Ratio The simple codes behind the craft of everyday cooking

CONSIDERING that 18 months is a quick turnaround in the cookbook world, it's startling to imagine that editors in the Kobe-and-caviar-foam days of 2007 foresaw that selling Americans on canning and pickling, curing their own bacon, charring meat and baking something called a grunt was a good way to boost sales. If I start seeing galley proofs for "101 Stone Soups," I'm stockpiling water and Valrhona. This summer's selection is a modest palate cleanser after last fall's celebrity-chef-food-porn-o-copia, with its Mount Everest-level recipes and don't-spill-on-me design. (Disclosure: I wrote one of those books. Full disclosure: The last time I cooked from it, I substituted trout roe for caviar.) There are a few celebrity chefs in the mix, but they're mostly on grill duty, or making things that go well with beer. Instead, there are chefs you've never heard of, but whose restaurants you will now want to visit; there are lab-rat cooks who methodically test each recipe as though their government grants depended on it; and there are some culinary civilians with nice taste. Francis Mallmann is a megastar in South America, a Patagonian prince with restaurants in Argentina and Uruguay, TV shows and the lot. I'd never heard of him until I went to his Buenos Aires flagship, a posh, sexy library in a neighborhood that made "Fort Apache, the Bronx" seem cheery. But what do you know? Like some other French-trained celebrity chefs known for their intricate food, Mallmann just wants to go to the country and grill. As SEVEN FIRES: Grilling the Argentine Way (Artisan, $35), his new book written with Peter Kaminsky, seductively illustrates, his ain't no block-party barbecue. Mallmann cooks on parrillas (grills), chapas (griddles) and infiernillos (bi-level fires), in hornos de barro (wood ovens), rescoldos (piles of ash and ember) and calderos (cauldrons), and - the holy grill - on the asador, an iron cross upon which a whole butterflied animal is impaled. Mallmann cooks with the elegant purity achieved only after attaining a mastery of complicated food. Inspired by these recipes, a grill-crazy friend called a metal shop to have an infiernillo made. My husband started thinking whole cow. I craved Mallmann's burnt flavors, from caramelized oranges with rosemary to flattened sweet potatoes charred in butter. Bobby Flay, be very afraid. What makes Mallmann so punk is that he makes six ingredients taste better than 20. (His honey gremolata has already become the sauce equivalent of a hit summer song I can't stop singing.) He also reconnects us to the primal simplicity and visceral pleasure of cooking over a fire - though his recipes can be made over charcoal or in a grill pan, too. A salad of tomatoes and fennel becomes a different course when charred. In many ways, "Seven Fires" was the simplest book I read (cow-flaying aside), and by far the most inspiring. ADAM PERRY LANG is at the opposite end of the grilling spectrum, a blingy S.U.V. to Mallmann's muddy old Land Rover. SERIOUS BARBECUE: Smoke, Char, Baste, and Brush Your Way to Great Outdoor Cooking (Hyperion, $35), written with J.J. Goode and Amy Vogler, is what to give the man who has yet to actualize his outdoor kitchen, or at least his ceramic egg cooker. (If all you have is a Weber, you're going to have to step up your game.) Adam Perry Lang went from the kitchen of Restaurant Daniel to running Manhattan's Daisy May's BBQ, but he never dumbed down. He's making bacon, but it's caramel-smoked. A recipe for a whole pork shoulder calls for an injection, a mustard moisturizer, sesoning blend, wrapping mixture and barbecue sauce. A girl can dream. Somewhere between rustic and complex lies the Big Sur Bakery, where three Los Angeles fine-dining refugees (Philip Wojtowicz is the chef; his wife, Michelle Rizzolo, is the baker; and Michael Gibson is the sommelier, front-of-house and Mr. Fix-It) turned an abandoned house into a Highway 1 destination. THE BIG SUR BAKERY COOKBOOK: A Year In the Life of a Restaurant (Morrow, available in July, $34.99), written with Catherine Price, tells its story, from its breakfast-only beginnings - a k a, how to make scones and influence hippies - through the yearly ebb and flow of tourists, cash and fresh ingredients. The recipes are interspersed with profiles of local characters and purveyors, from the goat wrestler to the couple who grow microgreens on their porch. Like Suzanne Goin's sleeper hit, "Sunday Suppers at Lucques," the B.S.B. cookbook uses a seasonal approach that can be self-defeating: should you crave yam-and-sweet-potato pie in April, you'll miss out unless you skip ahead to October. And like "Sunday Suppers," it's really a restaurant book: many of the recipes require a full day and a sous-chef. A lovely salad of artichoke hearts (poached with aromatics), almonds and asparagus (each roasted separately) in a dressing made from grapefruit