Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

Last year, I singled out Michael Ruhlman's Ratio as my cookbook of the year. I still stand by that decision.

Today, Michael Ruhlmam announced the release of the Ratio app for Android devices. I quickly downloaded it, and it is pretty keen. It seems to include a lot of the content from the book. More importantly, it has an interactive tool that is incredibly useful.

Let's say you want to make a cookie dough. The ratio calls for 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, and 3 parts flour. By default, these are set to 2, 4, and 6 ounces. Let's say you don't have a scale handy, though. You could convert these all to cups instead (or, say, the flour and sugar could be converted to cups and the fat could be converted to grams or liters or whatnot). Six ounces is 1.2 cups - but what if you only have one cup? Replace the 1.2 with a 1 and the app calculates the quantities of the other ingredients.

Now, the app isn't perfect. On my phone (an HTC Evo) the display gets cut off (not in a seriously problematic way, but it isn't pretty) unless I use it in landscape mode. Still, I've been looking for useful Android cooking apps and this is the one that I can see myself actually using a lot.

Oh yeah. There's an iPhone version, too.

This year we've seen a ton of great cookbooks come out. Many of them have been gorgeous. Several of them have been extremely useful.

There is one cookbook that came out in 2009 that is notable despite the fact that it isn't gorgeous. It isn't a hefty tome filled with full color pictures. It is a small, slim, no-frills book that is designed to be used.

That book is Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, and it is my pick for the best cookbook of the year.

Buy it on Amazon:
Ratio focuses upon 32 ratios that provide skeletal frameworks to food. We can build upon these frameworks in an infinite number of ways to produce a huge variety of different recipe. Bread? That's five parts flour to two parts liquid. That's different from the framework for a biscuit, which is three parts flour to two parts liquid to one part fat. The ratios aren't just limited to baked good, either. They include meats, stocks, sauces, and custards as well.

As readers of this blog know, I'm not a huge fan of recipes. Ratio has recipes, but they are the kind I like: recipes designed to be tweaked and changed. Ruhlman offers plenty of suggestions, using the ratios as a structure for creativity.

Ratio teaches you how to think about cooking. This isn't the science of food. Instead it instructs you in how to cook improvisationally. The fact that a strong structure is key to improvisation is one of those seemingly-paradoxical truths. I've used Ratio both as a reference and as a tool to get my creative juices flowing. I've also used it to help solve problems. A friend of mine asked me the other day to help her figure out how to make cookies with a box of lemon cake mix. I found the ingredient list and nutritional information on-line. There I found that one serving of the mix is 43g almost half of which is sugar. I'd guessed that somewhere between 15-20g would be flour. The rest was fat, leavening, flavoring, and texturizing ingredients.

So, the mix itself had a ratio of sugar to flour that was a just a bit more than 1:1, and it included a bit of fat.

I pulled out Ratio and found out that cookies are built upon a ratio of 3 parts flour, 1 part sugar, and 2 parts fat. To get this, I'd take the cake mix (1 part sugar and 1 part flour) and add an equal amount (2 parts) flour and add slightly less than an equal amount (2 parts) of butter. Mix that to a dough. Make cookies.

Ratio is one of those cookbooks that is meant to be used, not merely admired. Its size makes it easy to use in the kitchen, but - if you have an iPhone - you have another option, too: Ruhlman is releasing a Ratio iPhone app that looks incredibly useful.

Read parts one and two.

Once you learn why a recipe works the way it does, you are ready to change it. If you know the roles that the ingredients play in a recipe, you can be confident when you want to make simple substitutions and additions to improve the recipe. Similarly, if you know that the reason a particular dish is braised is because the low cooking temperature slowly breaks down the tough proteins in a particular ingredient, you can experiment with other methods of doing the same thing (such as marinating that ingredient in an acidic solution).

