Michael Ruhlman On Freeing Yourself From Recipes
If Michael Ruhlman’s done his job, your favourite cookbooks might go the way of the printed encyclopedia—at least for everyday cooking. Here’s what the food writer said over email about ratios, the foundation of all your food.
Foodies might recognise Ruhlman from his non-fiction accounts of training at the CIA, working with Thomas Keller at the world-renowned French Laundry restaurant and writing its lavish cookbook, and his culinary take on recreating the writer’s bible, Strunk & White’s “Elements of Style,” for the home cook with The Elements of Cooking. TV junkies might better know him for his judging stints on The Next Food Network Star or Cooking Under Fire, or his guest appearances with fellow prose-friendly cook Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations.
Ruhlman’s latest work, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, aims to reeducate the home chef and open their minds to the idea of cooking without a line-by-line recipe; to instead learn the basic formulas of five food groups (doughs, stocks, sausages, sauces, and custards), and then improvise and experiment from there on out. Chefs know these ratios, even if they don’t call them ratios, and they’re a big part of why they can vary a menu and branch out without fear.
The topic sounded like an ideal kitchen hack to us, so we asked Ruhlman to trade a few email questions about cooking and writing with us. He kindly responded, and the transcript follows:
Lifehacker: What does learning the ratio of a dish or food type, as opposed to knowing a great/grandma’s recipe, allow you to do differently?
Michael Ruhlman: It allows you to improvise. It allows you to take a basic preparation like quickbreads and apply any flavor you want to it. It allows you to cook without recipes
Lifehacker: Why has the average home cook been left in the dark about the fundamentals of cooking by ratios? Has this knowledge been hard to come by, or just considered too wonky for most everyday cooks?
Michael Ruhlman: I don’t know why. A recent Wall Street Journal article describing an upswing in cooking intuitively suggested we got hooked on recipes because of Fannie Farmer. Processed foods and cake mixes lead us to believe that we couldn’t do it on our own, and we believed the companies selling us the mixes.
Lifehacker: Can you give an example of a ratio that lets an everyday cook get creative?
Michael Ruhlman: Well, to use the quickbread ratio: 2 parts flour and liquid, 1 part egg and butter. That will give you a perfect muffin or, baked in a loaf pan, a quickbread. Now, you also need to have a little technique and common sense. A teaspoon of baking powder for every 5 ounces (cup) of flour is needed for leavening, a pinch of salt for flavor, but that’s it. If you want a lemon-lime cake, add lemon and lime juice and zest; vanilla is always good, or add lemon and popyseeds, add cranberry and orange, blueberries, bananas. Make a savoury quick bread with cumin coriander and ginger to accompany a dal. (Secret: If you season the batter with a little sugar and vanilla and pour it on a griddle, you have perfect pancakes. That savory quickbread suggestion? Pour it over corn or peas, just enough to bind them, spoon the mixture into hot oil for amazing fritters).
That’s what ratios allows you to do.
Lifehacker: Stepping away from food for a minute: How do you go about organising and outlining a book like Ratio or The Elements of Cooking?
Michael Ruhlman: I don’t know! You just start and if it doesn’t make sense, fix it! Ratio started out completely different, with stocks. But by the end, I realised that doughs and batters were the most important, so I led with that.
Lifehacker: What tools, computer or otherwise, help you research and organise notes, and run a line through them?
Michael Ruhlman: I use a computer and a kitchen scale.
Lifehacker: Your work usually takes high-end culinary experiences—training at the Culinary Institute of America, working with famous chefs, the elements of cooking—and creating a teachable, but not textbook, narrative out of them. How do you know when you’ve done that? What kind of goal do you set for yourself in turning something like charcuterie into plain speak?
Michael Ruhlman: I write books because I don’t know the answer to something. I write to explore. When I know the answer to my own questions, then I go and write. And if it doesn’t bore me to death when I reread, I know I’m on the right track.
Lifehacker: What kind of food resources—books, websites, etc.—do you turn to when you’re researching or just digging around online? What kind of stuff do you try to avoid?
Michael Ruhlman: For food: McGee (On Food & Cooking), Food Lover’s Companion are my two most turned-to books, and the internet. Or I call or write to people who know the answer.
Lifehacker: Finally, because we have to ask: Mac or PC? And what kind of gadgets can’t you live without?
Michael Ruhlman: I’m 100% Mac. (Other than that), kitchen scale, instant read thermometer, and I’m really liking my iPhone (the “Units” app is great).
