Michael Ruhlman

I've just started reading Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef. Released a few years ago, it's a kind of sequel to his The Making of a Chef, in which he goes to the famed Culinary Institute of America for a year and writes about his experience. In The Soul of a Chef, Ruhlman returns to the CIA, this time to trail seven chefs as they compete for the CIA's elusive title of "Certified Master Chef".

Man this guy can write. I don't know what it is exactly: his language isn't particularly poetic, his vocabulary isn't evocative or interestingly esoteric, his plots don't have elaborate twists and turns—it's a documentary, after all. But Ruhlman manages to capture the excitement, the frenzy, the tension, the mood-swings in the CIA's kitchens in a way that grips the reader by the throat. I couldn't put the first book down, and I'm equally riveted by the second.

The best thing about the books, for me at least, is that they make you want to cook. And not just cook, but try your utter best to cook well. No home cook should pretend that they can achieve anything like the levels of perfection required of students at the CIA, unless they dedicate themselves full-time to the task. But Ruhlman really makes you want to try, he makes you care about not just cooking things but cooking them right, or at least cooking them as well as you can. I've dipped into my Escoffier a number of times over the years, but it's only while I'm reading Ruhlman's books that I eagerly grab for it and really think about what Escoffier is asking us to do.

If you're looking for inspiration in the kitchen, but not about any particular ingredient or technique, I've read nothing better for the job than Ruhlman's two books. Check them out, if you haven't already.