Android App Spotlight #14: Ratio

Price: $4.99
AppBrain
Website

Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio isn't so much a cookbook as it is a template from which basic foods can be made. Want to make cookie dough? You'll need 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, and 3 parts flour. Looking for a brine? All you need is 20 parts water and 1 part salt. I'm of the inclination that cookbooks and their recipes are merely starting points from which consumers should expand upon now that they know the backbone of the recipe, and Ratio takes away the crutch of the recipe altogether. It's a more advanced cookbook - you're going to have to use your knowledge of cooking to get the flavors - but you'll at least have the elemental composition, provided you use the correct ratio. I've never read the book - though the Amazon page for it has a positive writeup from Alton Brown, which is good enough for me - but the app serves as a condensed form of all this information, providing the golden ratios for a couple dozen foods, from batters to fat-based sauces, provides a calculator to provide you with the exact amounts needed depending on how many people are being served, as well as a short narrative expanding upon the ratio and sometimes providing suggestions for flavoring.

There's an appeal to recipes - follow them to the letter, and your efforts will be rewarded - but at best, it serves only as a showcase for your manual skills and ability to follow directions. You shouldn't really consider yourself a cook unless you are able to expand or modify recipes, or even make up some of your own from scratch. This app will help you in the latter respect, though you'll have to work at it.