Michael Ruhlman

Based on Wikipedia: Michael Ruhlman

The Man Who Wants You to Throw Away Your Recipes

Here's a radical idea: what if everything you know about cooking is backwards? What if following recipes—those precise, measured instructions we treat as sacred texts—is actually the thing keeping you from becoming a good cook?

Michael Ruhlman has built his career on this provocation. He's the author who enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America not to become a chef, but to understand what makes chefs tick. He's the collaborator behind some of the most celebrated cookbooks of the past three decades. And he's the man who wrote a book called Ratio that essentially argues you can reduce all of baking and much of cooking to a handful of simple proportions.

Bread, he'll tell you, is five parts flour to three parts water. That's it. Once you know that, you don't need a recipe. You need to understand what you're doing.

From Copy Boy to Culinary Chronicler

Ruhlman's path to becoming one of America's most influential food writers began about as far from a professional kitchen as you can get. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1963, he attended a private boys' school called University School before heading to Duke University for his undergraduate degree.

After college, he did what many restless young graduates do: a series of odd jobs and travel. His first real position was as a copy boy at The New York Times—the lowest rung on the journalism ladder, fetching coffee and running errands for reporters. It's the kind of job that either crushes your ambitions or fuels them.

For Ruhlman, it fueled them. But not immediately.

He drifted back to Cleveland in 1991 to work for a local magazine. There, he wrote a piece about his old high school and its new headmaster. The article resonated enough that he expanded it into a book: Boys Themselves: A Return to Single-Sex Education, published in 1996. It was a thoughtful examination of whether educating boys separately from girls might actually serve them better—a topic that had nothing to do with food.

That book might have sent him down a path of education writing. Instead, it led somewhere entirely unexpected.

Going Back to School—Again

For his second book, Ruhlman made an unusual decision. He enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, the prestigious cooking school in Hyde Park, New York that has trained generations of professional chefs. But he wasn't there to become one of them.

He was there to watch. To take notes. To understand.

The Culinary Institute of America—often called the CIA, though not that CIA—is essentially the West Point of cooking. Students spend two years learning everything from knife skills to restaurant management. They wake before dawn for pastry classes. They memorize the mother sauces. They learn, through relentless repetition, how to cook.

Ruhlman took classes but never graduated. He was there as an observer with a press pass, embedding himself in this world of aspiring cooks to produce The Making of a Chef in 1997. The book became a surprise success, offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at what it actually takes to become a professional cook.

What made the book work wasn't just the fly-on-the-wall reporting. It was Ruhlman's genuine curiosity about the deeper questions. Why do chefs do things the way they do? What separates a competent cook from a great one? Is cooking a craft you learn or an art you're born with?

The book's success spawned two sequels: The Soul of a Chef in 2000 and The Reach of a Chef in 2006. Together, they form a trilogy exploring the evolution of the American chef from anonymous kitchen laborer to celebrity phenomenon.

The Thomas Keller Partnership

If Ruhlman's CIA books established him as a serious food writer, his collaboration with Thomas Keller elevated him to the top tier.

Thomas Keller is, by most measures, the most important American chef of his generation. His restaurant The French Laundry, tucked into a stone building in California's Napa Valley, has been ranked among the best restaurants in the world. Keller's approach to cooking is obsessively precise—he famously demands that his cooks work in complete silence, and he's been known to reject a dish because a garnish was placed a millimeter off center.

In 1999, Ruhlman helped produce The French Laundry Cookbook. This wasn't your typical chef's cookbook with simplified home versions of restaurant dishes. It was the real thing: the actual recipes Keller used in his kitchen, with all their complexity and multiple-day preparations intact.

The book was a commercial and critical triumph. It also established a template that Ruhlman would follow for years: pair a celebrated chef's technical brilliance with clear, accessible writing that could explain why these techniques mattered.

More Keller collaborations followed. Bouchon in 2004, named after Keller's French bistro. Under Pressure in 2008, which explored sous vide cooking—a technique where food is sealed in plastic bags and cooked in precisely controlled water baths, sometimes for days at a time. Ad Hoc at Home in 2009, focusing on family-style American cooking. Bouchon Bakery in 2012, tackling breads and pastries.

