Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking | Hacker News Reader

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

blog.ruhlman.com

21 pointsKC8ZKF13 comments

Well I take his point that expressing quantities in ratios may make more sense that absolute values. But aside from baking (and in particular anything involving yeast), cooking is not very sensitive to quantity variations. For people that cook a lot, these things come easy after a while, and for people that don't, they will have to follow a recipe anyway.

I remember when I first taught myself to cook obsessing about what constituted "a medium onion". Medium compared to what? Others in the bag? Others in the store? How I am i supposed to know what the smallest or largest onions in the world look like, so that I could figure out whether my onion was the golden medium?

After a while, I learned that I can have a 50% error in the size of the onion and the food will still be edible. If it's an onion, it will do, much as the OCD geek is screaming "looks a bit small for a medium onion" inside my head.

Ruhlman writes in today's post, "Cooks and bakers are distinctly different creatures. Cooks are the jazz musicians, bakers and pastry chefs are the classical pianists."

But certainly the importance of getting the proper ratio isn't limited to baking. Off the top of my head, mayonnaise, hollandaise, etc. are obvious examples. The "mother sauces", roux, custards, even certain stocks also come to mind. The 2:1:1 ratio for mirepoix isn't finicky but if it's mirepoix you want, you need to be in the ballpark.

I take the idea as, yes, of course there are a great many things you can cook by improvising and feeling your way. But armed with some basic, classic ratios, you can extend the same improvisational approach to riskier territory where you might otherwise want the guidance of a recipe. Whether it's successful at that I couldn't say.

People make their own mayo? I am such an underachiever...

(I can definitely make roux without measuring anything)

You should try it. :-) Homemade mayonnaise is wonderful! You'll never get that flavor from a jar.

1:1 ratios are easy like that.

I think you're simultaneously missing and proving Ruhlman's point. Take anything you know how to make; say, bread. Start subtracting out ingredients: the carmelized medium onion, the herbs, the olive oil. Get to salt, water, flour, and a little yeast; take any of these out, and it's not bread anymore.

Now take your bread "kernel" and look at the ratio between the ingredients. Go read a bunch of (reputable) bread recipes. You'll find that most reputable bread recipes will be some variation on that core ratio, just like both Linux and FreeBSD have a VFS layer and a system call table.

I'm halfway through the book (I'm a fan of Ruhlman's; "Charcuterie" sort of changed my life) and while the ability to generate recipes on the fly is a win, I agree with you that it's not revolutionary. But being able to eyeball any other recipe and see what kernel it's built on (or, if it's a crap recipe, if it's built on any sane ratio at all) is a huge win.

I bow to your judgement since you have actually read the book. I was more reacting to the "Eureka!" tone of the OP (you know, ten long years I have been toiling on this insight etc).

I am certainly intrigued to know how a book about smoking meat changed your life though!

Smoking isn't the half of it. Where before I ate duck, I now eat duck cured for 2 days with cloves, cooked sous-vide in its own rendered fat for 7 hours at 73C, and then stored for 3 weeks. Learning how sausage works, how curing works, and how preserving works is every bit as big of a deal as learning how to make a pan sauce from a fond. Can't recommend that book enough. I'm trying to source a half pig from a local farm; when I do, I'm going to work my way through the book start to finish, blogging it like the Alinea Cookbook blogger did.

Sous-vide, something else you don't want to get me started on; amazed that nobody here has picked that topic up. It's fucking amazing. I can't see how there isn't 11 billion dollars to be made with it somehow.

If I've understood this article correctly, the book can be summarized as: Feel free to multiply all the numbers in a recipe by a real number greater than zero. Tolerances on measurements are loose.

Are people really so afraid of math that this comes as a startling revelation?

Yeah, that was exactly my reaction as well. Surely, there must be something more to it than that ... right?

No, you've missed the point of the book. It's not that you can scale recipes. It's that behind almost every recipe there's a very simple ratio; when you know the ratio and the technique to apply it, you can generate many other recipes yourself. Think of it as a compression scheme.

The point is that recipes obscure the fundamental relationships of ingredients. I thought his explanation was clear that the essence of bread is 5:3 flour to water, and that with this simple ratio you can walk into a kitchen and make bread -- and improvise from there -- all without the need for a recipe.

He described in another post noticing new relationships between foods after reducing them to their essentials, that for instance "an angel food cake was simply meringue with flour folded in."

I hope I don't sound like I'm shilling for Ruhlman. I'm an enthusiastic follower of his blog but I have not bought, much less read this book.

It also feels like patterns, little building blocks to build bigger things. Thats whats compelling me to buy it, its not just technique or recipes, its knowledge you can use to expand on. Also, his blog is great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com