juice (reduced to a tablespoon) took an hour-plus, but it had the complexity to show for it. I'm already scheduling time to make the pork-belly pizza with barbecue sauce and sweet corn - Step 1: Cure pork belly for five days. And the recipes for breakfast pizza and brown-butter rhubarb bars are worth the cover price (or the airfare). Cajun food has touristy, shake-on connotations that cease to tempt once you've left the French Quarter. In recent years, the New Orleans chef Donald Link has restored its appeal by resuscitating Cajun classics at his restaurants Herbsaint, Cochon and the new Cochon Butcher. Herbsaint was one of the first fine-dining restaurants to reopen after Katrina, and the invitingly packaged REAL CAJUN: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald Link's Louisiana (Clarkson Potter, $35), written with Paula Disbrowe, shows why his food means so much to the community. Link shares the fare he ate growing up on the bayou, as well as what he cooks for family, friends and funerals. Some recipes are aspirationally insane - fried chicken and andouille gumbo, or "game day" choucroute with sausage, tasso and duck confit - while others I simply aspire to make, like a fried oyster and bacon sandwich (bacon recipe included), and Link's outstanding boudin, which he also uses as a heart-stopping beignet filling. The tone is easygoing, the explanations clear. Before I knew it, I was frying up spicy hush puppies and serving chicken and sausage jambalaya while drinking Abita beer. Even as Link liberates Cajun food, most Greek food seems stuck in its gyro-stand past. But in the big fat VEFA'S KITCHEN (Phaidon, $45), the Greek food writer Vefa Alexiadou shows us there's much, much more: over 650 recipes, to be semi-exact. Squashing so many dishes into one book means that instructions are terse and photos few - not great if you've never made Lenten spaghetti from Corfu or wrestled with 20 sheets of phyllo. The chicken pilaf in said phyllo was a washout, but the zucchini fritters have entered heavy rotation on my hors d'oeuvre list. Mark Miller, who is credited with creating modern Southwestern cuisine at his Santa Fe restaurant, Coyote Cafe, makes street food into art in his latest cookbook. TACOS (Ten Speed Press, $21.95), written with Benjamin Hargett and Jane Horn, is not about 30-minute fajita platters - or 30-minute anything. But you'll be grateful, even as you stock your pantry with mail-ordered chilies you can't pronounce. The fastest after-work recipe I found was for bacon tacos with honey and red chili, which was genius, a satisfying combination of smoked, sweet and spicy flavors fried into a taquito. Miller layers flavors and heat in thoughtful ways, from a filling of beer-braised beef short ribs, brightened with tamarind paste and orange zest, to rabbit with green chilies, mint and tomatillos. My husband, a Los-Angeles-raised taco purist, is hooked on this book and all its challenges, minus the Santa Fe'd chicken, goat cheese and apple taco. Back in the land of non-chef cookbooks, the food writer Eugenia Bone's WELL-PRESERVED: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods (Clarkson Potter, $24.95) was uncannily prescient: in October, sales of Ball canning supplies were up 92 percent over the same month a year earlier. Her handy little book grew out of the omnivore's real dilemma: what to do with all the expensive things you bought too many of at the farmers' market. Bone demystifies canning for those who didn't grow up at their grandmother's elbow, front-loading the book with how-to's accompanied by answers to commonly asked questions. Her alluring, easy-to-follow recipes for small quantities of jams, sauces, pickles and cured meats (more bacon!) are followed by recipes that incorporate them. Adam Perry Lang, left: "Pork is built for barbecue." Right, Francis Mallmann prepares for salt-crust roasting. That three-citrus marmalade you'll put up next winter? Try it with shrimp or chicken wings, or folded into a crepe. A powerful sauce made from pine nuts, garlic and raisins can be lobbed onto pasta, packed into a pork chop or simmered with quail. That bacon you cured in a Baggie for a week? You'll want to serve it with rigatoni, dates and Gorgonzola. The combination of this book and the newspaper stories about spikes in jar and seed sales sent me to the hardware store to buy every Ball product before it sold out. Now I'm just waiting for my back-ordered Seeds of Change shipment to arrive. Diana Henry, a food columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and a busy mother, proposes PURE SIMPLE COOKING: Effortless Meals Every Day (Ten Speed Press, $21.95), originally released in Britain in 2007. Her brand of insouciant chic begins with the cover image of a coppery roast chicken haphazardly topped with crisped prosciutto, cooling on a rumpled linen towel. British food stars excel at a kind of easy pleasure, that chuck-it-in-the-pot