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

292 Pages·2016·1.43 MB·English

by  Michael Ruhlman

For my father,
Rip,
provider of the feast
Table of Contents Title Page
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Part I - Skill Development
Secret Sharer
Routine
Day Eight
Brown Sauce
The Storm
The Making of Chef Pardus
You Understand What I Am Saying?
A System of Values
Roux Decree
Part II - The Formative Kitchens
Introduction to Hot Foods
Lunch Cookery and the Burnt Parsnip
President Metz
Part III - Keepers of the Food
Garde Manger
The Second-Term Practical
Bewitched
Externship
Part IV - Second Year
Thermal Death Point
St. Andrew’s Cafe
St. Andrew’s Kitchen
Taste
Part V - Bounty
Theater of Perfection
The American Bounty Restaurant
Also by Michael Ruhlman
Afterword: Benediction
Appendix - The CIA Curriculum: Associate Degrees
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
Introduction
When I return to the august halls of the Culinary Institute of America, I feel a
visceral jolt. To be around all that food—those dozens of teaching kitchens taut
with the work of cooking, the air electric with the food knowledge of more than
a hundred chef-instructors, and the palpable passion of men and women entering
our flourishing culinary world—charges me with energy and excitement.
I delight in telling new students that never has there been a better time in
America to be entering the world of food and service, a time when chefs have
earned prestige unimagined by their forebears, when excellent ingredients are
increasingly available, and food issues both serious and light are front page
news. I tell new students to learn the fundamentals of cooking and the rest will
follow, and more, that the degree of excellence with which they master those
fundamentals will very likely determine their success for the rest of their
culinary careers. I tell them to ask questions, to absorb as much culinary
knowledge and wisdom as possible during this brief time.
It’s an exciting journey, a culinary education. It transforms you from the
inside out. It alters your understanding of time and your relationship with
elements. A good culinary education, whether it happens in a restaurant or in a
school, will change the way you respond to the world, the way you organize
your life, your expectations of yourself and of others, the way you face
challenges. The rules of a kitchen and its unusual work ethos are different from
any other I’ve encountered, and in the best kitchens, this ethos is among the most
honorable to strive for and the most difficult to maintain.
A culinary education conveys voluminous information about the plants and
animals we eat and how they behave in heat—a body of knowledge that is
inexhaustible and infinitely nuanced—but the education is also about working
with your hands, the physical experience of the skill and the repetition of that
experience. Cooking at its most basic and at its most refined levels is
fundamentally a craft, and crafts must be practiced over and over; with repetition
comes increased speed and precision.
Most important of all, though, and what is least often explicitly stated, is that a
culinary education is about being pushed and about learning to push yourself:
You can do more than you imagine and you can do it better than you think
possible. That’s what you should be imbibing every day as you learn to break
down a chicken or to cure a ham or chiffonade herbs or cook and cool a crème
Anglaise—getting better every day. A good culinary education is ultimately
about this push, to learn more, to work harder, faster, better. Forever.
The Making of a Chef is the record of one culinary education at one of the
most influential culinary schools in the country, a portrait of the students, the
chef-instructors, the classes, the cooking lessons, and the food. But it’s also
about the transformation that can happen when you make the journey. I’m a
writer, but I became a cook in order to write this book, and this has done more to
direct my life than any one thing I’ve done before or since.

