I first heard of Michael Ruhlman by way of Anthony Bourdain when I was reading through some of Bourdain’s engaging books. Anthony wrote a great introduction to one of Michael’s books:
Ruhlman, Michael. The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2007.
Anthony Bourdain is a trained and experienced chef who is also a natural journalist; Michael Ruhlman is a trained and experienced journalist who is also a natural chef. But in Ruhlman’s writing, there is none of the territorial barking that you occasionally hear issuing forth from Bourdain and from other celebrity pit-bull chef-authors – Ruhlman comes across more like a culinary golden retriever. His books are thoroughly researched with beautiful prose and insightful observations – but they are also friendly and sweet. He also has a great gig as a spokes-retriever for Le Creuset bakeware (see here).
I read Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking while I was taking my foundations classes in culinary arts school. Superficially, it is treatise on cooking terminology: a chef’s A-to-Z. But instead of reading like a dry dictionary or encyclopedia, it manages to capture the excitement and importance of the terms – it’s almost like reading a tell-all gossip book of culinary ingredient celebrities.
Right now, I own more books written by Michael Ruhlman than by any other author.
In today’s post, though, I want to examine and dispute a guideline he presents in his book Ratio:
Ruhlman, Michael. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. New York: Scribner, 2009.
This book also could have been called Working Parameters or Rules of Engagement or something like that. It provides ratios of weights of ingredients grouped by broad categories: A standard-ish bread at 60% hydration would be made from a dough that was 5 parts flour to 3 parts water – yes, there would be salt and yeast too, but the “big” ingredients would be combined in a basic ratio of 5:3. A vinaigrette salad dressing is typically made with three parts oil to one part vinegar – a 3:1 ratio. The recipe for classical Hollandaise sauce uses 5 parts whole butter (or 4 parts clarified butter) to 1 part egg yolk to 1 part liquid – a 3:1:1 ratio.
The ratio I want to focus on in this post is his ratio for quick breads and muffins: 2 parts flour to 2 parts liquid to 1 part fat to 1 part egg – a 2:2:1:1 ratio. He claims that, as a template for quick breads, the working parameters are: to use about equal parts, by weight, of flour and liquid supplemented by half as much each of fat and egg – the ratio of flour and liquid to fat and eggs is 2:1. It is one of the few ratios he gives that does not correlate with my own experiences.
To be clear, he’s talking about pourable battered quick breads here – biscuits and scones are usually considered quick breads but they are made with much less liquid and are mixed using a different technique. The quick breads I’ll be addressing here are typically baked in loaf or muffin forms: banana bread, pumpkin bread, cornbread, blueberry muffins, you-name-it muffins. Stuff like that.
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A little background:
Most quick breads are mixed simply and…well…quickly. Dry ingredients are combined – flour, sugar, salt, leavening, spices, cocoa. Wet ingredients and fat are combined – liquids, eggs, fats, any liquid flavoring. Wet ingredients are mixed gently and briefly into the dry ingredients then baked. Some authors insist that sugar should be mixed with the wet ingredients but I don’t count that as an important division – I think of it as a preference.
Fats, eggs, and sugar are considered enriching ingredients in all breads. Among the breads that are leavened chemically by things like baking powder and baking soda, there is a spectrum of results: with quick breads on the rustic-y side and with cakes on the enrich-y side. So, the two primary dials that move breads through that spectrum are (1) sugar, & (2) eggs and fat. Sugar tends to ride solo, eggs and fat are the couple that dress alike and go everywhere together. Sugar isn’t always included in quick breads but it it a major player in cakes (I’ll deal with cakes in a later post).
But most quick breads include at least some sugar. Sugar makes things sweeter (news flash). Sugar also contributes to the amount of browning that occurs when quick breads bake. Most importantly, though, sugar interferes with the formation of gluten when flour is hydrated, and so increasing the sugar in a quick bread recipe produces a more tender crumb in the final result. So with all other ingredients unchanged, increasing the sugar in a recipe cranks-up the sweetness and creates a more tender bread. Sugar moves a bread through the spectrum of sweetness and tenderness.
The fats (butter, shortening, margarine, oil) in a quick bread make it moist and also tenderize the crumb. Fat’s companion, eggs, are roughly 75% water so eggs definitely contribute liquid to any recipe they are in. Egg proteins, mostly from the egg whites, provide structure and texture to baked goods; egg yolks, aside from their color, contribute flavor and richness. But the reason that fats and eggs tend to travel together in recipes is that the lecithin in the egg yolks is needed to emulsify the fats so they can be fully incorporated into the batter. A batter without egg yolks would be a greasy mess. Fats need eggs because they need egg yolks.
