« Millard Fuller shares the faith on Humankind
Quotes from "They Found the Secret"/Andrew Murray responds to trial/testing »

Cooking is about ratios, not recipes?

Posted by tom | Jul 29, 2009

So have you thrown away the recipes or regularly modify/build upon what you were given? My uncle, who caters, attests to the value of Michael Ruhlman's* ratio approach, interviewed in NPR's Throw Away The Recipe; Learn The Ratio Instead.  Maybe this approach explains the complex nature of replicating Mom's recipes, one learned on the farm and the other as a hospital nutritionist (who brings chemistry concerns to the table). 

Theresa thinks the concept is interesting and could be taught in a basic home economics course. ... I'll have to pass the story along to my friend Toby, who has the classic "Lord of the Rings" story on recipes/ratios.

*He knew Michael Ruhlman from his days as part of the undercover educational work of CIA, i.e., Culinary Institute of America ;-) Note:  My uncle is a graduate of the CIA.

Family Journal | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

2 Comments & 0 Trackbacks of "Cooking is about ratios, not recipes?"

    At the risk of sounding obnoxious, I thought this was well-known principle. Otherwise halving or doubling recipes wouldn't work.

    Also, remember that the ratio of surface area to volume is just as important as ratio of ingredients when it comes time to bake!

    Posted by Andy, Jul 29 2009, 23:53

    The world makes so much more sense through the sciences. We should have more cooking of edible foods in chemistry class for elementary/middle school students :-)

    I think for many, food "just happens" ... easier to have the magic of a restaurant or a microwave meal than the "complexity" of chemistry and biology.

    For me the complexity/mystery comes into hand when asking a master for a recipe only to find out that the masterpiece came from adding a pinch of this and that outside of the recipe (or even through significant revisions to an original recipe which can no longer be found as it was a 1x experiment in a pile of cooking magazines). So in order not to loose family traditions, time for mentoring with notebook/video camera in hand.

    But if it was a 1x experiment, time to a start digging into the piles of recipes and begging for a repeat performance ;-)

    Posted by Tom Grosh, Jul 31 2009, 11:06
Add comment