The Making of a Chef

There was a certain amount of jumping around within some of the day-to-day stories that I found distracting. Otherwise a really terrific book.

I like food shows, food books, and eating food, but I'm not a chef or a cook. I just follow a recipe. Michael Ruhlman here is a journalist who attends the CIA for the experience of it and not because he wants to be a chef himself. He starts out just like any other student, works his way through the curriculum, and then graduates along with the rest of the students. Along the way, his journalist-ness evidently confers upon him the ability to chat with his instructors and the staff at will, so we get a lot of one-on-one interviews with his teachers and other faculty involved with keeping the CIA running.

On one hand it was interesting hearing what students go through at the CIA. Lots of rigorous skill drills involved with making sure each one of your cuts is the same as the last, lots of making, remaking, and re-re-making things over and over again to get the basics down. I especially liked the segment near the end where the chefs have to work front of the house at one of the CIA's restaurants, and we get a lot of information about what it takes to be a waiter in the fine dining environment the CIA encourages. There's lots and lots of neat little tidbits of information here.

On the other hand, I felt like the author took his journalism too seriously, and we're treated to long segments in the minutiae of chef lectures. It sometimes feels like he transcribed these segments word-for-word from the instructors, and thus feels like I'm listening to class lectures all over again. I also feel like the author's perspective as a journalist and not a chef took something away from the experience. He wasn't there to learn a new trade or begin a new career, he was there to get information from others who were doing that. That degree of separation seemed (to me) to temper the feelings a bit into “well, this was awful, thank god I wasn't doing this for a career”, which seems a little flip. Also also, brown sauce. I grew incredibly tired of hearing about brown sauce.

For audiobook listeners, the audiobook for this was terrible. The narrator was monotone, and there were clear edited portions (to the point where things would stop mid-sentence sometimes and then pick up again after a long pause) that took away from the information.

So I guess this was a decent book, but there were a lot of hangups I had about it that prevent me from really recommending it to anyone.