When I change recipes, I tend to think in terms of balancing. Each recipe balances along several different axes:

• flavors (salty vs. sweet vs. bitter vs. sour vs. umami)
• textures (soft vs. tough vs. crispy vs. creamy vs. whatever)
• moisture (wet vs. dry)
• pH level (acidity vs. basicity)
• and others, potentially, depending on the recipe - a soup, for example, might have a particular balance to the size of solid ingredients within it.

When I break a recipe and recreate it, I don't always keep these balances, but I do try to remain aware of them. I might, for instance, want the dish I'm making to be sweeter and creamier than the original dish that I have a recipe for. In such a case, knowing what gave rise to the original balance in flavor and texture would be invaluable.

When I make changes in a recipe, I try to think about how those changes will affect the balances above. Consider a very simple example: a grilled cheese sandwich.

Ingredients:
2 slices white bread
2 slices American cheese
2 Tablespoons butter

Directions:
Put cheese between bread. Heat 1 tablespoon butter on skillet until melted. Place sandwich on melted butter. Cook until cheese begins to melt. Press down on sandwich with spatula. Remove sandwich from skillet. Heat the remainder of the butter until it is melted. Replace sandwich on skillet, untoasted side down, and cook until done.

How might we change this recipe? Maybe I want melted sharp cheddar cheese on pumpernickel with a slice of tomato. Can I use the same directions?

First, I ask myself why the original recipe works and how the changes would affect it:

1. Cheddar will melt more slowly than the American cheese, and will be denser once melted.
2. Pumpernickel will be denser than the white bread, making it less compressible.
3. Pumpernickel might transmit heat differently than the white bread, leading to a different rate of cheese melting
4. The original recipe calls for only cheese slices between the bread. The addition of tomato might reduce the sandwich's structural integrity.
5. Tomato might also affect the rate of cheese melting.

Next, I might consider balance:

• Flavor: A sharp cheese, a sour bread, and tomato will make this sandwich much more acidic/sour than the relatively bland-flavored original that gets most of its flavor from fat. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we might want to up the fat flavor in this if we want it to still taste something like a grilled cheese sandwich.
• Texture: The original is gooey on the inside, but crispy on the outside. The heartier cheese and bread of the altered version will make for a denser sandwich altogether. Again, this isn't necessarily bad, but it should be noted.
• Moisture: A tablespoon of butter is going to have less of an impact on the pumpernickel than it would on the white bread. Also, tomatoes are fairly wet - and the liquid would be inside the sandwich, which seems awkward.

So, how might I adapt this recipe?

Well, I could add some additional butter. That could both even out the flavor a bit and (if I spread some on the inside of the sandwich) help the cheese melt. Additional butter would also help the bread compress. I might consider starting the sandwich off in the oven so that the cheese begins to melt before I even put it into the skillet. I might also consider cooking the tomato first to render out some of the liquid from it. Alternately, I might cook the sandwich in the oven open-faced first, then place a slice of tomato in between the melted cheese slices so that it would remain in place in the skillet. If I didn't have an irrational aversion to microwave ovens, I might even pop the sandwich into one for a bit before it hit the skillet (to soften the bread and pre-melt the cheese).

Lessons in Recipe Breaking

A number of cookbooks are extremely useful when following this method. Though it isn't for beginners, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is unmatched as a tool for figuring out why recipes work the way they do. Shirley Corriher's Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed and BakeWise are more accessible. They are fairly standard books of recipes, but they provide a good bit of explanation of how and why the recipes work the way they do. As a result, they give you hundreds of recipes ready for adaptation, with a lot of the deciphering work already done for you. Sally Scneider's The Improvisational Cook is a walk-through of something very like the entire process that I've detailed. Her book has a number of recipes with variants of each. She doesn't always explain the reasoning behind each of these variants, but if you follow the thought processes detailed here you should have no problem in using her examples to create your own recipe variants. I am, perhaps, most excited by Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking - a brand new book that promises to reveal the basic ratios that govern the balances in foods. I haven't seen it yet, but from what I've read in previews, it sounds like a superb tool for deciphering recipes, figuring out the essential bits of recipes, and understanding how to alter them while retaining their basic structure.