Michael Ruhlman

The Elements of Cooking



Michael Ruhlman
Food writer, good cook

Michael Ruhlman has worked for over a decade with the best chefs in the country. From his first best-selling food book, The Making of a Chef, and his next one, The Soul of a Chef, which focused on Cleveland's Michael Symon among others, Ruhlman's groundbreaking work has exposed, celebrated and delineated the shadowy backstage world of America's greatest kitchens and the chefs who run them. His previous book, The Reach of a Chef, zeroed in on the increasing popularity of food culture and celebrity chefs, tracing the lives of master chefs and showing what happens when they leave the kitchen for the TV studio and best sellers lists. His new book The Elements of Cooking, is an opinionated food glossary patterned after Strunk & White's Elements of Style, jam-packed not only with key cooking terms, but definitions towards an understanding of how good cooks become great. The book is designed for anyone from the beginner to the experienced chef. Cool Cleveland's Thomas Mulready spent time in Michael's own Cleveland Heights kitchen as he prepared a meal of roasted chicken, fingerling potatoes fresh from the local farmer's market, green beans with toasted almonds, all topped off with a nice jus made from the scrapings on the bottom of the pan. He talks with Mulready about how America has become the center of the food universe, the secret code of the kitchen, and the eight indispensable fundamentals of cooking.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743299787/ref=nosim/ruhlmancom



The Elements of Cooking
Michael Ruhlman
Scribner

Watching Michael Ruhlman cook is less like an episode on The Food Network than a conversation with a zen master chef. A true Clevelander, Ruhlman's first book, Boys Themselves, chronicled life at single-gender University School, which he attended. But he caught the imagination of the public and the attention of some of the world's greatest chefs when he attended the Culinary Institute of America and decided to write about it in The Making of a Chef, which was optioned by Universal. Other popular books followed: The Soul of a Chef, focusing on three young master chefs, including Cleveland's Michael Symon of Lola & Lolita restaurants; The Reach of a Chef, on celebrity culture, the third of his trilogy on professional cooking; Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing, belying his NEO roots; the coffee-table sized, The French Laundry Cookbook, and Bouchon, written almost like novels, with recipes from Thomas Keller's famous restaurant; and A Return to Cooking, with recipes from Eric Ripert, a cook who became a chef and wanted to become a cook again. What was missing was an examination of the basics of cooking, a focus on the craft of creating the basics in everyone's kitchen, from those just understanding the art of applying heat to meat, to the chef on the journey from good to great.
Worth the price of the book are the eight quirky and essential essays on concepts vital to cooking: Stock (at the same time more complicated and more simple than it seems); Sauce (not just what you pour over food, but also the mayonnaise in tuna salad, so important that a French saucier is "often the most talented cook in the kitchen..."); Salt ("the most important thing for a cook to know is how to salt food..."); The Egg ("My reverence for the egg borders on religious devotion..."); Heat (understanding of heat "defines the excellence of the cook..."); Tools (the five essential tools that allow you to cook almost anything); Sources (15 great books on cooking); and Finesse (going from superb to superlative).

The remainder of Elements of Cooking is arranged from A to Z as a glossary with entries that the aspiring cook will find useful: the book should be kept handy in the kitchen, next to The Joy of Cooking, On Food and Cooking, and any other essential references you use daily. Convenient for spilling the secrets of kitchen slang, or offering the necessary definition of carmelize or macerate, the book is probably more unique in that it can be read cover to cover, or from middle to front, or skipping around, educating the reader on the correct approaches to food preparation, the importance of specific ingredients and seasoning, and the spirit with which one should engage themselves in the kitchen.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743299787/ref=nosim/ruhlmancom
http://www.Ruhlman.com

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