Below are descriptions of some of my favorite books (and there’s a complete list of all of my books at the bottom.
Most recently (5/23/2023): The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, a book intended to simplify cocktails in the sometimes confusing era of the Craft Cocktail.
My most recent cookbook is From Scratch: 10 Meals, 175 Recipes, and Techniques You’ll Use Over and Over. All my books aim to teach as well as to provide great recipes that work, and this one looks at ten meals (Roast Chicken, Steak Frites, Paella) and show how much you know if you know just one of those meals, and all you can do when you know just a little.
My other great teaching book is Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, a Cook's Manifesto, which won a James Beard Foundation award. Here I break all of cooking down into twenty foods and techniques (salt, egg, batter, sauté, braise). When you know these 20 things, there’s nothing you can’t cook.
Ratio: The Secret Codes of Everyday Cooking breaks all of cooking down into proportions. Recipes aren’t a list of amounts of ingredients, they’re a record of proportions of one ingredient relative to another. So much flour require so much water to be bread. Double that water and add an equal part egg and you’ve got a batter. When you know a ratio, you have a hundred recipes at hand.
Probably my most successful cookbook, I wrote with my friend Chef Brian Polcyn, called Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting Smoking and Curing. It’s all about making bacon and sausage and pates, considered the Bible of the subject.
We followed this with Salumi: The Italian Craft of Dry Curing, all about dry-curing meats, and Pate, Confit, Rillette.
For simply reading about the life and work of the chef: My most popular nonfiction seems to be The Soul of a Chef: The Pursuit of Perfection, closely followed by The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, followed by The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooking in the Age of Celebrity, each book about differing aspects of the endlessly fascinating, brutal, elegant, metaphor-for-life professional kitchen.
I also spent a year with an independent grocery store chain to find out how our food gets to us and where it all comes from: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food In America.
The egg is a miracle of nutrition, economy, deliciousness, and utility. There may be no more valuable food to the cook. So I wrote a book exploring its many uses: Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient.
I’m very proud of The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song to a Forgotten Fat, a small but lovely book about cooking with one of the world’s most flavorful fat, predominant in Jewish cuisine.
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking and The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen also strive to clarify and simplify the work of cooking.
Also, I'm very proud to have published my first fiction, In Short Measures: Three Novellas (2015) each story about love and marriage in middle age, and of youthful love and lost love. Sorry, no food here, just love stories.
The following is a list of all my books, organized by publication date, first to most recent.:
My first book, a year in the life of a traditional all-boy day school that actively advocates for single-sex education for boys and young me. Ruhlman "follows a diverse handful of students and a couple of standout teachers as a novelist would, to establish major characters, and the crises and themes of the year develop like plot lines." NYTimes.
I spent a year at the Culinary Institute of America learning to cook, the wrote a reported memoir about it. I had no idea at the time it would change my life.
Chosen by The NYTimes as on of the 25 most influential cookbooks of the past 100 years, The French Laundry Cookbook a treasure trove of cooking technique, philosophy, recipes, and photography from one of the country's most celebrated restaurants and chefs.
A narrative of three of America's top chefs and the story of their lives as chefs, and American culinary culture. Anthony Bourdain described it as "an adventure story, a hold-your-breath-while-you-turn-the-page thriller that's also an anthropological study of the culture of cooking."