

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking - KC8ZKF
http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2009/04/ratio-the-simpl.html

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frossie
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.

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tptacek
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.

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frossie
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!

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tptacek
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.

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sketerpot
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?

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tptacek
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.

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rodrigo
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.

