Ratio

The Book in 3 Sentences

Ruhlman’s Ratio breaks down cooking and baking into fundamental mathematical proportions between ingredients, demonstrating that mastering these basic ratios is key to culinary success. The book systematically explores essential ratios across major categories including doughs, batters, stocks, sauces, and custards, showing how understanding these proportions frees cooks from strict recipe dependence.

Beyond just listing ratios, it explains how ingredients interact and how variations in proportions affect final results - like how fat “shortens” dough or how yeast fermentation time impacts bread flavor.

Impressions

This is a remarkably practical and enlightening approach to teaching cooking fundamentals. Instead of just providing recipes, Ruhlman gives readers the underlying formulas that make cooking work, effectively teaching them to fish rather than giving them fish. The writing shows deep technical knowledge while remaining accessible, though some might find the ratio-based approach initially intimidating. This book feels like a culinary textbook disguised as an engaging read.

My Top Quotes

Doughs

• Bread = 5 parts flour: 3 parts water (plus yeast and salt)

• Pasta Dough = 3 parts flour: 2 parts egg

• Pie Dough = 3 parts flour: 2 parts fat: 1 part water

• Biscuit = 3 parts flour: 1 part fat: 2 parts liquid

• Cookie Dough = 1 part sugar: 2 parts fat: 3 parts flour

• Pâte à Choux = 2 parts water: 1 part butter: 1 part flour: 2 parts egg Batters

• Pound Cake = 1 part butter: 1 part sugar: 1 part egg: 1 part flour

• Sponge Cake = 1 part egg: 1 part sugar: 1 part flour: 1 part butter

• Angel Food Cake = 3 parts egg white: 3 parts sugar: 1 part flour

• Quick Bread = 2 parts flour: 2 parts liquid: 1 part egg: 1 part butter

• Muffin = 2 parts flour: 2 parts liquid: 1 part egg: 1 part butter

• Fritter = 2 parts flour: 2 parts liquid: 1 part egg

• Pancake = 2 parts flour: 2 parts liquid: 1 part egg: ½ part butter

• Popover = 2 parts liquid: 1 part egg: 1 part flour

• Crepe = 1 part liquid: 1 part egg: ½ part flour Stocks and Sauces

• Stock = 3 parts water: 2 parts bones

• Consommé = 12 parts stock: 3 parts meat: 1 part mirepoix: 1 part egg white Roux = 3 parts flour: 2 parts fat

• Thickening Ratio = 10 parts liquid: 1 part roux

• Beurre Manié = 1 part flour: 1 part butter (by volume)

• Slurry = 1 part cornstarch: 1 part water (by volume)

• Thickening Rule = 1 tablespoon starch will thicken 1 cup liquid i

• Farçir Sausage = 3 parts meat: 1 part fat

• Sausage Seasoning = 60 parts meat/fat: 1 part salt

• Mousseline = 8 parts meat: 4 parts cream: 1 part egg

• Brine = 20 parts water: 1 part salt Fat-Based Sauces

• Mayonnaise = 20 parts oil: 1 part liquid (plus yolk)

• Vinaigrette = 3 parts oil: 1 part vinegar

• Hollandaise = 5 parts butter: 1 part yolk: 1 part liquid

• Custards Free-Standing Custard = 2 parts liquid: 1 part egg

• Crème Anglaise = 4 parts milk/cream: 1 part yolk: 1 part sugar

• Chocolate Sauce = 1 part chocolate: 1 part cream

• Caramel Sauce = 1 part sugar: 1 part cream

• A culinary ratio is a fixed proportion of one ingredient or ingredients relative to another.

• Three of your most valuable tools in the kitchen: flour, eggs, and butter.

• For small measurements of uniform ingredients, such as dry yeast or baking powder, I use teaspoon and tablespoon measures. This is why the ratios for beurre manié (a flour-butter thickener) and slurry (a pure starch and water thickener) are by volume, not weight.

• Most of the dough and batter ratios include flour. If you do not have a scale, assume that a level cup of flour weighs about 5 ounces or 140 grams.

• He says that everything a cook needs to know—everything, mind you—is contained in five books: Escoffier, Larousse, Hering’s Dictionary, La Repetoire. I tell him that’s only four. “And Câreme,” he says. He pauses. “No one wants.”

• Dough almost invariably signifies some form of ground cereal grain held together with some form of moisture. The simplest dough is flour and water, and will be relatively flavorless unless you do something to it, such as add fat, egg, yeast, salt, sugar, or if you wrap it around something tasty (ground pork) and fry it, as with a Chinese pot sticker (6 tablespoons of cold water into a cup of flour will give you a workable pot sticker dough, or about 2 to 1 by weight).

• Adding fat “shortens” the dough—that is, shortens the strands of gluten that make a dough chewy. Fat is the difference between a noodle dough and a crumbly pastry dough.

• Eggs enrich a dough, whether fat is included or not.

• Yeast both leavens dough (a dough with fat, such as brioche, or without fat, such as a baguette) and gives it flavor.