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
i have been trying to tell people this about recipes for EVER! a recipe is like the frame of a house, it gives you a place to start, you have to put the walls up and paint them.
of course i'm the sort of person who will take a 30 minute recipe and make it take 2 hours...heh
mfusion
I'm trying to take that next step in cooking, so I can be more creative with my recipes. I really would like to find a good book on cooking techniques and the more 'scientific' aspects of cooking (foods that mesh well together, proportions, ratios, etc). I'll definitely check out the two resources linked.
I have to like any system that elevates sausages and custard into basic food groups :)
Most beginning cooks need to learn proper techinque not just formulary; baking an pastry are especially sensitive to this.
BreadBoy
I've been doing similar things for a while, I just didn't think about it as hacking. I take a recipe and look for the principles behind it and then try to apply that to other foods. For example, one recipe called to deglaze the pan with some wine and combine that with cream to make a pan sauce. I took the principle of deglazing to create pan sauces from all sorts of food with all sorts of deglazing agents - some have been truly awful - but my techniques has been getting better and I have many more successes than failures now-a-days.
Just like the matrix, a recipe is based on rules. What you have to learn is some of those rules can be bent, and some of them broken.
jtw78
I don't think it's the ratios that keep people using cookbooks. I think it's more probably the marrying flavors.
Just from this I think. Okay, he's not using a recipe per se. Sometimes I go free form in the kitchen but when I'm doing a new to me dish I use a recipe. Once I've done it two or three times, I'm able to use the recipe that's been pretty much memorized and mix it up to create something else. This doesn't seem very different to me.
Let's take the quickbread. I learned to make pancakes by reading the panel on the box. Then I decided to try my own so I looked at a recipe. After a couple of go rounds, I knew what to do so I didn't need to look at anything. Then I decided hey, let's add some chocolate syrup to the batter. I thought, hmmm, chocolate chip.
Later, I was like, you know I could start with a basic pancake batter, leave of some things, and use it as a bath to fry up some corn flake crusted chicken.
Surely it's not just me? Am I missing the real point or am I just already doing what he's talking about. Am I not the person he's talking to?
jupiterthunder
@chiieddy:
Google Alton Brown. He has what you're looking for.
I cook without recipes all the time, and have no problem modifying recipes with good results, as well. But I'm still not sure I understand what he's saying here: "2 parts flour and liquid, 1 part egg and butter." Seems like there should be some more granularity on the ratio between flour and liquid, and between egg and butter. If you use almost 2 cups of flour to 1 TBSP liquid, it'd suck. And one egg will the rest all butter wouldn't be balanced if you need more eggs for the recipe. So...what kind of ratios do the halves here operate on?
StavitaNoppit
For some reason most of my men friends all seem to be obsessed with cooking. I think this ratio framework concept is the logical side of the brain and a perfect article to forwarded to them. Personally I like the refrigerator surprise form of cooking too. Just pull out everything that looks like it might go together and put the puzzle together. Problem is, you never have a recipe to duplicate it again if it turns out great...hahaha.
linda415
@StavitaNoppit: Generally, when ratios talk about PART, they talk about everything in terms of the same unit.
2 parts flour
2 parts liquid (I assume milk or water depending on goal)
1 part egg
1 part butter
So if you start with a CUP of flour, you'd have a CUP of liquid and a 1/2 cup of egg and a 1/2 cup of butter.
Not sure if those ratios turn out well or not, but that's what he means by it.
My wife does all this intuitively, which amazes me. She's a great cook and does everything out of her head, almost never with recipes (no formal training). I am lucky. Perhaps this book would be good to reinforce her intuition!
@chiieddy:
Also check out On Food and Cooking and Cookwise. Both books will definitely help provide a more scientific context on food. :)
skechada
@StavitaNoppit:
I read it as 2 parts flour, 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, 1 part butter.
Confuzius
I checked out the table of contents and it seems to be mostly baking. Count me in as one of the people who need to know about marrying of flavors and what should get thrown in when WRT cooking.
I love reading cooking blogs like 101 Cookbooks where she just breezily says, "well I had some of X and a bit of Y so I knew I'd need Z to make it right. Midway through, I added X, then, 10 minutes later, Y." How would I know to do that? Is there a book like this that will tell me, "X is a foil for Y?"
Or, you read a restaurant review that says "X balances the tartness of Y." How do I know that?
Help me, cooking Gods, help me!
The other book to accompany that would be The Flavor Bible ([www.amazon.com]), so you know what foods go with what when you're cooking without a recipe
saffyre9
@jupiterthunder:
I think you have an every so slightly different mentality. Ruhlman seems to want us to move away from building off of recipes entirely. His objective is to have a few very basic "recipes" that all others stem from.
