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In his second in-depth foray into the world of professional cooking, Michael Ruhlman journeys into the heart of the profession. Observing the rigorous Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America, the most influential cooking school in the country, Ruhlman enters the lives and kitchens of rising star Michael Symon and the renowned Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. This fascinating audiobook will satisfy any listener's hunger for knowledge about cooking and food, the secrets of successful chefs, at what point cooking becomes an art form, and more.
It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem.
From one of our most interesting literary figures, former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs, a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook.
In an industry where celebrity chefs are known as much for their salty talk and quick tempers as their food, Eric Ripert stands out. The winner of four James Beard Awards, co-owner and chef of a world-renowned restaurant, and recipient of countless Michelin stars, Ripert embodies elegance and culinary perfection. But before the accolades, before he even knew how to make a proper hollandaise sauce, Eric Ripert was a lonely young boy in the south of France whose life was falling apart.
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors.
In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses 24 hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here listeners will find all the details, in rapid-fire succession, of what it takes to deliver an exceptional plate of food - the journey to excellence by way of exhaustion. Told in second-person narrative, Sous Chef is an immersive, adrenaline-fueled run that offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the food service industry, allowing listeners to briefly inhabit the hidden world behind the kitchen doors, in real time.
In his second in-depth foray into the world of professional cooking, Michael Ruhlman journeys into the heart of the profession. Observing the rigorous Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America, the most influential cooking school in the country, Ruhlman enters the lives and kitchens of rising star Michael Symon and the renowned Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. This fascinating audiobook will satisfy any listener's hunger for knowledge about cooking and food, the secrets of successful chefs, at what point cooking becomes an art form, and more.
It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem.
From one of our most interesting literary figures, former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs, a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook.
In an industry where celebrity chefs are known as much for their salty talk and quick tempers as their food, Eric Ripert stands out. The winner of four James Beard Awards, co-owner and chef of a world-renowned restaurant, and recipient of countless Michelin stars, Ripert embodies elegance and culinary perfection. But before the accolades, before he even knew how to make a proper hollandaise sauce, Eric Ripert was a lonely young boy in the south of France whose life was falling apart.
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors.
In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses 24 hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here listeners will find all the details, in rapid-fire succession, of what it takes to deliver an exceptional plate of food - the journey to excellence by way of exhaustion. Told in second-person narrative, Sous Chef is an immersive, adrenaline-fueled run that offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the food service industry, allowing listeners to briefly inhabit the hidden world behind the kitchen doors, in real time.
A visionary new master class in cooking that distills decades of professional experience into just four simple elements, from the woman declared "America's next great cooking teacher" by Alice Waters.
In his lively, unprecedented close-up portrait of Ferran Adrià, award-winning food writer Colman Andrews traces this groundbreaking chef’s rise from resort hotel dishwasher to culinary deity, and the evolution of El Bulli from a German-owned beach bar into the establishment voted annually by an international jury to be “the world’s best restaurant”.
In a culture obsessed with food - how it looks, what it tastes like, where it comes from, what is good for us - there are often more questions than answers. Michael Ruhlman proposes that the best practices for consuming wisely could be hiding in plain sight - in the aisles of your local supermarket. Using the human story of the family-run Midwestern chain Heinen's as an anchor to this journalistic narrative, he dives into the mysterious world of supermarkets and the ways in which we produce, consume, and distribute food.
In the 10 years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business and for Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw explores those changes, tracking Bourdain's strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood. Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen.
Last summer, The New Yorker published chef Anthony Bourdain's shocking, "Don't Eat Before Reading This." Now, the author uses the same "take-no-prisoners" attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable audiobook, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike.
When you're cooking, you're a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll transports listeners back in time to witness the remarkable evolution of the American restaurant chef in the 1970s and 1980s. Andrew Friedman goes inside Chez Panisse and other Bay Area restaurants to show how the politically charged backdrop of Berkeley helped spark this new profession; into the historically underrated community of Los Angeles chefs, including a young Wolfgang Puck; and into the clash of cultures between established French chefs in New York City and the American game changers.
Chefs at top restaurants face competing pressures to deliver complex and creative dishes, and navigate market forces to run a profitable business in an industry with exceptionally high costs and low profit margins. Creating a distinctive and original culinary style allows them to stand out in the market, but making the familiar food that many customers want ensures that they can stay in business.
This is Gordon Ramsay's autobiography, the first time he has told the full story of how he became the world's most famous and infamous chef. He also discusses his difficult childhood, his brother's heroin addiction, and his failed first career as a footballer.
How does a nice Italian boy from Queens turn his passion for food and wine into a nationwide empire? In his intrepid, irreverent, and terrifically entertaining memoir, Restaurant Man, Joe Bastianich charts his remarkable culinary journey from his parents’ neighborhood eatery to becoming one of the country’s most successful restaurateurs, along with his superstar chef partners: his mother, Lidia Bastianich, and Mario Batali.
Anthony Bourdain, Gabrielle Hamilton, and Eric Ripert are all well established, accomplished chefs; they share their early cooking experiences, what influenced their cooking styles, and what made them want to be chefs forever. Bourdain is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, the author of the best-selling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and the host of the popular Food Network series, A Cook's Tour.