cheer of Nigella and Nigel. Henry's globetrotting recipes tilt toward the spices of North Africa, Spain and Italy. But a "(virtually) no-cook starter" of boiled quail eggs dipped in dukkah - that is, ground hazelnuts toasted with sesame seeds, coriander and cumin - was oddly bland, and poussin painted with harissa, cumin and coriander offered surprisingly little bang for the buck. It's a shame that what's breezy on the page isn't always satisfying at the table: Henry is either effortless to the point of carelessness, or her metric conversion software is on the fritz. The roast potatoes with chorizo, however, made me forget all that wasted cumin. Who needs cookbooks anyway? Michael Ruhlman wants home chefs to cast them off and walk toward the light, entering a kingdom of creativity and confidence. In order to get there, though, they'll have to be good at memorizing numbers, or at least make a photocopy of the ratio wheel on the book's cover. (If you know that 3:2:1 = pie crust, you're probably a professional chef, to whom these ratios are second nature.) WHILE Ruhlman was attending the Culinary Institute of America for a book project, a chef showed him a copy of the golden rules, which boiled down the elements of (French) cooking into ratios. They represent "the truth of cooking," notes the omnicurious author, who's also written books on charcuterie, heart surgery and home renovation. In RATIO: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (Scribner, $27), Ruhlman guides readers through the ratios for a variety of doughs, batters, stocks, sauces, custards and sausages, explaining their chemical and culinary basis in clear, earnest prose and providing tasteful recipes that lay out the technique for each formula. His goal is noble: who wouldn't want to be able to whip up a béarnaise sauce and some gougères without cracking a book? That is, unless you don't want to whip up a béarnaise sauce and some gougères. The editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine make their cookbooks seem indispensible. A dedicated team, they're united in masterminding dishes that meet their culinary (or childhood) ideals with the calculated fervor of Russian hackers. In their latest book, THE BEST SKILLET RECIPES (America's Test Kitchen, $35), they set out to see what they can do with that cookware essential. "Like finding 1,001 uses for duct tape," the magazine's founder and editor, Christopher Kimball, writes, "we wondered if the skillet had unrealized potential." Did you know that lasagna, pizza and soufflés can be made in a skillet? They're not so bad, though they're more impressive for their resourcefulness than for how they actually taste. The recipes trend toward the low- to-middlebrow (tuna noodle casserole, sloppy Joes, pad Thai), with a variety of ethnic entrees and French-Italian classics, from salmon with lentils and chard to Tuscan-style steak with garlicky spinach. To be honest, the best part about Cook's Illustrated is the writing: the editors' dogged, formulaic process has lapsed into parody, reading like a cross between Goldilocks and Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir: "We tried replacing some of the cheddar with Gruyère, but its strong flavor did not sit well with tasters," they write of a mac 'n' cheese. "Gouda, havarti and fontina were all given a shot, but none tasted just right. We hit the jackpot with Monterey Jack - it helped smooth out the sauce and created that silky texture we were after." Phew! MIX SHAKE STIR: Recipes From Danny Meyer's Acclaimed New York City Restaurants (Little, Brown, $29.99) has us cooking up cocktails. You can recreate drinks served at Meyer's restaurants, from the Modern Martini to Blue Smoke Lynchburg Lemonade, but you have to plan ahead (and change some of the names, unless you want to hand out Lots o' Passions or Hampton Jitneys). At this point in the cocktail craze, infusing a bottle of rye with ginger, cooking spiced rhubarb syrup and making your own grenadine can only win you friends. Even if it's going to be a summer of doing more with less, there's always room for dessert. In this case, more oozy scrumptiousness on a French linen towel, via Portland, Oregon's Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson (he at Wildwood restaurant, she at Baker & Spice bakery). Their RUSTIC FRUIT DESSERTS: Crumbles, Buckles, Cobblers, Pandowdles, and More (Ten Speed Press, $22) is a seasonal mini-bible that goes beyond basics. The authors make a classic crisp interesting - put the topping on the bottom and the top! - and introduce us to a wonderful thing called a caramel-peach grunt. Their upside-down cherry cake was a thing of beauty, even when made with frozen fruit, and come winter I can look forward to a modest apple cobbler with cheddar cheese biscuits, which will hold me over until the next onslaught of celebrity-chef cookbooks. Christine Muhlke is the food editor of The New York Times Magazine.

