I would not recommend this to my worst enemy. 

Palmer: 0/5. Absolutely not. In the spirit of ranch, I did not heat up this alfredo dressing. I also do not like alfredo on the best of days, so I'm probably a bit biased.  But this was somehow so bland and also so incorrect, and also so far in my chicken tasting journey, that I really had to force myself to swallow it and then kind of felt like I was going to vom.

Ultimately, our best rated chicken/sauce combo was classic, verified ranch, which broke our scale.

Libby: As previously mentioned, I am a ranch addict, so it comes as no surprise that the ranch was my favorite of the bunch. I might get sued for saying this, but I'd recommend combining your ketchup and ranch into one sorta-insane but definitely delicious dipping sauce. I unabashedly love both ketchup and ranch, and combining them into a super condiment for chicken tenders is my idea of game-day perfection. 

Palmer: My favorite out of this slate was definitely the ranch itself. That being said, despite having been raised in the Midwest, I am not a ranch girl, and would have preferred to eat these with literally any kind of sauce that had even the mildest kick. Spicy mayo. Buffalo sauce. Sriracha, if you could find any at the grocery store these days. That being said, Libby's mayochup suggestion did soothe my palate with some nice acidity and sweetness at the end of this challenge.