Reddit reviews Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

I loved the book Ratio.

I bought this as a gift for someone and there is a little baking in it.
https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking-ebook/dp/B001UP63MI

Ratio

Take a look at like... 10 iterations of a red sauce for pasta.


Turns out you can stick things in a pot, add tomatoes and let it cook and make pasta sauce.



It's all about learning how the basic recipe works and knowing the world does in fact not end if you don't follow a recipe exactly.



Even when it comes to baked items you don't need the exact recipe, you just need to learn the important ratios. Something handy for you to read would be Ratio. http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking-ebook/dp/B001UP63MI



As you practice cooking you'll get to the point where you follow specific recipes once to see how it works and then wing it from there. :) good luck

I really adore Ratio - it might not be exactly what you are looking for, but it's a very interesting food science book that I really love to reference.

Alton Brown's cookbooks are quite good, so I'll add my voice to those recommending them.

If you don't need color glossy photos, "The New Best Recipe" from the folks at Cook's Illustrated magazine has great recipes and thorough instructions.

When you someday move beyond the basics, I'd also throw in a plug for Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio" and Jacques Pepin's "Complete Techniques". Ruhlman's book breaks some recipes (like doughs, batters, and custards) down to their basic components and will help you understand how to modify or even improvise with some kinds of recipes, and Pepin's book has great illustrations that can help get you through some of the techniques mentioned by not described by cookbooks. Pepin's Techniques might even prove useful to you now as a reference, depending on what other cookbooks you're working with.

As others have said, practice.

With that said, books like Ratio and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat have also been a huge help to me.

They both teach you more about what things work well together rather than how to follow particular recipes. Ratio is about what flavors compliment each other and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat demonstrates how the combination of those four elemental units in cooking can up your game across the board.

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Link: Ratio


|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|UK|amazon.co.uk|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|Mexico|amazon.com.mx|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Australia|amazon.com.au|
|Italy|amazon.it|




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Thanks for the kind words, and the cook book revision is an interesting idea. I certainly have gained more experience and learned more. In the meantime, you might find Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, by Michael Ruhlman, to be of interest.