Ruhlman, who explained the basic ingredients, tools, and cookbooks essential to the home chef in The Elements of Cooking (2007), now offers an illuminating read on the magic numbers that lie at the heart of basic cookery. He divides the book into five parts (doughs, stocks, sausages, sauces, and custards). In each section he explains what essential properties make the ratios work and the subtle variations that differentiate, for instance, a bread dough (five parts flour, three parts water) from a biscuit dough (three parts flour, one part fat, two parts liquid). While making his case that possessing one small bit of crystalline information can open up a world of practical applications gets a little repetitive, it's certainly a lesson worth taking to heart. This revealing and remarkably accessible read offers indispensible information for those ready to cook by the seat of their pants; with a handy grasp of these ratios (and a dash of technique), willing chefs should have no excuse to remain tethered to recipe cards and cookbooks.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2009 Booklist

What Is a Ratio and Why Is It Important? Aculinary ratio is a fixed proportion of one ingredient or ingredients relative to another. These proportions form the backbone of the craft of cooking. When you know a culinary ratio, it's not like knowing a single recipe, it's instantly knowing a thousand. Here is the ratio for bread: 5 parts flour : 3 parts water. This means that if you combine 5 ounces of flour and 3 ounces of water, or 20 ounces of flour and 12 ounces of water, or 500 grams of flour and 300 grams of water, you will, if you mix it properly, have a good bread dough. You need a small amount of yeast, but the exact amount is hugely variable as it turns out, so that's not a meaningful part of the ratio. You need salt for flavor, but that is a matter of taste to a large degree. And you need to mix the dough until it has enough elasticity to contain the gas released by the yeast. So while there are rules to follow and issues of technique, these are not part of the ratio. What can you do, now that you know the bread ratio? You can make fresh bread without opening a single book or scouring a website for random recipes, and you can make as much or as little as you like. That 500 grams of flour or 20 ounces of flour with the water, a big pinch of dry yeast, and 2 big pinches of salt make a good loaf of bread. But if you want to liven it up, add a tablespoon of freshly chopped rosemary and a head of roasted garlic and stretch it out for a roasted garlic and rosemary ciabatta. Other fresh herbs such as thyme, sage, and oregano work beautifully, too. Or use other intense, flavorful ingredients: poblano and chipotle peppers, kalamata olives and walnuts, chocolate and cherries, pistachios and cranberries. Caramelized onion! A sausage! Cheese! The variations are limitless because you know the ratio, 5 parts flour, 3 parts water. Eventually you'll feel comfortable using some whole grain flour in there or potato. Of course, many, many variables contribute to the end result -- how long the final rise is, how hot the oven, how well you shaped the dough, and so on -- and addressing those variables can make baking feel dauntingly complicated. Indeed, baking that perfect loaf of bread every time takes practice and thoughtfulness; whole books are devoted to it. But on the most basic level, baking bread is not complicated. Feel like making fresh pizza? Ten ounces of flour, 6 ounces of water, a pinch of yeast, and a pinch of salt will give you dough for a medium pie. Many recipes for pizza dough include a sugar of some kind -- if that's to your taste, add a tablespoon of sugar or honey (you'll find this increases yeast activity). Many add a flavoring of olive oil. Go for it. Stick to the 5 : 3 ratio and you're golden. Want an easy delicious white sandwich bread for the kids? Same ratio (and maybe add some wheat germ for additional fiber and some honey for flavor and sweetness). But still it's 5 to 3. Just cook it more gently, 350°F for an hour or so, until it's very hot inside. This book is composed of such ratios. Cooking is infinitely nuanced and there are ultimately too many variables to account for in any single recipe (the ambient humidity, how long a bag of flour has been sitting in the cupboard), so it's important to remember, as my first culinary instructor notes, "how well ratios work is directly proportionate to the ratio of common sense applied to them." Good technique must be used in conjunction with the ratio -- which is why this is a book and not a sheet of paper. You need the ratio and the user's manual. Technique must be practiced -- you can never stop getting better. This is important: my aim isn't to make the perfect bread or pasta or mayonnaise or biscuits -- "the best I've ever had." It's to set a baseline to work from, to codify the fundamentals from which we work and which we work off of. When I was writing Walk on Water, about a renowned surgeon, more than one doctor noted the common saying, "great is the enemy of good," meaning that when surgeons strive for greatness, they can cause harm when they might otherwise not have harmed had they simply strived for good. I've worked with the greatest perfectionist there is in the cooking world, and I love that hunt for the perfect sauce, the perfect custard, but here I'm after good. Only when we know good can we begin to inch up from good to excellent. Here is another thing knowing a ratio does: it helps you to better understand cooking in general. How does