I’m an improvisational cook. This means that I’ll take stock of what I have in the kitchen and then create dishes from what’s available. This method usually works if I’m making savory dishes, but when it comes to baking I’ve had less success. (We won’t discuss the time I spontaneously threw in steel oats, cayenne and sea salt into a chocolate cookie recipe.)
Baking calls for precision, which I lack. For a long time I’ve wondered if there were basic formulas for making pastries, something I could use to make up my own recipes, if say, I wanted a steel oat and sea salt cookie to actually be edible. So when I heard about Michael Ruhlman’s latest book, Ratio, I knew this was the information I’d been looking for.
A professor of Ruhlman’s at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) presented him with the initial ratio concept, which takes certain foods and reduces them to their basic essence. For instance, let's look at pie crust. Its ratio is 3 parts flour: 2 parts fat: 1 part water. So no matter if you’re mixing butter and lard with wheat flour and ground pecans, or shortening with oat flour and buckwheat, by using these exact proportions of fat to flour to water you should have a crust that works.
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