Cookery and geekery go hand-in-hand, it seems. It's a lucky coincidence that Northern California is home not only to rampant culinary enthusiasm and some of the best farmland in the country, but also the seat of much of the world's high-tech industry. Randomly eavesdrop on a San Francisco street, and words like "biodynamic compost" will blend together seamlessly with things like "browsing scrobbler". It's a weird beautiful mix, and makes this part of the world a fun place to live.
The Bay Area mindset is perfectly within the crosshairs for the recent release of Ratio, a new culinary iPhone app. It's been developed on behalf of Michael Ruhlman, the writer, chef, cookbook author, and fellow food adventurer with the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Alton Brown. I've heard the hype, and this morning, took the $5 plunge and downloaded it myself.
The brilliance of this app is almost eclipsed by its simplicity. The basic premise here is that a few simple ratios of ingredients make up an enormous culinary canon of recipes. Understanding these ratios, for the fat, flour and water in a pie dough recipe, for instance, unlocks techniques to enable countless recipes to be created with confidence and ease.
Volumetric measurement, or using cups and teaspoons to mete out compactable ingredients like flour and sugar, is laughably unreliable. A humid day or a heavy hand with the measuring cup will cause even the most carefully concocted recipe to fail. The solution? Weigh everything instead. Weight is the only precise measurement to use for portioning ingredients. Unfortunately, most American cooks don't use a scale, and most cookbooks are simply lifestyle porn clogged with flowery prose, not specificity. This app makes a good effort to clear the barriers for entry into a more sober and scientific style of cooking - just buy a scale, and this app will give you all the information you need.
The content runs deeply - it outlines doughs, batters, custards, fat-based sauces, stocks and thickeners, dessert sauces, and in a nod to Ruhlman's previous triumph, Charcuterie, also includes ratios related to sausage, mousseline and the like. My five dollars have been well spent.
2 comments:
Incidentally, if you are baking by volume instead of weight, you're not baking - you're guessing.
well put, dave!
and food crusader, you're the first blog post on the Ratio app! Well done! Love the line "brilliance eclipsed by simplicity"—a true honor as that is what defines the best literature/art.
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