Can you describe how the flavor of halibut differs from red snapper? How Brie differs from cheddar? For most of us, unfortunately, the answer is: badly. Flavor remains a vague, undeveloped concept we don't know enough about to describe - or to appreciate - fully. In Flavor, Bob Holmes shows us just how much we're missing. He tackles questions like why cake tastes sweetest on white plates, how wine experts' eyes fool their noses, and how language affects flavor.
The subject mater of the audiobook, a journalist going through culinary school, is very interesting. However the narrator, as most of the other reviewers have pointed out, makes it very difficult for this audiobook to be engaging. I listen to audiobooks as I'm driving long distances to try to keep myself awake, alert, and entertained. I found myself being droned to boredom by the narrator's monotone, seeming lack of interest, and apparent lack of knowledge of the subject matter.
All the "characters" sounded the same. While many audiobook performers create different "voices" for different characters, this presenter made no effort to differentiate one character from another, which made it very difficult to keep track of who was "talking".
I was also very surprised at the careless production. Again, as other reviewers pointed out, there were awkward pauses, missed edits, and a silted pace in parts. What were the producers and editors doing the whole time, eating??
With a better narrator, this could have been a very engaging audiobook.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful
This is the most badly read audiobook I've ever heard. The reader is stilted, lacks feel for the material, and barely changes intonation ever.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful
I really enjoyed the content of the book. The reader destroyed some pretty simple names that erode my enjoyment of the book. They grate on my nerves, like his pronunciation of the word shallots. I love Ruhlman's books, this is no exception. I would prefer to read this text.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful
I quite enjoyed hearing all the little details that go into the making of a chef at the CIA but I don't think it is for everyone. Even if you think you are interested please listen to the preview as I had a difficult time listening to the narrator. VERY DRY, took me a couple of hours to get passed the narrators monotone emotionless voice.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
I read the hardcover version of this a few years ago, and loved it. I'm enjoying listening to it, but the recording itself can be a little irritating. Would have been much better if Ruhlman himself would have recorded it. This particular narrator mispronounces words a lot, and even pronounced the same word two different ways within a few seconds. There are some strange gaps in the recording, too, which are an editing problem, not a narrating problem. This book and its author are widely respected among professionals, and I'm disappointed that more care was not taken in its presentation. Other than the mispronunciations and gaps, the narrator does a decent job and doesn't display any other annoying tendencies.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
I expected to love this book, but I found myself getting really confused. It seems like it skips around a bit between subject matters, so that I'd find myself listening to a description of a teacher, and then a class not taught by that teacher, and then we'd be back to that teacher.
More annoying, though, was the narrator--this guy was horrible. The mispronounciations and awkward pauses were even worse than a previous reviewer would lead you to believe.
All in all, I didn't enjoy this book, which was really disappointing, since I was looking forward to diving into it.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
As a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and having read both "The Making of a Chef" and "The Soul of a Chef," I can attest to the validity of the inner-workings of the Culinary. This book is not only accurate in nearly every detail, but I had the honor of learning under many of the same Chefs talked about in the book. When I learned that I had been accepted to the Culinary, I ran out and bought a copy of this book as research. Now, after having graduated several years later, I took the opporotunity to listen to the book again, surprised at the authenticity. I encourage anyone interested in either going to culinary school or learning about what it takes to be a chef, pay close attention to this book. It will give you a delightful insight into a cloaked world, one usually covered in tomato sauce.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful
Back when you could actually buy books that were Kindle "text to speech" enabled, I listened to them all the time. "Doesn't the computer voice bother you?" everyone asked. It didn't, not a bit. I say this to offer proof that I have a very high tolerance for a range of narration styles.
That said, this narrator is driving me crazy. His voice is so monotonous that I have trouble telling where his sentences end and another begins. Look through his other work, you will see that he tends to narrate history books. Enough said.
I will struggle through this book based solely on my interest in the topic.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
This book would be a great primer for those considering jumping in, checkbook in hand, to a culinary program. It is written about one of my favorite subjects - the culinary field and the people who chose it (I'm a personal chef). But, the narration and the story itself is plodding. I don't need to read about famous chefs and their experiences in culinary school (if they even attended culinary school)to find it interesting, but this was definitely needed "something". It was lacking spice and a reason why I should care about what the author went through in his quest for knowledge. Some stories "read" better when NOT told by the person who wrote the story. Not everyone can use their voice to simulate emotion and inflection, and just because the author lived the story and wrote the book does not qualify him to read it back to others in such a way that they would want to hear it. I really, really wish I had found this more interesting, I desperately wanted to!
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Seriously. This guy reads like he's a police desk sergeant reading the crime blotter. His pacing is completely off -- he doesn't pause at the end of a sentence before he starts a new chapter, for goodness sake. He's monotone, he pronounces things oddly, and I am just agog that he can make a career out of this.
The content is interesting and in text form I would have given it at least 4 stars, but at this point I don't even know if I'm going to finish it because listening to it is alternately putting me to sleep and driving me crazy.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Much of this book focussed on the character of the teaching staff and headline processes. Sadly not the informative piece of work the title would suggest.
Personally, I found this a slog to the end with very few redeeming features.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful