I hate recipes.
Most recipes today are terrible. They tend to be extremely vague and offer poor direction, and sadly, they don’t often turn out. Honestly, why should they? There’s too many variables presented with the modern kitchen. Gas or electric stove, aluminum or stainless steel pans, how you mix, stir, fold, or whip, what the weather is like, what kind of flour you use, etc. It’s a wonder any recipe ever turns out acceptable results. This is especially bad for baking books. If you have a baking cookbook that has a 90% success rate, say Amen! I hear crickets. Most people publishing a recipe book have kitchen testers to try out the recipes in the book and make sure they work! Then you try to make it at home using a stove that has a gas burner that doesn’t work properly, with the phone ringing, baby crying, and a young person tugging at your clothes, and the recipe fails. Catastrophically. Then you have to call for pizza or take-out. Now everyone is disappointed, and you’re left wondering if you should ever try to cook anything ever again. You’ve just defeated the purpose of cooking by using a recipe that didn’t work.
That’s all about to change. (Well, except for the crying baby part. I’m terrible at making babies stop crying.)
Ratios. They’re everywhere. From finance to engineering to even cooking. You probably use them, but don’t realize it. Ratios are what separate the chef from the home cook. They allow the chef to make a stock, and keep the home cook chained to a recipe that might or might not work. They are used so often in cooking, it would shock you to know how often they come into play. The problem is, the home cook can’t recognize it because they’ve been blindly following a recipe and don’t know how to change it when things go bad. Worse yet, some of you will change a recipe before you’ve ever made it the first time, and end up with bread that fills your oven, because you decided that the bread recipe looks too salty, so you left out the salt. Now you’re scratching your head, trying to find out what went wrong, peeling dough off your oven, and decide to try it again. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
So how do we get back on track to cooking good food and avoiding failure? We use a ratio that been in use since Escoffier wrote his book. Once we have the basic ratio and technique down, then we can start adding here and taking out there to achieve truly great things.
After reading some reviews of Ratio, there are book reviewers out there that say this book isn’t for the amateur cook. What a load of crap. I will offer that every beginning cook SHOULD have this book! Think about it. One of the first things they teach students at the CIA (not the spook school in Langley, Virginia, the Culinary Institute of America) is that stock is x pounds of meaty bones, y pounds of water, and z pounds of mirepoix. If they are teaching culinary students ratios, why shouldn’t the beginning cook start with them? They should, because if you learn how to do it right the first time, you don’t develop bad habits. Old habits are hard to break. (I think someone make a song about that.)
Next time, I’ll delve into how we’re going to approach this book, lay out the rules and guidelines, and discuss what you’ll need to follow along.