I found a lot of my inspiration for cooking in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio. I wanted to explore a world free from recipes. Ruhlman starts with explaining how ratios can free a home cook from only following recipes. Recipes are great if passed down through tradition or to make a favorite dish, but they limit the cook. Finding a recipe at a site like Allrecipes is great in the evening after work when you need a quick dish and your brain stopped working when you woke up that morning. However, there’s less joy in finding those recipes. It’s so easy, and that’s the problem.
For example, what if someone went through all of the songs humanity has ever and will ever create and gave you a playlist of 100 songs. And these 100 songs are the ones you would love the most, out of any song ever created or that ever will be created. How long would you enjoy that playlist? Years? A few months? Weeks? How sad would it be to possess, to know, that those songs are the best you will ever obtain. Your love for music might disappear. Most of the fun in music comes through discovery, without which music would become stale and unsatisfying.
Allrecipes gives you highly rated dishes at the touch of a button. But what has been made easy becomes inconsequential, and I don’t want food to be inconsequential. I know I’m not the only naysayer of Allrecipes, and I know it’s easy to tear down something that’s popular, but I was disappointed by the “discoveries” I had before I read Ratio. My discoveries consisted of finding a new recipe online and making it. Instead, Ratio opened up the possibility that I could discover something new, or at least better understand the concepts underlying recipes.
I wanted to make it all. There was a problem, however. Ratio covers a large number of 
items at the most basic level to give readers a broad understanding of the power of breaking down recipes to their simplest form. I did not (nor do most people) have time to study such a broad range of subjects. I had to narrow down what to study. After reviewing Ratio I decided to focus on a staple food: Bread. All I needed was a book to start my studies
with. My breakthrough came while having a conversation about food with a friend of mine who is a chef at a local sushi place. She suggested I start with Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, a Portland-based baker.
I purchased the book, flew through the first few chapters, purchased some rudimentary equipment, and began my “in-depth” study of bread.
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