Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (1) (Ruhlman's Ratios)

i sent this to my sister for Christmas. She is trying to be gluten free and so this gave her some guidance to adjust recipes, and it also was good for her daughter who is a Home Ec. major. I have not used the book, but foudn the ratios fascinating.

Bought this years ago and lost my copy…probably at one of my kids houses. Very useful for those of us who bake and create.

This is an awesome book. It unlocks the use of ratios in the art of cooking. An eye opener when it comes to taking more risks with cuisine.

It’s an indispensable reference for anyone who wants to understand the ‘why’ behind cooking techniques. Whether you're baking bread or making sauces, this book teaches you how to adapt and create rather than just follow. Highly recommended for both beginners and pros.

Great book inspiring confidence and empowerment in the kitchen. I love the concept, I learned a tremendous amount but I live at a higher elevation so I do have to make some deviations from the exact ratios for some of the bread, dough and cake concepts but the message still carries forward.

*"Ratio" is one of the most essential books in my kitchen.*

Reading about cooking is only second on my list to actually cooking something. I tend toward a scientific approach to my kitchen wherein math and chemistry are as important as technique and skill. My collection of culinary reading is a personal library of 100's of cookbooks and books about cooking. Some are true antiques, some are heirlooms tossed away by relatives who will surely regret the decision, some are ethnic/regional, some are the professional staples, and many aren't even in English. Ruhlman's treatise, I read it in a single sitting front-to-back, is now in a place of easy access for reference next to my hand-me-down copy of Fanny Farmer.What we have here is exactly what the title claims and very little else - it's ratios for cooking. 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat, 1 part water = pie crust; exactly what I wanted to learn. With a reasonably complete commentary on how to bake a pie, what to put in it, the best containers for pies, or even a lot of pie recipes -- mostly a discussion of the ratio (by weight) which makes it very clear, very quickly how pie dough differs from a muffin. He discusses the impact of butter vs lard vs shortening. And I found most of the ratios discussed we similarly treated.I have plenty of texts that discuss in great detail the mechanical aspects (technical skill) that differentiate the muffin method, biscuit method, creaming, etc... I have plenty that offer recipes with ingredient lists. This isn't those. This is the very foundation that all of those should have been based upon, with personal variations, and provides the ratios not only to create a new recipe from knowledge but to debug or tweak an existing recipe based on common ratios.Among my cooking hobbies is recipe writing and bread baking. I bake bread at least weekly, often more. I have often collected a recipe from the internet that just didn't seem write but I could exactly narrow down the problem. With these ratios, it's now easier to quickly check a recipe for reasonable variations before baking it. With these ratios, it's now easier for me to design a recipe based on the science without having to run through numerous batches of trial-and-error.Sure, there's some other material that could be in here to make it even more helpful. But, there are other references out there that provide that information too. I might have even preferred, unlike many of the negative commenters, that Ruhlman had left out much of the commentary and recipes and provided an even shorter tome concentrated more purely on the math and chemistry.Bottom Line: if you need a recipe book then this ain't what you want. There are plenty of those out there and if you tell all of your friends and family that you want some, you'll have a collection of 100's before you know it. Plus, internet. If you need a cooking school manual then this ain't that either. The best of those are a bit costly but there's always, internet. If what you want to do is take recipe analysis down to the bare foundation so you can create a new sort of muffin or cookie without baking twenty batches to get it close - this is near perfection.Photo is my first run of my new pizza muffin recipe. Based on the ratios in this book. Second run will reduce the liquid just a touch but these came out marvelously.

I remember when Ratio first came out, I wasn't interested at all. First, all the ratios seemed "mathy" to me and I am pretty much math phobic. Also, why bother with making my own recipes or knowing the formulas, when hundreds of people a year are doing it for me in cookbooks? No pictures? Math? seriously uninterested.Fast forward to watching Anna and Kristina cook from it on the "grocery bags." Frankly, I feel if they can have success with a book I can too. It got me interested enough to check Ratio from the library. After reading it a bit I realized the ratios are really laid out and explained well and I could actually follow the explanations! Me- math backward woman!The first thing to call out to me was the banana split, I made the ice cream, the butterscotch sauce and the chocolate ganache. I also made the caramel sauce by accident, I started following the wrong recipe, which is a major gripe of mine, why can't cookbook publishers put the recipe on the same page, or at least facing pages? I hate having to go back and forth flipping pages while covered in ingredients with messy fingers! ugh! *pets peeve* Anyway...The ice cream was amazing. My entire family gulped it down, declaring it the best ice cream I ever made. The butterscotch, it took me back to my youth when my grandma made butterscotch. When Ruhlman says you can't get butterscotch like this without making it, he is right. It was lush and silky and beautiful and I would wanted to dive in it headfirst. The ganache was good though pretty much how I always made it, the accidental caramel sauce was wonderful.I bought the book for the butterscotch recipe alone. Now, I call myself the aioli breaker. I cannot make homemade mayo to save my life. Blender, mixer, food processor, by hand, it breaks. recipes from Julia Child to Bourdain to David Liebowitz, it breaks. I have a freezer full of egg whites and a kitchen full of broken mayo. So I tried ratio's recipe. First I made a big beautiful angel food cake with all the egg whites. It turned out gorgeous! then I tried his immersion blender technique for mayo. I knew it would fail, I could make an angel food cake from my failures, do you know how many egg whites that is from broken yolks and broken mayo? But I tried, and darned if I do not have a bowl of perfect mayo, white, creamy, not an egg yolk floating in curdled oil but real mayo.I know this is a long review but honestly, this book deserves it and more. It's absolutely amazing- don't let the word ratio keep you from this book the way I did for to long. It deserves to be a cherished part of any cooks collection.