Actually, he probably wants people to do exactly what you do. I've found that people will never quite do anything to the same degree that I recommend it, so I tend to make my claims and recommendations a bit more extreme than I really believe they should be/are.
Jacob Morgan
@Synik103: Alton Brown's the man! He has two great books out there that I highly recommend: "I'm Just Here for the Food" and "I'm Just Here for the Food 2" ... the baking one is a great guide.
@chiieddy: If you speak French you can read and learn a lot from Hervé This' books
[en.wikipedia.org]
(FYI "This" is pronounced as the "this" of "Mathis")
@MagicJewball:
I love it when these LH postings remind me of a great Friends episode.
+ Watch video
jupiterthunder
@SQLGuru: 1/2 cup of butter?!
i think he means ratios by weight, see how one of his most essential gadgets is a scale?
awesome article. thnx
Really liked the idea behind this book since it seems to give you the basic building blocks for the chemistry behind cooking.
I'm not a brilliant chef but I do cook without recipes and it took a long time to stop making big mistakes and learning restraint.
The big benefit from not using recipes is that cooking never becomes a chore since it's always a challenge and if you know how to bring out the best in an ingredient almost anything can taste good together.
@Synik103: I love to watch "Good Eats" Alton's show. He is the Bill Nye of food - he has helped to transform my cooking by giving me the science and the principles that I can apply across many different types of food.
"There's a lesson to be learned here." ~A. Brown.
jtw78
@Jacob Morgan:
That is a fascinating bit of psychology. I'm gonna make note of it. Maybe try it out.
jupiterthunder
@jupiterthunder: You're getting to the same idea, just from a different angle. I have a 3 recipe technique that I use for everything:
-Google a dish
-Pick 3 recipes
-Compare/combine these for a baseline recipe*
-Improvise
*You can average some ingredients to get a ratio, but for others you will have to pick one or the other.
If I was more ambitious, I would program a search engine that did this with a statistical analysis.
@SQLGuru: I believe that usually in cooking the ratio is based on weight in ounces or grams.
KaliCreusa
@Synik103: Google Harold McGee. He had what Alton Brown took, and is a hell of a lot more useful.
HansGadison
@linda415: I do this all the time, too. I can throw together a casserole quickly and easily using whatever I have on hand. And my chili is never the same twice.
I have a shelf full of recipe books that I never look at -- they're too much effort. I rarely bake, so it's usually just a matter of putting things together until they taste good. Sometimes I fail, but more often than not, I get a decent meal out of it.
I already cook this way for certain things, most notably sauces thickened with flour/roux.
I've got a table taped inside the cupboard over my stove with generic sauce ingredient amounts (water, fat, flour) scaled for different amounts of the watery ingredient.
Glancing at this table, I can (without a recipe) bang out chicken gravy from a can of chicken broth, sweetened rhubarb sauce from a cup of chopped rhubarb with water added to fill in the space between the chunks, thicken a japanese-style curry, convert a pork marinade into a finishing sauce, etc, etc, etc.
I love cooking this way, and will be getting to book to expand my ratio repertoire.
dwhitman
I love that my style of cooking has a name... "intuitive". My wife often asks "what are you making?" to which I often reply, "I'm not sure yet." I'd love to put some proven theory behind my intuition.
Reminds me of the puzzled look I got from my dearly departed Auntie Rose - the matriarch of my big Italian family - when I asked her for one of her recipes years ago. "Oh, I don't have it written down..." she said, puzzled that I had thought otherwise.
Roostabunny
This looks like an interesting read. Been wanting to learn how to cook. Might be a good gift for friends too. Granted there are a lot of recipes out there and some of them are scary, so hopefully this book will also help make things simpler too so that people don't shy away from it because of complexity of those recipes.
DuneMech
My hubby never uses recipes when he cooks. I use them as a guideline, more for inspiration and ideas, but always end up changing amounts and types of ingredients.
I have taught myself to cook with out recipes the food I like to eat.
TIP:
Pick one cuisine at a time and make it a lot.
For Indian cooking, learn to make a basic dal.
Then make one with different dal (IE: lentils, chickpeas or mungbeans)Then play with the spice ratios, add different vegetables etc.
You will quickly learn how it all works because it is so simple. You will be inventing your own curries in no time.
Then move on to say, middle eastern pilafs. Another basic dish that can have infinite variables.
