Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Title: Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
Author: Michael Ruhlman
Genre: Cooking

According to Michael Ruhlman, there are essentially two things you need to be a really excellent cook: technique, and understanding of the building blocks of a recipe. While the title of Ratio might lead you to think it’s a building-block book, there is just as much technique as math; the building blocks provide the organization rather than the focus. It’s not all technical and theoretical, either; the recipe are sprinkled throughout like chocolate chips in really good cookies (1 part sugar, 2 parts butter, three parts flour).

Ratio takes us through five basic categories of the building blocks of good cooking—home of professional. It’s that basic. Those categories are doughs & batters (a batter is defined as a dough that pours), stocks, farci (French for sausage, which I far prefer to the leaden English “forcemeat”), fat-based sauces, and the custard continuum. The book is marvelously consitent, in tha the ratios are listed in the order that the ingredients are added, so that even recipes with identical ratios, such as pound cake and sponge cake, are distinguished by (you guessed it) technique. Each basic ratio is described, then variations are listed after. And measurements are provided for both weight (the truly precise way to measure) and volume (the way most of us do it). If all you have is you have eggs, butter, flour, sugar, and salt, you can make an amazing variety of things. I actually peeked at the pizza dough ratio myself yesterday, took notes, and promptly swapped half of the white flour for whole wheat and  added parsley, thyme, and oregano. And that, my dear Reading Public, is how the book is intended to be used. Knowing the ratios will help you develop your own recipes, rather than relying on books. It can also help you spot bad recipes, and tweak them into good ones.

Doughs and batters is by far the largest section, and takes us from “lean” (no added fat) bread dough through pasta, pies, biscuits, choux, cakes, quick breads, muffins, popovers, and crepes. If you have trouble with you baking–and baking requires a lot more precision than cooking, then simply reading through the section can help you troubleshoot. Maybe a recipe fails because it has too much liquid? Or not enough starch? The logic and science behind the ratios is very accessible, not to mention delightfully scalable, because sometimes you only want to make enough pancakes for one or two people, as opposed to the 6-8 on the back-of-the-package recipe.  Fat-based sauces, which discusses mayonnaise, vinaigrette, and hollandaise, is the shortest, but I have to confess that it gave me new respect for mayo in particular; or at least the homemade kind. I had never really thought about it, but any flavorings you can put in a vinaigrette, you can put in a mayonnaise. And vice versa.

What appeals to me most about the book is that it speaks to the way I cook. My technique is reasonable, when I put the effort in, and like everyone else who cooks, I’m well aware of the importance of using good materials. Adding in the ratios, though…that’s probably going to make the biggest difference in how I cook from now on.

Overall, it’s highly accessible, well-organized, guide to playing with food that, with relatively little time and effort, will probably get consistently good results.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Thirty Books in Thirty Days. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.