“The recipe looked great in the magazine (book, online, or on TV), but then I tried to make it and it just didn’t work”.
Behind this complaint is the mistaken belief that simply following recipes from a cookbook will actually teach you to cook well, as if a paint by numbers kit could teach you to create great art.
The unfortunate truth is that good cooking is a craft, something that all of us generally learn over time through trial and error. A recipe is simply an overview, but in order to make the dish well, you need some basic understanding of the skills and the universal principles that are the foundations of all cooking.
After reading Michael Ruhlman’s new book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cookingwe found it to be an invaluable resource that can actually help us to understand some of these universal truths and thereby become better cooks.
Rather than being a standard cookbook, Ratio is a proposal to rethink the way we approach cooking.
Ruhlman’s premise is that the keys to consistently good baked goods, sauces, and other kitchen staples are simple ratios, generally based upon the weight of ingredients rather than their volume:
A bread dough recipe reduced to its essentials is 5 parts flour to 3 parts water (with a little yeast and salt), while a base cookie recipe is as simple as 1-2-3: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat and 3 parts flour.
By thinking in terms of ratios, a cook moves from using measuring cups and spoons, to using a simple digital kitchen scale that can help turn out perfectly proportioned breads, cookies, and sauces.
Working with a scale in the kitchen always seemed a bit fussy to us; something more akin to a science lab than a home kitchen. But what Ratio teaches is that beneath all the glorious flavors, colors and textures of the foods seen in restaurants and in the magazines, the cooking of food is an endeavor rooted in basic science.
And by having a basic, good quality digital scale, your results in baking will become significantly better. And while there are some very fancy scales out there, we find this basic and inexpensive digital kitchen scale works perfectly.
Our experience following the basic bread dough ratio in the book was a revelation. While we’ve made bread often enough before, there were always wide swings in variation in how the dough worked and in the finished bread.
By following the simple 5/3 bread dough ratio, however, the dough we made had the smooth and elastic feel that always tended to elude us when we were using volume measurements instead of weight ratios.
Ruhlman readily admits that the ratio concept is most applicable to baked goods, and for those sections alone the book is a great resource. The later sections on sauces and vinaigrettes are mostly good common sense for a home cook, rather than a revelation. In general, however, Ratio belongs on any complete foodie bookshelf, if not the kitchen counter itself.
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, by Michael Ruhlman
EatWisconsin says
I love Ruhlman’s books and cannot wait to get my hands on this one.
Jeff says
Weight measurements for baking is the single change in how I was making bread that took the skill from being a pain in the butt, to a weekly Sunday afternoon activity. It is SO much easier to just weigh everything out and throw it in the stand mixer than to babysit cups and tablespoons and just the right amount of water, etc., etc., etc.
Another good “cooking basics” is Sally Schneider’s “How to Cook” – it uses base recipes and then gives common or simple derivations and variations. It can sometimes be a bit of a pain (e.g., an over-reliance on “fancy” ingredients like saffron or shallot or morels when more readily on-hand ingredients like tumeric, onion, or button mushrooms would suffice), but the theme of the book, basics, is well-conveyed and shows how even “fancy” restaurant food is just the same thing with fancier ingredients (to wit: the said saffron, shallots and morels).
Foodie says
We think it’s one of his better ones. We also like his view inside the Culinary Institute of America: The Making of a Chef. You also get the background on where he learned the concepts behind Ratio.
Foodie says
@Jeff,
I also think we are going to be baking a lot more bread if we can avoid the “babysitting”. Our big frustration is never being sure just what kind of dough we were going to end up with.
Thanks also for the tip on Schneider’s book. Looks like it would be something right up our alley.
Eric says
I’m currently reading through this book and find it to be a great resource while helping me think about cooking in a different and intuitive way. So far I highly recommend it.