Those of us who've not been professionally trained in the culinary arts can get a glimpse at this numeric code of cooking thanks to "Ratio", a book by Michael Ruhlman.
A chef serves up a culinary delight.
Though home cooks typically find them essential, written recipes are mostly absent from restaurant kitchens.
Chefs and line cooks prepare the same dishes hundreds of times in a week. The need to refer to written instructions is thus made superfluous by repetition.
Most professional cooks do have a carefully guarded notebook into which they've copied formulas and concepts for dishes that are part of their professional repertoire, but those jottings would be practically unintelligible to a layperson. Ingredient measures are not fully specified, and instructions are often distilled down to a few words or phrases.
A chef may have a library of cookbooks at home or in his office, but they serve as occasional sources of inspiration rather than everyday references.
Professional training and years of experience have instead taught chefs to rely on two forms of culinary savvy.
The first of those is flavor affinities. Certain foods work together, balancing each other out in a way that's pleasing to the palate, such as pork with apples or tomatoes with cheese.
Those flavor affinities serve as a framework from which most recipes derive their appeal.
Another area of knowledge upon which kitchen professionals rely are basic ingredient ratios. Pasta dough, for instance, needs to be three parts flour to two parts egg, while a three-to-one proportion of meat to fat gives sausages of any sort the right texture and flavor.
Those of us who've not been professionally trained in the culinary arts can get a glimpse at this numeric code of cooking thanks to "Ratio", a book by Michael Ruhlman.
A chef-turned-writer, Ruhlman details 33 core ratios that govern nearly everything that goes on in the professional kitchen and bakeshop.
Published by Simon and Schuster, "Ratio" is available at booksellers everywhere.