Each book found an audience hungry not just for recipes but for understanding.

The Charcuterie Revival

While working with Keller on haute cuisine, Ruhlman was simultaneously exploring something far more primal: the ancient art of preserving meat.

In 2005, he published Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing with Michigan chef Brian Polcyn. The book arrived at exactly the right moment. American cooks were beginning to rediscover traditional food crafts—baking bread, fermenting vegetables, brewing beer at home. Making your own bacon or curing your own duck prosciutto fit perfectly into this movement.

Charcuterie, if you're unfamiliar, is the French term for the craft of preserved meats. It encompasses bacon, sausages, pâtés, terrines, confit, and dozens of other preparations that humans developed over millennia to keep meat edible before refrigeration existed. The word comes from the French chair cuite, meaning "cooked flesh."

Ruhlman and Polcyn's book demystified these techniques for home cooks. Suddenly, people who had never considered making their own pancetta were curing pork belly in their refrigerators. The book launched a thousand basement salami operations.

A follow-up, Salumi, arrived in 2012, focusing specifically on Italian dry-cured meats. Where Charcuterie covered the broader French tradition, Salumi dove deep into the specific techniques behind coppa, 'nduja, and other Italian specialties. Polcyn and Ruhlman continued their partnership with Pâté, Confit, Rillette in 2019 and Meat Pies in 2024.

The Ratio Revolution

All of Ruhlman's work had been building toward a single insight, and in 2009 he finally articulated it in Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.

The book's premise is deceptively simple. Most basic preparations in the kitchen—the building blocks from which everything else is made—follow consistent proportions. Learn the ratios, and you're free from recipes forever.

Consider bread. A basic bread dough is five parts flour to three parts water, by weight. Add yeast, salt, and time, and you have bread. Want a wetter, more rustic loaf with bigger holes? Increase the water. Want a tighter crumb for sandwiches? Decrease it. But five to three is your starting point.

Or take vinaigrette, the simple salad dressing that trips up so many home cooks. It's three parts oil to one part vinegar. That's the ratio. You can use olive oil or walnut oil. You can use red wine vinegar or lemon juice. You can add mustard or shallots or herbs. But three to one is the underlying structure.

The beauty of Ruhlman's approach is that it shifts cooking from memorization to understanding. When you know that pasta dough is three parts flour to two parts egg, you don't need to look up a recipe every time you want fresh noodles. When you know that pie dough is three parts flour to two parts fat to one part water, you can adjust based on conditions—a little more water on a dry day, a little less when it's humid.

This might sound elementary, but it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about cooking. Most cookbook authors give you fish. Ruhlman wants to teach you to fish.

Twenty Techniques to Rule Them All

If Ratio distilled cooking to its mathematical essence, Ruhlman's Twenty (2011) distilled it to its technical essence.

The book identifies twenty fundamental techniques that, once mastered, allow you to cook virtually anything. Things like: using salt properly, working with eggs, making stock, braising meat, cooking with acid. Each technique builds on the others, and together they form a complete vocabulary for the kitchen.

The James Beard Foundation—essentially the Oscars of the American food world—awarded the book its general cooking prize in 2012. It was Ruhlman's second Beard Award, following a 1999 win for magazine feature writing.

The book crystallized something Ruhlman had been circling for years: the difference between cooking and following recipes. Anyone can follow a recipe, at least mechanically. But understanding why you're doing each step—why you salt pasta water, why you sear meat before braising, why you add acid at the end rather than the beginning—transforms you from a recipe follower into an actual cook.

The Elements of Style—For Food

In 2007, Ruhlman published The Elements of Cooking, a book that made its debt explicit in the title. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is the slender grammar guide that has taught generations of writers to omit needless words and prefer the active voice. Ruhlman wanted to do the same thing for cooking.

The book opens with essays on the fundamentals—heat, salt, stock, a few others—before transitioning into an alphabetical reference guide to cooking terms and techniques. It's the kind of book you keep near the stove, dipping into when you encounter an unfamiliar term or want a quick refresher on the proper technique for something.

The ambition was significant. Where most cooking references are encyclopedic and exhaustive, Ruhlman wanted something lean and opinionated. Not every technique is equally important. Not every term deserves equal space. What matters, he argued, are the essentials.