I arrived at the CIA at a fortuitous moment. In 1996, chefs were on the cusp of
what would become full-blown celebrity. The Food Network was in its infancy
(Emeril Live would debut that summer). The call for local ingredients and
naturally raised food was a murmur, mainly among chefs. America’s gathering
interest in ingredients, cooking, and restaurants had yet to be called a “food
revolution.”
I was among 29,000 students in the United States who had entered one of 157
culinary degree programs that year. Last year, according to the CIA, more than
62,000 students were enrolled in 301 programs. Today 56 schools offer
bachelor’s degrees in the culinary arts. When I entered only two did, the CIA
and Johnson & Wales (which enrolls the highest number of students in its five
campuses).
In a little more than a decade, the number of people seeking a formal culinary
education has doubled. Many of the new students are career changers. When I
returned to the CIA in 2005, I met students in their forties and fifties who had
been bankers, physicians, lawyers, and other white collar professionals; they had
been either unfulfilled in their previous work or they had long harbored dreams
of professional culinary pursuits and had at last taken the plunge. But the
average age of the CIA student is lower now than when I was there (down to
twenty-two from twenty-six), so the career changer accounts for only a small
percentage of the extraordinary growth in enrollment.
One reason the numbers have doubled over the past twelve years, I believe, is
the growth of opportunities for work in the food world. Students no longer need
necessarily to enroll intending to become chefs as they did for most of the CIA’s
six decades (the school was founded in New Haven in 1946 to offer a trade to
American servicemen returning from World War II). Today, the restaurant
industry remains strong and growing ($558 billion, up $21 billion from last
year), so those wishing to join its ranks as chefs and restaurateurs are assured a
strong job market. But new opportunities in media and publishing, in food
production, and in business and industry abound as well.
Another reason for the doubled enrollment is that the growing prestige of
being a chef has made joining a culinary program cool. It didn’t used to be
something a parent bragged about for their son or daughter, but now it is, and
this is both good and bad. Chefs have television shows. Chefs are famous. Chefs
are published authors. Chefs have lines of products. Chefs have many
businesses. Some chefs are world-famous moguls. The emergence of the chef as
tycoon, embodied by Wolfgang Puck, Mario Batali, Jean-Georges Vongerichten,
and others who operate restaurants throughout the world and sell food and
cooking products—proves the potential for riches and fame never before
dreamed of by professional cooks.
This is a good thing for all chefs. Chefs deserve our esteem—but for their
work, not for their fame and not simply because they wear a chef’s coat. It is
good that some chefs, through their very hard work, have hit it big and earned
the admiration of their peers in other businesses. The extraordinary successes of
the relatively few reflect well on the entire industry.
The downside of this phenomenon is that aspiring cooks may be led to believe
that the doors of culinary school open onto the land of milk and honey upon
graduation. This is akin to thinking everyone who is a committed football or
basketball player in high school has a pretty good shot at the NFL or NBA. The
fact is, only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of people who enter a
culinary program during the next five years will become rich and famous for
their cooking or their businesses.
Because of the illusion created by the recent celebrity of chefs, many who
enter culinary school are disillusioned or disappointed after leaving it—yoked by
student-loan debt and grueling work at subsistence level pay. Yet, this is exactly
what one should expect upon graduating, and it is not a bad thing.
When you leave a culinary program you will have the tools to learn the rest of
what you need to know to succeed. Learning the rest means building up
experience and this requires time. The food industry and industries connected to
it are vast, and opportunities are many. Some opportunities haven’t even been
invented yet, but they will be, likely by an enterprising young man or woman
currently at work on their culinary degree.
Because of the expanding opportunities, those students who enroll in a
bachelor’s program, or studies beyond the associate cooking degree, will have an
advantage in the job market. If you have the time and the money for the
additional years of study, it’s probably worth the additional time and money.
I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail over the years from people who have read this book.
Many thank me for saving them from going to culinary school. A lot more say
that this book is the reason they enrolled in a culinary school.
The most frequent question I get is this: “Is it worth it? Should I put myself
into debt or should I learn by working in restaurants?”
Only you can make that call. But I believe that either way can work depending
on your situation. One costs money and delivers a lot of information in a very
short time. The other takes quite a bit more time and will not provide the breadth
of information one gets in most schools, but you earn money as you learn; also,
many famous and highly regarded chefs trained by working. The latter option is
less certain and takes longer. The former is much more expensive, but, in my
opinion, is worth the money because it delivers so much information so quickly.
The e-mails I get that are impossible to answer are those from people who are
out of their twenties and are wondering if it’s too late. “Mr. Ruhlman,” a
correspondent wrote me last week, “am I crazy to think that I can embark on a
culinary career at the age of fifty?”
It depends. If this man wants to be a restaurant chef, I would say yes, it is too
late. Actual restaurant cooking is a young man’s game—it requires extraordinary
stamina and endurance. It’s a physical occupation more on the level of
professional football than the performing arts, and the better shape you’re in, the
better cook you’ll be. It takes at least five years after culinary school to figure
out what you’re doing from a culinary standpoint. And another five years to
make anything happen on your own, a restaurant or a culinary business. I’m not
aware of any sixty-year-old chefs still working the line. And friends nearing fifty
who still occasionally do work the line at their restaurants describe their younger
colleagues impatiently reading the tickets over their shoulders because they no
longer move fast enough. As with any physical occupation, whether in
professional sports or heart surgery or cooking, there comes a time in a cook’s
life when knowledge and experience cannot compensate for diminishing speed.
If, on the other hand, this correspondent simply wants to be involved in the
food world somehow, then no, he’s not crazy. It all depends on what you’re
after. Fifty is getting up there for any kind of change, but if you can swing it
financially, you may find culinary school and the opportunities it opens up for
you truly rewarding. Perhaps it will be in writing, perhaps it will be in
production, front of the house service, or in research and development for a food
company.
I finished my culinary school journey when I completed the manuscript for
this book in January 1997 at the age of thirty-four. I had little idea at the time
that the culinary education I got as a result of my reporting this book (and some
good luck) would become the foundation of much of the writing I’ve gone on to
do and has become the primary source of my income. Alton Brown worked in
television until about the same age, foresaw the potential for food television
programming and enrolled at the New England Culinary Institute in 1994. He
created and sold his show Good Eats to the Food Network in 1999 and has
become one of the most popular personalities on the network, hosting a variety
of shows and documentaries and writing several excellent books on food and
cooking.
No doubt there are many examples of middle-aged culinary students who have
gone on to be successful in the culinary world. It all depends on what your goals
are. If you intend to become involved in any kind of food media, whether in
print or on screen, I recommend a culinary education. I believe that people with
a solid culinary foundation will be best suited to take advantage of opportunities
in traditional media and in the new media.

