Ratio by Michael Ruhlman (Cookbook Spotlight)

One of the first and most influential books that taught me how to think like a chef is Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. The author himself sums up the message of the book when he says, “Ratios liberate you - when you know the ratio and some basic techniques, then you really can start to cook.”

The most obvious take away is that ratios between core ingredients are important, and as long as those ratios are preserved, the finished dish will still be successful. Not only does this help with confidently increasing or decreasing the size of a dish, but thinking this way allows you to see completely different dishes in terms of a ratio. How will a saute with many vegetables turn out with more mushrooms, less broccoli, or larger pieces of onion? WIll putting the same amount of salt on a thicker vs thinner steak make it taste better or worse? What are the core ingredients in these braised short ribs, and what ingredients can you change without changing the essence of the dish? Thinking about how adjusting ratios in all of your cooking and how those adjustments affect the finished flavor and texture will only help to improve your cooking.

The next important take away from this book is the importance of technique. Every unique dish in the book has a unique way of combining the ingredients to ultimately create that dish. Eclair dough and pancakes, have similar ingredients in a similar ratio, but the resulting dish is completely different because of the technique used to combine those ingredients. This serves to illustrate again how to look at food like a chef. How can the same ingredients be combined in different ways? What happens if you make pork butt in a pressure cooker versus slow cooked in lard for 12 hours? Playing around with different techniques for the same ingredients helps to understand how you can change flavors without changing any ingredients.

Once you can look at a recipe or a dish, analyze the ratios and the core ingredients, understand the effect of the techniques, then it becomes easy to experiment. The framework provided by the ratio and the technique allows for infinite variability in each dish. Let’s take those braised short ribs I mentioned earlier. You could use red wine and mushrooms for an earthy, French dish. You could use tequila and jalapeños for a Mexican dish. You could even use soy sauce and ginger to flavor an Asian inspired dish. Or you could do any other of a myriad of combinations. Understanding the fundamentals of cooking allows you to break all the rules as you need and still know that a dish will end up more or less as you hoped.

By helping cooks to understand the value and relationship between ratios of ingredients, techniques, and experimentation, Ratio can truly help anyone who habitually burns water approach cooking much more confidently.