Recipes for quick breads are robust: they adapt well to reasonable changes in all the ingredients. Just keep in mind that increasing ingredients must be done with sense and moderation. Add too much sugar and eventually a recipe will break down because there isn’t sufficient liquid to dissolve it. Add too much egg and fat and the result may be pleasantly dense, but could be dry from the network of baked proteins from the egg whites or might add so much weight to the quick bread that it falls under its own weight while it’s baking.
But let’s get back to Ruhlman. I agree with part of Ruhlman’s ratio assessment for quick breads: that flour and liquid tend to appear in equal weights and that fat and eggs tend to appear in equal weights. But in practice, I find that most quick bread recipes use much less fat and egg than Ruhlman suggests. Rather than coexisting in a 2:1 ratio of flour/liquid to fat/egg, I find the ratio to be 3:1 or 4:1. In other words, the recipes I use tend to contain about equal parts flour and liquid and then between 1/3 and 1/4 as much each of fat and egg. And another generalization I would add is that less sweet recipes use a little less liquid.
Sugar doesn’t enter into Ruhlman’s ratio for a good reason. The amount of sugar used in most quick breads typically doesn’t require adjusting other ingredients.
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I would like to illustrate my revision to Ruhlman’s ratio for quick breads using a recipe for cornbread found on the wonderful Serious Eats website. The recipe they use is a variation on what I consider to be the gold standard for cornbread recipes: the Albers® Corn Bread recipe from the makers of Albers white and yellow corn meals. The ingredients differ a little so the Albers cornbread is a little bit dryer than the one featured on the Serious Eats website.
To look at the underlying ratios in the Serious Eats recipe, let’s look at the ingredients list. I’ll make a few notes and comments as we go along.
(1) Flour (in this case, flour + cornmeal): 1 cup (about 5 ounces) all-purpose flour + 1 cup (about 5 ounces) fine yellow cornmeal – so that’s 10 ounces total
Notes – It is usually best to start off a recipe by deciding how much flour you will need to make the amount you want (or in this case, how much flour and cornmeal). Ten ounces is usually appropriate to make a batter that will fill a 10″ cast iron skillet (as we will in this recipe) or make 12 muffins or fill an 8″ or 9″ square baking pan – so the same starting amount is suitable for a variety of quick bread shapes. Also, 10 ounces is the weight of roughly 2 cups of flour, so for people who choose to use volumetric measures as opposed to weights, there is a simple way to measure this convenient amount.
Comment – Some recipes for cornbread use 100% cornmeal. I prefer the softer cornbread made from a 50/50 mix of flour and cornmeal.
(2) Liquid: 6 ounces (about 3/4 cup) sour cream + 4 ounces (about 1/2 cup) cultured buttermilk – so that’s 10 ounces total
Notes – Well…not quite 10 ounces total. Milk products are not 100% liquid. Sour cream is about 20% fat; whole milk and buttermilk are about 4% fat. All forms of milk contain milk solids as well. So it’s not quite equal parts of flour to liquid here – the liquid weight is probably around 80% of the total flour weight – which is pretty much consistent with the Albers recipe (that recipe uses a cup of milk – 8 ounces). I think the tang from the sour cream and buttermilk tastes great in cornbread.
(3) Egg: 2 eggs
Notes – Two large eggs weigh-in at 3.5 ounces – about a third the weight of the flour.
(4) Fat: 7 tablespoons unsalted butter
Notes – Seven tablespoons of butter weighs 3.5 ounces, but not all of that is fat. Butter is only 80% butterfat with about 15% water and the rest consisting of milk solids. BUT, there is some additional fat coming from the sour cream (yeah…and some from the buttermilk too, but I don’t want to micromanage my numbers here). Butterfat: 3.5 ounces x 80% = 2.8 ounces. Fat from sour cream: 6 ounces x 20% = 1.2 ounces. 2.8 ounces + 1.2 ounces = 4 ounces. So the eggs and fats are included in roughly equal amounts – a little additional fat here keeps the cornbread tasting moist. The Albers recipe uses a single egg (1.75 ounces) and 1/3 cup of oil (2.6 ounces) – it will taste less rich and less moist – a bit more rustic-y.
Comment – It is a useful generalization to examine egg weight relative to fat weight in a quick bread recipe, but since the yolks do the emulsifying, it is also useful to examine how many yolks are included relative to the weight of the fat. Though a single yolk can emulsify nearly a full cup of oil in very little water, most quicbreads tend to include at least one yolk for ever 2 – 4 ounces of fat.
Ratio – We have roughly equal parts flour and liquid (a little less liquid, and the flour is actually a mixture of flour and cornmeal). We have eggs and fat each included at roughly 1/3 the weight of the flour.
