The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute

Author: Michael Ruhlman

Rating: ⭐ 3/5

Date Read: 2012/08/29

Pages: 305

The Making of a Chef is an interesting peek inside the Culinary Institute of America, which is the most important culinary school in the United States. Ruhlman is passionate about food, and writes about it well. Had I read this book in the 90’s, I would have given it 4 stars.

Many things in the world of food, however, have changed significantly. In the 90’s, food wasn’t intellectualized beyond the small sphere of bay area hippies who championed farm-to-table operations. That’s not just speculation, since Ruhlman himself admits that only one of his fellow CIA students really thought about the food. Now, farmers markets are in cities across the country, and people are becoming increasingly concerned about organic produce, free-range meats, and sustainability. When the book was written, Top Chef (and all the cooking competition knock-offs) didn’t exist; last year, I had to wait three months to snag a reservation at Top Chef Stephanie Izard’s Girl and the Goat (worth it, by the way). But the biggest change is the food itself. When I ate at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in the early 2000’s, I thought smoked salmon pizza was the height of culinary creativity. Thinking back on it, the pizza seems like something I might decide to make only while super high and out of prosciutto.

High-end dining has changed. The French Laundry was bought by Thomas Keller in 1994, but it didn’t become the best restaurant in the world until 2003. In the late 90’s, oysters and pearls would have been an out of this world, brand new, never-before attempted experience (I’m sure they’re still out of this world, at least in Keller’s comptent hands). Today, that kind of dish might get you kicked off of Top Chef, since it’s been over copied and overdone. If I had lived in Chicago during the mid to late 90’s (as a 20-something, mind you. During the late 90’s, my 13 year old self was doing a lot of cooking, but most of it consisted of loaded tacos and chicken pot pies), I would have been doing my best to grab a reservation at Charlie Trotter’s. Most of my Chicagoan foodie friends only vaguely know who Charlie Trotter is. In a world where you can experience whatever Grant Achatz is cooking up, Trotter seems like a dinosaur (and if he’s really the asshole he’s purported to be, he probably deserves it). Nowadays, people know who great chefs like Graham Elliot and Rick Bayless are. They’d tweet about it if they saw them at Whole Foods. People really, deeply care about food.

This didn’t seem to be true in the 90’s. And I’m not saying that because 90’s me was more interested in N’sync than cuisine. I’m saying it because things have changed a lot since Top Chef, and the Food Network, and blogging, and Yelp. Hell, even my mom venerates farm-to-table advocates like Alice Waters and Rick Bayless. Ruhlman’s book loses something, not by any fault of its own, but because it doesn’t anticipate the revolution that was about to take place. When Ruhlman started culinary school, El Bulli hadn’t even gotten its third star, so I don’t blame him for not being prescient enough to predict the importance of molecular gastronomy. I do wonder what a book about the CIA would be like today though (literary agents, I’m more than willing to write this, if you’ll pay for it).

Nowhere is the shift from “California pizza” to “European-inspired locally sourced seasonal sharable small-plates (with organic wines and small-batch craft beer)” more apparent than at the end of the book, where Ruhlman describes his experiences working on restaurant row (in other words, at the restaurants run by the CIA). I get the distinct impression that I wouldn’t enjoy eating there. There’s some real strange “health” food cooking here, which feels particularly outdated. Apparently, the goal of St. Andrew’s Cafe, one of the restaurants at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, was to serve “healthier” foods. In the fat-phobic 90’s, this was done by piling plates full of (fat free) carbohydrates and replacing real foods, like cream, with evaporated skim milk. No, just no. It’s hard to believe that students learned to make pasta (and pizza!) as a health food. Luckily, the CIA has abandoned this bizarre practice by turning St. Andrew’s into a sustainable farm-to-table concept.

I bet Ruhlman’s pleased that my friends and I can spend a Friday evening at The Purple Pig, snacking on house-cured lardo and spreading bone marrow on artisan bread. I’m sure he’s even more pleased that we can hold a long, and intellectually thrilling, conversation about our favorite ways to cure ham (I’m seriously obsessed with prosciutto di parma, but my friends swear that jambon is far superior. We’ll have to agree to disagree). But the thing Ruhlman would be most happy about is our realization that a quality stock is the most important thing you can learn how to cook (I’ve given stock out as a birthday gift. No joke). Because that’s one thing that hasn’t changed: knowing the basics will get you further than an immersion circulator ever can.