Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

As the culinary world fills up with overly complicated recipes and never-ending ingredient lists, Michael Ruhlman blasts through the surplus of information and delivers this innovative, straightforward book that cuts to the core of cooking. Ratio provides one of the greatest kitchen lessons there is—and it makes cooking easier and more satisfying than ever.

Ratio takes us to the very “truth” of cooking: it is not about recipes but rather about basic ratios and fundamental techniques that make all food come together, simply. When you know a culinary ratio, it’s not like knowing a single recipe, it’s instantly knowing a thousand. With thirty-three ratios and suggestions for enticing variations, Ratio is the truth of cooking: basic preparations that teach us how the fundamental ingredients of the kitchen—water, flour, butter and oils, milk and cream, and eggs—work. Change the ratio and bread dough becomes pasta dough, cakes become muffins become popovers become crepes. 

Why spend time sorting through the millions of cookie recipes available in books, magazines, and on the Internet? Isn’t it easier just to remember 1-2-3? That’s the ratio of ingredients that always make a basic, delicious cookie dough: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, and 3 parts flour. From there, add anything you want—chocolate, lemon and orange zest, nuts, poppy seeds, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, almond extract, or peanut butter, to name a few favorite additions.

About the Author:

Michael Ruhlman is the author of award-winning cookbooks and nonfiction narratives. He is the author of chef Thomas Keller's seminal The French Laundry Cookbook as well as the highly successful series about the training of chefs: The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef. He is also the author of The Elements of Cooking and Ratio. Ruhlman has worked at The New York Times and as a food columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He has attended the Culinary Institute of America and is the author of eighteen books--about food and cooking, and also such wide ranging subjects as a pediatric heart surgeon and building wooden boats. Michael lives with his wife in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.

Release Date: 2010

Condition: New