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 [...]]]> “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

Kermit Lynch founded his eponymous wine store in San Francisco around the time his friend [...]]]> Sometimes the best insights on a topic come from the most opinionated cranks.  That’s true in food (Richard Olney) and it’s true in wine. Especially in Kermit Lynch’s book: Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France.

Kermit Lynch founded his eponymous wine store in San Francisco around the time his friend Alice Waters was starting to make waves with Chez Panisse.  And like her, he evolved into one of the leading thought leaders on the meaningful relationship between how something is grown and produced (grapes) and how it is consumed (wine).

Versus any educational textbook on wine, Adventures On The Wine Route is an interesting “on the road again”-type tour of most of the major wine growing regions in France: full of opinions, encounters with quirky vintners,  and great insights into the wine making process, from grape to bottle.

The most memorable and valuable sections of the book reflect where his heart resides.  He writes most evocatively of the people, the landscape, the food, and the wine of Provence, and the Northern and Southern wine growing areas of the Rhone Valley.

He is also clear in what he doesn’t like: wine rating systems that assign numbers to wines, filtering, chaptalization, and anything involving modern machinery and the process of producing great wine.

If you are looking for the latest thoughts on recent French vintages, this is probably not the book, since it is a bit dated (1988).

However, in order to better understand the passion that the production and enjoyment good wine evokes, Adventures On The Wine Route is an essential addition to any foodie’s bookshelf.

To get a sense of where his head is at now on the wines of France, and the rest of the world, you can subscribe to Kermit Lynch’s wine shop newsletter.