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The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute | 
| Author: Michael Ruhlman
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
Buy Used: $4.99
You Save: $12.01 (71%)
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Rating:  97 reviews
Sales Rank: 46303
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0805061738
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5092
EAN: 9780805061734
ASIN: 0805061738
Publication Date: October 15, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: No writing/highlighting present, first endpage has name cut off of top of page, slight page foxing
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Amazon.com
Journalist Michael Ruhlman talked his way into the CIA: the Culinary Institute of America, the Harvard of cooking schools. It had something to do with potatoes a grand-uncle had eaten deacades earlier, how the man could remember them so well for so long, buried as they had been in the middle of an elegant meal. Ruhlman wanted to learn how to cook potatoes like that--like an art--and the CIA seemed the place to go. The fun part of this book is that we all get to go along for the ride without having to endure the trauma of cooking school. Ever wonder what goes on in a busy kitchen, why your meal comes late or shows up poorly cooked? The temptation is to blame the waiter, but there are a world of cooks behind those swinging doors, and Ruhlman marches you right into it. It's a world where, when everything is going right, time halts and consciousness expands. And when a few things go wrong, the earth begins to wobble on its axis. Ruhlamn has the writerly skills to make the education of a chef a visceral experience.
Product Description
Now in paperback, the eye-opening book that was nominated for a 1998 James Beard Foundation award in the Writing on Food category.In the winter of 1996, Michael Ruhlman donned hounds-tooth-check pants and a chef's jacket and entered the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, to learn the art of cooking. His vivid and energetic record of that experience, The Making of a Chef, takes us to the heart of this food-knowledge mecca. Here we meet a coterie of talented chefs, an astonishing and driven breed. Ruhlman learns fundamental skills and information about the behavior of food that make cooking anything possible. Ultimately, he propels himself and his readers through a score of kitchens and classrooms, from Asian and American regional cuisines to lunch cookery and even table waiting, in search of the elusive, unnameable elements of great cooking.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 92 more reviews...
 Insightful and Entertaining July 30, 2008
A Reader (Phoenix, AZ)
I really enjoyed this book.
What I expected was an inside-the-walls report about an interesting institution, its students, and its instructors. To be sure, the book is that. But it is more. The core of the book, I think, is the epiphany, or series of epiphanies, that Ruhlman has on and after a day he considers missing class because of a snowstorm. The book's major themes orbit that formative experience and are held by its gravity. Some of these are deep, thought-provoking, and ultimately unanswerable matters; for example, the cook's version of the nature v. nurture debate - are cooks born or created? Some are a bit more CIA-specific; Rulman's thesis that the overarching dogma of the place is perfection is both beautifully explained and illustrated by vignettes (for example, the running obsession with the proper roux for brown sauce).
To me, though, the book is at its finest in using the snowstorm core to explain the essence of a cook. Ruhlman finds the concept difficult to reduce to words. One important aspect, though, seems to be captured albeit imperfectly by the hackneyed concept of "the zone." (Ruhlman doesn't use this term.) There are occasions - not many - when I have been in "the zone." I am not a cook, but I have had times - at school, at work, and with some hobbies - when I have faced monumental tasks, with seemingly not enough time, and where my attention has been entirely engaged and neither failure or tardiness is an option; where the completion of each task along the way offers no time for reflection, satisfaction, or rest but instead is merely the predicate for moving, as efficiently as possible, to the next.
What I remember most about these occasions is the decompression period when the project is complete. The transition, almost literally, from focused vision to a fuller field of vision. I can recall, for example, one such occasion where, when my work was finally done in the late evening, I noticed a complete and completely uneaten lunch that I had somehow secured in the midst of the task, but could not remember how. It sat no more than 2 feet from me throughout, untouched and, indeed, unseen, until the pinpoint focus broadened and peripheral vision returned. For a brief time my senses are alive. I see, sense, and interact with the world differently. And then, too quickly, I return to my normal state - well outside "the zone" with my attention scattered in different directions.
Surgeons or professional athletes, who similarly live in and out of the zone, probably can already relate. For the rest of us, Ruhlman's book is a dramatic success and accessible to non-cooks like me precisely because we all, no doubt, have had similar experiences to varying degrees. What Ruhlman helps us see is that CIA students, and cooks, live almost perpetually in these states - in "the zone," then the exhausted but exhilarating hyper-aware state that follows, immediately back into the zone, and on and on. While many cooks-turned-writers such as Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White have attempted to describe similar states, they paint with too broad and imperfect a brush - typically resorting to incomplete concepts like "adrenaline junkie." Ruhlman - a writer turned cook - however, nails it in a much more satisfying exploration of the question and in so doing makes his book amazingly accessibly to anyone and, indeed, transcendent.