Beyond the Kitchen

Though Ruhlman became famous for food writing, his interests have always ranged wider. Wooden Boats (2001) explored the craftsmanship behind traditional boat building. Walk On Water (2003) embedded him in an elite pediatric surgical unit. House (2005) was a memoir about renovating his Cleveland home.

In 2015, he even published fiction: In Short Measures: Three Novellas, stories about love in middle age that had nothing to do with food at all.

But food kept pulling him back. Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America (2017) examined the supermarket industry—a topic that might sound dry until you realize that how we shop for food shapes what we eat, how it's produced, and ultimately who profits from feeding us. From Scratch (2019) looked at ten staple meals and extracted all the lessons embedded in each.

He's also explored the quirkier corners of culinary tradition. The Book of Schmaltz (2012) is a love letter to rendered chicken fat flavored with onion—a ingredient central to Jewish cooking but largely forgotten in modern American kitchens. Egg (2014) devoted an entire book to humanity's most versatile ingredient. The Book of Cocktail Ratios (2023) applied his ratio philosophy to mixed drinks.

The Celebrity Chef Era

Ruhlman came of age as a food writer during an extraordinary transformation in American food culture. When he enrolled at the Culinary Institute in the mid-1990s, most Americans couldn't name a single living chef. By the time he published The Reach of a Chef in 2006, chefs were celebrities with television shows, product lines, and global restaurant empires.

He documented this change partly by living through it. His collaborations with Thomas Keller came as Keller was ascending to his current status as America's most revered chef. He worked with Eric Ripert, the French chef behind New York's Le Bernardin, on A Return to Cooking (2002). He helped fellow Clevelander Michael Symon—who would later become an Iron Chef—produce his first cookbook, Live to Cook (2009). He collaborated with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, another titan of New York fine dining, on the foreword for Gabriel Kreuther: The Spirit of Alsace, a Cookbook (2021).

Ruhlman also appeared on the other side of the camera. He served as a judge on the PBS reality show Cooking Under Fire and on The Next Iron Chef, the competition that determined who would join the ranks of celebrity chefs on Iron Chef America.

The Mission: Get People Cooking

If there's a through line in Ruhlman's work, it's a simple conviction: people should cook for themselves and the people they love.

This might seem obvious—who doesn't value a home-cooked meal?—but the reality of American eating suggests otherwise. The average American eats more than a third of their calories from restaurants and takeout. Sales of prepared and processed foods continue to climb. Cooking has become, for many people, an occasional hobby rather than a daily practice.

Ruhlman sees this as a loss, not just for our health but for something deeper. Cooking connects us to ingredients, to seasons, to the people we feed. It's a skill that compounds—the more you cook, the better you get, and the more pleasure you derive from it.

He's embraced technology in service of this mission. In the smartphone era, he worked with digital media developer Will Turnage to create the Ratio App, which put his proportional cooking philosophy in people's pockets. He produced apps for bread baking and schmaltz-based cooking. He's been an active presence on social media, using every platform to encourage people to get into the kitchen.

A Cleveland Story

It's worth noting that Ruhlman has remained, in many ways, a Cleveland writer. He was born there, educated there, and returned there after his early travels. Cleveland isn't the first city that comes to mind when you think of American food culture—that distinction belongs to New York, San Francisco, maybe New Orleans—but it produced both Ruhlman and Michael Symon, two figures who helped shape the national conversation about food.

Today, Ruhlman splits his time between New York and Providence, Rhode Island. He married the writer Ann Hood in 2017, in a ceremony in Abingdon Square Park in Manhattan's West Village. He has two children from his previous marriage to photographer Donna Turner, with whom he collaborated on many of his books.

His career has now spanned nearly three decades and more than two dozen books. He's watched the rise of celebrity chefs, the farm-to-table movement, the explosion of food television, and the current moment when home cooking videos dominate social media. Through all of it, he's kept asking the same fundamental questions.

What makes a good cook? How do we teach people to feed themselves? Why do the techniques that have worked for centuries still matter?

The answers, Ruhlman would say, are simpler than you think. Five parts flour. Three parts water. A little heat. A lot of practice. And the willingness to stop following recipes and start actually cooking.