A few more ingredients are needed for our cornbread, but they are not part of the ratio I wanted to examine:
(5) Sugar: 4 tablespoons sugar
Notes – That would be 1/4 cup of sugar or about 1.75 ounces. The Serious Eats and Albers recipes agree on the sweetness. I disagree – I love really sweet cornbread so I used 1/2 cup of sugar instead – about 3.5 ounces.
Comment – Quick breads, for me, shouldn’t be cloyingly sweet – the sugar should never reach 70% of the weight of the flour. Recipes that contain a LOT of sugar act less like quick breads and more like cakes (which I will cover in another post).
(6) Salt and Leavening: 1 teaspoon kosher salt + 2 teaspoons baking powder + 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Notes – The general rule here is to use 1 teaspoon of salt for every 2 cups of flour. For leavening, use 1 tablespoon (3 teaspoons) of baking powder for 2 cups of flour. When using acidic liquids (like sour cream or buttermilk), substitute 1/4 teaspoon baking soda for 1 teaspoon of the baking powder (that 1:4 substitution is standard).
So this cornbread gives a beautiful example of my revised Ruhlman’s ratio in action. The Serious Eats recipe is representative of a 3:1 ratio (roughly equal parts flour and liquid with 1/3 as much each of egg and fat) – the Albers recipe is representative of a 4:1 ratio. Both recipes work just fine, but produce slightly different results.
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Now, let’s look more closely at the technique in the Serious Eats recipe (and a couple of places where I diverted from the recipe). The underlying technique for quick breads is as simple as mixing wet into dry ingredients, but some attention to detail won’t hurt here.
Part 1 – The Dry Ingredients
5 oz. flour + 5 oz. cornmeal + 3.5 oz. sugar + 1 tsp. salt + 2 tsp. baking powder + 1/4 tsp. baking soda
I measured all the dry ingredients into the bowl of my food processor (flour, cornmeal, and sugar by weight; salt, baking powder, and baking soda using measuring spoons). Pulsing the ingredients breaks up any clumps, aerates the flour, and insures an even distribution of all the ingredients. Sifting and whisking work well too.
I used half yellow cornmeal and half white cornmeal (2.5 ounces each) for the cornmeal in this recipe.
Part 2 – Most of the Wet Ingredients
6 oz. sour cream + 4 oz. buttermilk + 2 eggs
I measured the sour cream and buttermilk by weight. Eggs are just whole eggs – I usually count each large egg as weighing 1.75 ounces. In this case, I actually used extra large eggs because they were what I had in the refrigerator. That explains why the final reading on the scale is 14 1/4 ounces.
The liquefied fat will be added to these wet ingredients, but we need to do a little work to the fat first.
Part 3 – Browning the Butter
Browning butter boils-off the water that is in butter and browns the milk solids. It produces a brown colored butterfat with a very nutty aroma and taste. Recipes that use brown butter are all the rage right now. I browned my butter with a little bit of fruity extra virgin olive oil in the skillet to lend its aroma and taste to the mix. Ultimately I wound up with a little more fat than they used in the Serious Eats recipe.
About 1 oz. olive oil + 3 oz. (6 Tbsp.) unsalted butter.
Here you can see the water boiling-off.
As soon as the bubbling tapers off, you will know that the water has boiled out of the butter. Once this happens, the butter browns quickly. It is important to keep the butter moving because your heated mixture can go from melted butterfat to burnt VERY quickly. Because I was heating my butter in a black cast iron skillet, it was impossible to get an image that shows the browning in the pan.
The browned butter will look like butter that has browned. The dark line at the bottom of this measuring cup are flecks of browned milk solids.
I used the leftover fat in my cast iron skillet to grease it.
The skillet is ready to cook some cornbread.
Part 4 – Ingredients ready
The browned butter needs to cool before being combined with the wet ingredients.
Before your final mixing, you should have two separate groups of ingredients – the dry (flour, cornmeal, sugar, leavening, and salt) – and the wet (sour cream, buttermilk, eggs, and oil). After browning the butter, wait for it to cool before combining with the wet ingredients.
Ready to mix – wet ingredients go into dry ingredients.
Part 5 – Mixing and baking
Cornbread is usually cooked in a relatively hot oven: 425°F. Preheat the oven with the cast iron skillet. Pouring the batter into the hot skillet before baking will help form a nice crust on the bottom of the cornbread. Wait until the oven has come up to temperature before mixing the batter.
Pour the wet into the dry and mix gently – just until the dry ingredients have been moistened.
Pour the mixed batter into the hot skillet and return the skillet to the oven.
The cornbread is done when it is browned over the top and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean: 20 minutes.
When you remove the skillet of cornbread from the oven, slide the contents right out of the skillet onto a cooling rack and allow it to cool for at least 15 minutes before slicing. The hotter the cornbread is, the more likely it is to tear when you slice it.
Here you can see the crust on the bottom of the skillet cornbread.
Dense and moist and flavorful.
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