My main intention in writing this book was not to create a primer for the
incoming culinary student; rather, I wanted to craft a story that would be
compelling even for those who have no intention of setting foot in a culinary
school, but who still want to know what happens to you when you learn to cook,
what it means to be a cook and a chef, and to know what the work of
professional cooking has to tell us about food and cooking generally, whether in
professional kitchens or at home. And so this book is filled with the stories and
personalities of the actual people I encountered on my journey through the CIA.
I’ve lost touch with most of the people I write about in this book but still keep
up with a few. Adam Shepard is the chef-owner of two restaurants called
Lunetta, one in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn. Ben Grossman is a chef and an
owner of The Smoke Joint in Brooklyn. Both were leaders in my Skills class.
Paul Trujillo is the chef of a restaurant on St. John in the Virgin Islands. Travis
Alberhasky is a chef at a catering company in Kansas, and is a member of the
Missouri National Guard who has been deployed to and returned from Iraq. Eun-
Jung Lee earned her Ph.D. and is a culinary educator at a hospitality college in
Korea. Last year, I ran into a woman I took bread baking with, Jill Davie, chef
de cuisine at Josie in Santa Monica, when she was a contestant on The Next Iron
Chef America for the Food Network. She also has a show on the Fine Living
Network. She told me our friend from bread baking, Jason Dante, had become a
nurse. I bumped into Bill Scepansky, with whom I cooked at the American
Bounty restaurant, at a food conference at the CIA’s campus in the Napa Valley
—he works as a corporate chef for a large produce company. John Marshall, my
partner on the grill station at American Bounty, owned and ran a restaurant in