Loading ...The Making of a Chef
Michael Ruhlman, a journalist, decided he wanted to write about what it was like to become a chef. So he went and enrolled himself in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). The Making of a Chef is about his experience going through the institutes classes, working at it’s restaurants, and not only learning the skills one needs to cook, but actually the mentality that is required to become a successful one.
We first go through basic skills classes with Ruhlman and learn many basics with him. What is roux? What is Béchamel? How do you make a perfect consume from scratch? We then go onto to classes on bread-making, “garde manger” and many others. We pick up a few tidbits here and there about what these classes are about, what it’s like to actually be in them, and a few of the skills and information that is actually taught. Ruhlman also does a great job simply narrating his own experience not only learning the skills, but relating to the varied teacher chefs and fellow students. We get to know some of his fellow students quite well.
Ruhlman went through these classes in 1996, so I sometimes wonder how things have changed since with the advent of the internet. Listening to the book (I bought it through Audible.com), one can’t help to get excited about the CIA. Here you can go in a complete novice cook and within weeks you should have a mastery of at least many of the basics of cooking. In less than two years, you are ready to actually be on the line in a respectable restaurant. This is definitely boot camp for cooks, and from someone who has a very uneven knowledge of cooking it is enticing to think you could just go there and become a master… or at least proficient.
As tempting as this is, you also learn in this book (as I’ve heard elsewhere) how hard a job it is to be a chef. It is long hours of very physical work, on your feet most of this time. You work every holiday – in fact holidays are the only days you can’t take off – unless you are in the rare restaurant that doesn’t serve. You also have to keep up a relentless pace in order to keep customers from leaving due to impatience, and you have to do this and still put out a product that is basically perfect or very close to it in quality. The CIA, as Ruhlman describes it, prepares its students for this by the intensity of its classes, which give time limits for preparing everything and deducts points for the smallest imperfections. To want to become a chef, Ruhlman suggests (and I would tend to agree with him), one has to have it in ones bones. A dilettante like myself who gets excited by the IDEA of being a chef would probably very quickly end up bowing out due to these overwhelming pressures involved.
One word of caution about the Audio version of this book. It originally comes from Blackstone Audio Books, so they are most likely at fault, but I have complained to Audible who provide the book to its subscribers as well. There are some pretty bad problems with the audio. Nothing that makes in unlistenable, but still distracting enough to be annoying. The main issue one notes almost immediately is that somehow there is a lot of repeating of a sentence or part of a sentence. When I say a lot I don’t mean it’s constant, but it might be enough, if edited to knock 10-20 minutes off of the 12+ hour audio book. The narrator’s voice, which is not bad, keeps getting clipped off, only to start again after a pause. It’s almost as if they took a steady tape of the guy and chopped it at various points and inserted pauses intentionally. This also ads more time to it, and while distracting, also doesn’t make it unlistenable. Finally, it almost seems as if they recorded each few chapters with different equipment. The narrators voice gets louder and then softer and then higher and the lower, and then less treble, and then more treble. It’s pretty uneven, and yet another distraction. Hopefully Blackstone and Audible will clean up this recording and make it a much more polished product. Even given these inadequacies, though, I would still recommend it to any foodie, gourmand, or gourmet out there, or just someone who likes a good story and a look into a subculture that one would normally never get to see.