The Ultimate Meaning and Usefulness of Ratios
My impulse to write books originates in the urge to find out what I don’t know. Often I’ve heard people utter the words, “I’ve got a book inside me,” or an idea to that effect, and it perpetuates an inaccurate view of how books are written. Often people who say they have a book in them are suggesting that if only they had the time to write down what’s there inside them, they’d have a book. But the truth is, I don’t think any writer sits down, opens up a faucet, and lets a story drain out into the container of their computer. The fact is, the act of writing generates the story. This is why it’s so hard to sit down and stay down long enough to write.
For me writing is first and foremost an act of exploration and then creation. I wrote The Making of a Chef to find out what the most prominent school in the country said you had to know in order to be a chef. I wrote Walk on Water to find out who you become if, for your day job, you cut into and stitch up the hearts of sick babies. Cookbooks are no different, in my case. I didn’t write Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing because I knew all there was to know about it and wanted to tell others. I wrote it because I knew little about it and wanted to know more. The motive to write this book was the same. For a dozen years I’ve been infatuated with Uwe Hestnar’s ratio chart. He wrote it to teach his students, lost in recipes, to get their heads out of books and to start cooking. To me, though, Hestnar’s ratio sheet was an attempt to pare away all that was extraneous in cooking so that we could know what was fundamental. At what point did a pie dough stop being a pie dough and become a cookie dough? If we knew that, then we would truly know what pie dough was. He had reduced the hollandaise to two ingredients, yolk and butter, nothing else. Hollandaise has other ingredients—lemon juice, salt, and so on—but remove those and you still had an emulsified butter sauce. Take away the butter or yolk, however, and it ceased to be one.
What he was attempting, it’s just now occurred to me, during this act of writing this morning, was to create a Periodic Table of the Elements for the Kitchen. What a brilliant idea. In an era when cooks are drifting, lost on a Pacific Ocean of recipes, this was landfall.
Could you really do this? Could you really get to the bottom of the entirety of cooking? This was what I didn’t know but what I wanted to find out.
Well? What did I find out? I now know a lot about pediatric heart surgery and a lot about curing pork products. What do I know now that I’ve explored these ratios?
The most important thing I’ve learned in exploring ratios is the interconnectedness of all our preparations. This is especially true of the dough-batter continuum, which is why it’s meaningful to create a chart of it. Understanding a pasta dough helps you to understand a bread dough and a cookie dough and a pie dough better by recognizing what the variations, whether egg, water, or fat, do to the flour.
The second most important thing I’ve learned is how much cooking technique matters. I make a better pie dough than my photographer wife, even though we use the same ratio, because I’ve made more of them and so my fingers know how to knead the dough, just so much, just until it comes together, to achieve a flaky piecrust. “You didn’t always make great pie doughs, just remember that,” Donna said, miffed, when I was helping her to make one. In other words, care, observation, thoughtfulness, and, most of all, practice are every bit as fundamental to a preparation as knowing the ratio.
Some ratios aren’t as important as knowing what is important. I have made a stock ratio, 3 parts water to 2 parts bones, but it will still be stock if you use a 2 to 1 ratio. Recognizing why all the ingredients have to be submerged in order to be useful, though, is more important. Here ratios are useful guides.
Ultimately, ratios make cooking easier and more comprehensible because, as Hestnar’s students discovered, when you knew the ratio, you didn’t have to be chained to a book or a recipe.
On Sunday we invited some neighbors for dinner. While at the grocery store that afternoon, I figured I’d better make something sweet for after dinner. The easiest ratio I know is for cake, pound cake—equal parts butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. I usually reduce everything by half, to 8 ounces each. But to make sure I had enough, I figured I’d up everything to 12 ounces—which I could do because the ingredients are measured by weight. The cake came together almost without my having to think about it. It was mixed and in the oven 15 minutes after I got home. If I wanted only a couple of portions, I could have reduced it to 4 ounces.
Ratios liberate you—when you know the ratio and some basic techniques, then you can really start to cook.