• Sugar sweetens a dough, as in a traditional pâte sucrée.

• And salt does many things to a dough—for instance, it can inhibit the growth of yeast or bacteria in naturally fermented doughs, it can tighten the gluten network and make a dough more elastic, and, of course, it enhances flavor.

• Bread = 5 parts flour : 3 parts water (plus yeast and salt

• The more yeast, the faster it goes, and as a rule, the longer the fermentation time (time during which the yeast feeds and releases gas), the more flavorful the bread.

• You have a scale, here is how easy it is: set a bowl on the scale, add an egg for every full serving you want to make, then add 1 ½ that weight in flour.

• Pâte à choux is one of the coolest flour-and-water preparations in the kitchen. It is easy to make, delicious all by itself, can be a pedestal for any number of sweet or savory ingredients, can be cooked in the oven, in water, in oil (with each type of heat creating different and wonderful effects), and can be featured at virtually any part of the meal.

• Much of baking, and especially batters, is predicated less on the ingredients than the order in which the ingredients are combined and the way they are combined.

• Cakes with fat are sponge cakes (or a variant we call pound cake). They’re rich and moist. Cake without fat (no butter, no yolks) are angel food cakes.

• The key to a tall and fluffy cake, as opposed to one that has sunken and become dense and chewy, is not the ratio (doubling the flour, for instance, will not substantially change your cake), but rather the mixing of the egg whites to just the right volume and no more.

• Good mise en place is critical in cake making. Make sure your oven is already hot, that your cake pan is ready, and your flour-sugar mixture is sifted (an easy, quick way to do this is to pulse it in a food processor with the blade attachment), so that you lose as few of those air bubbles as possible.

• Muffins are essentially flavored pancake batter and can be baked in muffin shapes or in a loaf pan for a batter bread;

• Any confite meats, such as duck confit or pork confit, are delicious in a crepe.

• When I began this book, I started with stocks. They are, after all, le fond de la cuisine, the foundation upon which all else rests.

• Soups are simply stocks fortified with ingredients that you don’t strain out.

• Roux is flour cooked in butterfat and is an excellent thickening device for both soups and sauces. As the flour granules, which have been separated by a layer of fat and been partially cooked, heat up, they swell and release starch molecules, thickening the sauce.

• Beurre manié, or kneaded butter, is butter into which an equal volume of flour has been rubbed and kneaded, becoming an easy, effective way to thicken small amounts of sauces while also enriching them.

• Farçir is the French verb “to stuff,” and a farce, in professional kitchens, refers to a stuffing. In many kitchens and most cooking schools, the term for a meat stuffing has been Anglicized into forcemeat, probably the ugliest culinary term in the books.

• The farce is an extraordinary cooking tool. It can bring you to the heights of pleasure, and yet it almost always uses common and inexpensive ingredients or provides a means for turning the trim from valuable ingredients into something shapely and delicious. Farce technique is ultimately one of economy and resourcefulness, and so it is the good cook who knows and understands the versatility of the technique.

• Fat is flavor. Fat is texture. Fat gives dishes succulence, richness. Fat is the component that makes a dish satisfying, and the fat-based sauces are among the most satisfying preparations in the kitchen and also among the most versatile.

• A word to those who fear fat: don’t. Fat is good. We need fat to survive. Fat doesn’t make us fat (eating more calories than we burn makes us fat). Fat won’t make us unhealthy if we eat it in moderation, which happens to be the way it tastes best (you wouldn’t want to eat a bowl of vinaigrette or a cup of mayonnaise or a stick of butter). Assuming you have a diet low in processed foods, natural fat used in the proper proportion makes most things better and is good for you.

• A vinaigrette is such a useful concept, it should be considered a mother sauce, given its own category in the classical sauce repertoire, and regarded as a tool almost in the same way as stock.

• The ratio of 3 parts oil or fat to 1 part acid is standard but can and should be varied according to your tastes. For a vinaigrette using red wine vinegar, 3 to 1 is perfect, but for a sharp citrus juice, such as lime juice, you may want to use 4 parts oil.

• Classic South American sauce for beef, the chimichurri is nothing more than a heavily herbed vinaigrette.

• Needless to say, the better tasting your vinegar, the better your sauce—with vinegar, you tend to get what you pay for.

• ¼ cup lime juice ½ teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon minced shallot ¼ cup natural peanut butter ¼ teaspoon cayenne 4 ounces peanut oil or vegetable oil (about ½ cup) Combine the lime juice, salt, and shallot in a blender. Blend for a second or two to dissolve the salt and distribute the shallot.

• As a rule, I like to have about a tablespoon of water per 10 ounces of fat to ensure a stable emulsion.

• Crème anglaise, also known simply as anglaise, or vanilla sauce, or custard sauce, is among the simplest, quickest dessert preparations in the kitchen and is so basic in its dairy-and-yolk structure that it can become any number of finished dishes, depending on how it’s handled.

• Chocolate sauce, also known as ganache, is made with equal parts chocolate and cream and is so easy, it almost doesn’t count as a technique.