Chef's Essentials
Ratios, salt math, heat thresholds, flavor balance and kitchen math.
Experienced chefs do not memorize recipes. They keep a few ratios and principles in mind and rebuild the dish from them each time. Chef's Essentials collects those ratios and principles on seven short pages. Each card shows the page's most used number and the questions it answers. A ratio is a starting point, and tasting makes the final decision.
0.8–1.2%salt by weight of the dish
Salt ratios and salt math
Open the page →3 : 1oil : lemon in shepherd's salad
Basic ratios and household measures
Open the page →74 °Csafe internal temperature for poultry (165 °F)
Heat thresholds and food safety
Open the page →Salt firstthe first check when a dish tastes wrong
Fixing taste and the order of ingredients
- What do you add when a dish tastes wrong?
- In what order do ingredients go in?
- Which ingredients cause trouble together?
1 cmthe size of a dice cut
Cutting, doneness and timing
- What size do you cut vegetables?
- How do you know a dish is ready?
- How do you get several dishes ready at once?
7 resultsfour for texture, three for flavor
What do you want? From result to technique
- How does meat stay juicy?
- How does meat become tender?
- How does food get crisp?
- How does a sauce get thick and hold together?
- How do you get a browned, roasted flavor?
- How does a flavor get inside food?
- How do you release the aroma of spices?
2× → 4×twice the thickness, four times the time