(I am a sucker for silk road food. This technique might not work for Japanese, or fine French pastries etc)
[lbveg.com]
A free cookbook that addresses what spices/flavors work well with each other, what oils to use, and when to add the spices to your cooking. Some might be turned off because it's a vegetarian book but the info is still valid and easy enough to apply to meat based dishes.
pizzatramp
@KaliCreusa: when talking in ratios parts are always in weight.
flour will settle, i've eaten too much baked goods that were like a brick because they used way too much flour.
think about a pound cake, the greatest recipe in the world for examples. pound of flour, pound of eggs, pound of sugar, pound of butter (very soft)
so there is a starting point, adjust from there, remembering that baking is chemistry, flavorings don't really change the formula much. for example you can flavor the sugar with vanilla, lower the amount of eggs if you want a more dense cake, add a leavening ingredient ( very very carefully) substitute some brown sugar for white, or after it's baked and cooled soak it in brandy or custard.
does anyone need help with those ratios?
mfusion
just because I have to... ala one of my food hero's Anthony Bordain "....Ruhhhlman." (see Seinfield)...
@jupiterthunder:
LOL thanks for that.
Andrew Farris
@MagicJewball:
The book you want for this is The Flavor Bible. It's not a cookbook, more like a big encyclopedia of foods and the seasonings that go best with them (and vice versa).
Lauram
This sort of book is really only for practiced cooks who are ready to move beyond recipes. Knowing ratios is great if you have the technique down, and already know, for example, that you should leave some lumps in the pancake batter, always use cold butter when making pie crust but room-temp butter when baking a cake, etc. If you grasp the technique and the logic/chemistry it's based on, then you can improvise recipes by keeping the ratios in mind. Beginners should probably try something more like the new "Martha Stewart Cooking School" cookbook, which comes highly recommended by all the cookbook experts I know.
Lauram
I bought this book and like it so far, but he's very clear up front that you can still make not so good product if you haphazardly use the ratios without any technique. So while you might be excited at first to hear "basic bread dough - 5:3", there's also a lot of fine print about the mixing, kneading, proofing, etc. that you need to be aware of. The ratios are the starting point that makes creativity the focus rather than proportion; the technique is more responsible for the divide between inedible, good, and great.
@Lauram: Thanks, I'll try that!
Just a quick editorial note: "home chefs" is incorrect, unless you're referring to trained and certified chefs who happen to be at home. You mean home cooks. A chef is a professional.
My girlfriend is a great baker and never measures anything. She says she learned how to do it when she was a girl when she helped her grandmother cook.
I do a lot of cooking without recipes, but I think for a beginner, baked goods are the LAST thing you should try to cook without a recipe. I see a lot of people are confused by the ratios, they are quite vague, and he doesn't specify how much sweetening to use, which obviously makes a difference. Using a liquid sweetener, like honey or molasses vs. sugar, will change the ratios. So I would advise folks to start by learning how to cook main dishes, soups & side dishes, many of which which can also be tasted and corrected as you go along. Use the recipe book for cakes & breads; I still do except for things like cornbread & pancakes batter, which I've done so often I know them by heart.
CallaMaguffin
I call it sport cooking. It is fun when you don't know exactly what the end of the story is. If you have a good herb and veggie garden that adds to the suspense. You start with a couple basic things like some meat item and whatever is in the fridge and then you run out to the garden with snips and grab stuff. It is even more fun when you just got a call that said "I just invited 3 or 4 maybe more people for dinner; what do we need?" Uh Huh! He sometimes really P.O'd me but I really did love the challenge to get to cooking! But even though I only use my cookbooks now for inspiration when stumped - I am becoming a little nostalgic because now I often just google my ingredients and pick a few recipes...my cookbooks sit forlorn.
StephanoClytemnestra
Ugh. Only mac queefes ask "are you PC or Mac" and need to tell everyone they love their overpriced fashion statements.
It's a tool and a toy, not a reason for living.
Apeiron242
@Gann: Heh, I do the same thing. Get some recipes to kind of go by. Mostly because I don't have time to go shopping for every single meal to get random special ingredients, and I'm too lazy to plan ahead.
Travis Greene
While this definitely is informative I'm not sure why there's this undertone of recipes being bad or for the unskilled. By saying "these are the ingredients for this bread" and then you add some sort of flavoring (e.g. lemon and poppy) this guy is really just giving you recipes also. Also, there's a reason people use recipes: to get a consistent and satisfying result. Recipes can be tweaked and that's good, but the reason they are out there is to give people a starting point, sort of like what this guy is getting at.
@BnWRainbow: French Level 3 right now. Trying to slog through Le Petite Prince to give an idea of my reading level. Might be a bit too advanced at the moment.
Merci!
@HansGadison: Already have the McGee book bookmarked (came up as a suggestion when I bookmarked the 2 in the article) as well as the Alton Brown books. Interestingly, I also found This in English. Not sure if the posted below meant that book:
[www.amazon.com]