bread differ from fresh pasta? Not all that much actually, except that for pasta, egg takes the place of water at a ratio of 3 parts flour and 2 parts egg. What's the difference between bread dough and pie dough? The proportions of flour and water are a little different (3 : 1), but it's the important third ingredient, fat, that makes it pie dough -- fat is responsible for making pie dough unlike bread dough, tender rather than chewy. The pie dough ratio is fairly standard: 3 : 2 : 1 (3 parts flour, 2 parts fat, and 1 part water) and it's often referred to as 3-2-1 Pie Dough. It's a great ratio because it's so versatile. It's also possible to make a really bad pie dough using this ratio if you don't know the properties of pie dough and the fact that the gentler you are with it, the more tender it will be. But the ratio itself is bedrock. The fact is, there are hundreds of thousands of recipes out there, but few of them help you to be a better cook in any substantial way. In fact, they may hurt you as a cook by keeping you chained to recipes. Getting your hands on a ratio is like being given a key to unlock those chains. Ratios free you. Ratios are about the basics of cooking. They teach us how the fundamental ingredients of the kitchen -- flour, water, butter and oils, milk and cream, eggs -- work and how variations in proportions create the variations in our dishes, bread rather than pasta, crepes rather than cakes. Doughs and batters are where ratios really shine because the proportions of the basic ingredients, the ratios, define the end result. When you get right down to it, the main difference between a sweet crepe batter and a sponge cake is that crepe batter has half as much flour. Other kinds of ratios for fundamental preparations expand your reach in much the same way. Among the most common ratios is that for a standard vinaigrette. Couldn't be simpler: 3 parts oil, 1 part vinegar. That's it. Works great. Stir together and dress some greens. Once you have that, then it only follows that you may want to enhance the flavor a little, add some salt and pepper and, for balance, some sugar. Perhaps some aromatics, fresh herbs, a roasted shallot, brown rather than white sugar, and honey. Perhaps you want it thick and creamy, so you might emulsify it. You might want to change your fat (bacon rather than canola oil, olive rather than bacon) or the acid (sherry vinegar rather than red wine vinegar, lemon juice rather than sherry). If you know the ratio for a mayonnaise, you don't know just mayonnaise -- which is an amazing preparation when you make it yourself (see page 175 for a simple hand-blender version) -- you know a creamy lime-cumin dressing for a grilled pork sandwich and you know a lemonshallot dipping sauce for a steamed artichoke. The elegant hollandaise, a thick butter sauce, becomes a stately béarnaise sauce when you pack it with fresh tarragon. Know the hollandaise ratio and technique rather than a specific recipe for hollandaise sauce, and you can infuse it with chillis, or reduced red wine and rosemary for roasted leg of lamb. There's no end to what you can do in the kitchen when you know a ratio. Custards, of course, are ratio based and couldn't be simpler: 2 parts liquid (usually but not necessarily milk or cream) and 1 part egg. Large eggs are very close to 2 ounces each, so that works out to 8 ounces of liquid to 2 eggs. More expected for dinner? Make that 16 ounces and 4 eggs. This results in a great crème caramel, but you can go savory if you want -- bone marrow and coriander, a savory mint custard for that lamb instead of the butter sauce. How do you know how much mint to add? Using ratios enables you to begin thinking as chefs do; they use their common sense and they taste as they go. Ratios are even helpful to consider in those preparations that are typically measured by sight, such as making a stock, or thickening a stock for a soup or a sauce. Is there a foundation ratio for stock? Not really, but it's useful for gaining a sense of proper proportions, especially if you're just beginning to cook. Because dough and batter ratios are so instructive, I'm leading off with those. That section is followed by soups and sauces, where ratios are valuable in different ways. With fat-based sauces, ratios determine the amount of fat used relative to other ingredients. For stocks, and stock-based sauces and soups, ratios are more a guide than a definitive proportion, and they also help us to achieve specific consistencies. Soups and sauces are followed by ratios for sausages and pâtés, meat-based ratios, which are in a different realm from those undergirding doughs and batters in that they primarily concern proportions of salt and fat. And I end with custards -- among my most favorite things to eat -- which can be savory or sweet, solid enough to stand unmolded on their own, others that are voluptuous and creamy, and finally basic dessert sauces, most notable, the remarkable custard sauce. With the advent of the Internet, we have access to an ocean of recipes but relatively less information on food and cooking. Understanding ratios and technique is, for the home cook, a step toward becoming more independent in the kitchen. But ratios are just as important to chefs and other food professionals because they provide a launching point for the development of new dishes. Technique will ultimately determine the quality of the end result. Ratios are the points from which infinite variations begin. Copyright (c) 2009 by Michael Ruhlman Excerpted from Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.