Well written, dragged a bit at times, but learned so very much July 7, 2008
World Tourist (Rio de Janeiro, Chicago)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Well if you are not a foodie I would suggest reducing the review by 3 stars and finding something else to read, but if you are a foodie this book was excellent. A nice fairly complete telling of what it is like to go through the Culinary Institute which is something I always wanted to do but either didn't have the time nor wish to commit so much of it. I am always playing in the kitchen and I got a ton of direction from this book as to the why of what I often do without knowing it (of course if that is all you are looking for there is McGee). Even little things that I picked up were great, for example, my wife hates wet sandwich bread, here in America we eat a lot of sandwiches so this small thing is a big problem. In the book they make mention of how the CIA club sandwich always puts cheese on the bread to create a barrier, so simple but something that never dawned on me, sounds silly but now I know how to make my sandwiches and her happy at the same time, thats worth a lot more than the price of the book right there.
 Disappointing & Misleading October 24, 2007
C. Lamb (California, United States)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Ruhlman tries very hard to be neither a culinary student nor a journalist, so he ends up being a sort of half-baked memoirist. On the one hand, this book is worth reading in order to get a behind-the-scenes of some of what it's like to train at the CIA, but on the other hand, Ruhlman's lack of writerly discipline makes the book exasperatingly low on information.
There's far too much hero-worship on his part of dominant male figures at the school; it seems that Ruhlman is powerfully drawn to aggressive, angry, powerful, and/or graceful men, and his account of the CIA is overshadowed by his need to be accepted by and mythologize male chefs like Adam (a passionate, withdrawn student), the school's president, his Skills teacher, and other male teachers. Worst of all, the women at the school are given short-shrift by Ruhlman, presented as either needy figures of fun or neurotic screwups who get put in their place by a man. This read less like accurate reporting and more like the bias of a writer who isn't as interested in the women he meets.
I wouldn't have minded if Ruhlman had acknowledged the effect these men had on him and his need to be accepted by them and had written honestly about that, but he hid behind his so-called account of training at the CIA and his creation of what he describes as the nature of people who are born to cook. In actuality, he skipped most of the school's curriculum and was given special treatment by the staff.
Overall, a disappointing and frustrating read.
Deft, knowledgeable, and well written August 20, 2007
Brad
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Michael Ruhlman has found his true calling. He's one of the best authors currently out there who writes culinaryeese ... not about recipes, but about [i]the journey/experience itself[/i]. And he does it with the intimacy and sensitivity of someone who's been through the process himself.
In this book, the author takes the reader on a ride though what it's like to attend the Culinary Institute of America, from the perspective of an insider/student.
Wonderful book. Well written. Deft, and knowledgeable.
Highly recommended for self-taught cooking aficianados who love every aspect of their hobby, and also for people considering formalized culinary education and a career in the food industry.
 An interesting personal account on how one becomes a professional cook August 12, 2007
samiam0917 (North Carolina)
I am an avid follower (hobbyist, not a professional) of all things culinary and my best friend is a CIA graduate, so I was very interested to get an objective view of what what goes on at CIA and to put some perspective around some of the stories he's told me thorugh the years. Ruhlman's story of his time at CIA was engaging and an overall good read, but two things left me a bit cold (hence the 4 vs. 5 stars).
1) I was quite disappointed to find no culinary glossary, dictionary, or reference to define the formal and informal terms he used with great frequency throughout the book. Given my interest in food and my many discussions w/my chef friend, I knew what "family meal" was, what he meant by "in the weeds," and was able to identify most culinary terms such as "bruinoise," "gallantine," and "pate a choux," but I suspect the casual reader was lost in that aspect and I've never enjoyed reading a book where I needed a dictionary to know what the writer was talking about.
2) I found the content of the story to be uneven throughout the book. What Ruhlman covered in depth, he REALLY covered in depth, i.e., the making of the mise en place or how to create a roux. In doing so, however, he glossed over or merely touched on many other potential areas of interest without further development, i.e., the culinary terminology (as mentioned above), the pain-staking planning and execution it must take to use the foods from one class in another, the inspiration and creation of class and restaurant menus, how CIA graduates (not just the famous ones) have influenced the world of food, cooking, restaurants, etc.
Ultimately, I think this story would have been better suited to being published as a multi-issue series in a foodie magazine like Food and Wine or Gourmet vs. as a stand-alone book. Nonetheless, and my comments above notwithstanding, I did enjoy the book and felt I learned a lot about the basics of becoming a chef.
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