Ratio

It always seems to me that I have a knack for buying or asking for cookbooks for my birthday. This past Christmas for example I was given The French Laundry cookbook, and for my birthday this past month I was given the Alinea cookbook. Though both books are beautifully filled with pictures of the process that take to make their refined cuisine, sadly I am afraid that I can’t afford foie gras or have the knowledge to use calcium lactate or sodium acetate. These books however do fuel what I want to do with my life; those images help create a passion for food that looks wonderful and (though I haven’t tried any of Thomas Keller’s creations) taste great as well. But I will never use these books in my kitchen.

For the several years that I have been experimenting in the kitchen, I have tried to make chocolate chip cookies without a recipe but have seemed to fail miserably every time, it felt I was only off by a few simple ingredients. I knew how to make a basic pie crust using the 3-2-1 ratio, but I was looking for something more that would enable me to whip something up, like a batch of chocolate chip cookies, without having to look in a cookbook to find one.

While checking Michael Ruhlman’s blog a few weeks ago I saw something that caught my attention, Ratio a new book that had been released a few days before. After reading the review by Alton Brown I was ecstatic. This was what I was looking for! Thirty minutes later I was in the local mall heading toward Walden Books. Luckily I had managed to grab the last copy off the shelf.

Though Michael Ruhlman has written many other books, including The Making of a Chef and The Soul of Chef, his new book Ratio was different. Instead of following chefs around like he did Thomas Keller and Michael Simon, he wrote a cookbook showing how using ratios can be a part of everyday cooking.

Unlike other cookbooks that need to be followed to the exact letter, Ratio has enabled the reader to add their personal flair, As long as they stick to the ratio of the item they are trying to prepare, the possibilities are limitless

I am eternally grateful for what Ruhlman has done making it no longer necessary to have to dig out a cookbook ever time I need to make a batch of pancakes or a angel food cake. Only after three weeks of use, Ratio by far has been the most used book in my kitchen.