Name: Andrea Badgley's review of The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman
Item: The Soul of a Chef
Rating: 4
Author: Andrea Badgley

Michael Ruhlman

The journalist-author of The Making of a Chef draws on his own love of good food to journey into the heart of the men and women whose goal is to serve perfect food, drawing on the collective experiences of three talented young chefs to reveal the dreams, goals, and ideas of great chefs. Reprint.

The Journey Toward Perfection

The Soul of a Chef

Andrea Badgley

Documents the author's experience in the United States' most influental cooking school, from the first classroom to the final kitchen, the American Bounty Restaurant.

Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

The Making of a Chef

Laura Mauler

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.

altlovesbooks

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.

Chris Aldrich

Certainly an interesting read and view into the working world of chefs. It also has some interesting philosophical viewpoints on life which can be used in almost any profession. I feel like I used to run a movie theater the same way that Thomas Keller philosophically runs the French Laundry.

Documents the author's experience in the United States' most influential cooking school, from the first classroom to the final kitchen, the American Bounty Restaurant. Original. 35,000 first printing.

I'm tempted to call this unadulterated "food porn," but because there are no photos, it's technically got to be called food erotica. And some terrifically fantastic erotica it is!

Ruhlman manages to capture the magic of brown sauce theory and elevates it to near religion while telling some compelling and interesting stories on his journey through the Culinary Institute of America. If I wasn't in a more solid frame of mind, I'd be tempted to pack everything in, take my copy of McGee, and head to the CIA right now.

The acclaimed author of "The Soul of a Chef" explores the allure of the celebrity chef in modern America.

Beyond the Kitchen

The Reach of a Chef

An interesting read to be sure, particularly in light of several of his previous books. It's interesting to see a semblance of follow up on some of the stories and characters he'd written nearly a decade before.

I appreciated the sections dealing with the CIA more than some of the latter specific restaurant and individual chef bios. There were some interesting pieces of overview of the restaurant business which were also quite interesting. I'm curious how there isn't a show on the Food Network which encapsulates some of this book into television format?

Andrea Badgley &
The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman

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Andrea Badgley &The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman

Reviews

Join the club

Andrea Badgley &
The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman