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For a gourmet like Duke student-chef Bryan
Zupon, the decision not to channel his considerable culinary talents
into a full-time career may seem lamentable. But, as journalist
Michael Ruhlman '85 can attest, the life of a professional
chef is far more grueling, and far less glamorous, than it sounds.
When Ruhlman went undercover as a student at the legendary Culinary
Institute of America (CIA) in 1996, his goals were twofold. As
a gastronome, he was determined to master the techniques and training
required to become a professional-level chef. As a writer, Ruhlman
wanted to capture the rigorous intensity of the experience for
readers curious about what goes on behind the swinging doors of
a successful commercial kitchen.
The resulting book, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the
Culinary Institute of America (1997), turned out to be the first
in a food trilogy that includes The Soul of a Chef: The Journey
Toward Perfection (2000) and The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen
(2006). He's also collaborated on several cookbooks: The
French Laundry Cookbook and Bouchon with Thomas Keller, Charcuterie
with Brian Polcyn, and A Return to Cooking with Eric Ripert. Although
Ruhlman has also written nonfiction books about same-sex education,
wooden-boat yards, and pediatric heart surgeons, his track record
as a food writer has gained him the most visibility.
"I'm lucky that my interest in learning and writing
about food coincided so felicitously with the country's emerging
interest in food," says Ruhlman. "When I started [at
CIA], food journalists, by and large, did not have any training
in the culinary arts. So it gave me a real advantage."
The Chef trilogy captures behind-the-scenes accounts of what restaurant
life is really like—the sinking, gut-wrenching feeling when
the line gets backed up as new order tickets pile up; staff members
who quit during a rush or don't show up at all; the physical
toll of working on your feet, nonstop, in a crowded 105-degree
kitchen for ten-hour shifts.
Since Ruhlman first donned a chef's jacket a decade ago,
the public's growing fascination with food and the popularity
of such 24/7 cable programming as The Food Network have given rise
to the phenomenon of the celebrity chef. As he asks in his most
recent book, when a chef's empire includes, say, a handful
of restaurants, a slickly marketed line of spices and prepared
foods, a couple of television shows, and full-time publicists and
marketing managers, who is actually doing the cooking?
"I think that there is going to be a correction in our adoration
of the chef," he says. "We are going to begin to appreciate
those chefs who deserve to be appreciated and understand that not
everybody, because they are a chef, deserves to be a celebrity.
We are going to become more sophisticated about what the work entails
and what is a good meal versus a great meal. And as we become more
educated, we are going to care less about who the chef is than
we are about the restaurant experience itself."
As he chops vegetables to make a mirepois for veal stock simmering
on his stove—Ruhlman does all the cooking in his family—he
reflects on the wave of attention being paid to experimental chefs
whose ingredients lists include chemical additives such as powdered
calcium chloride, xanathan gum, and sodium alginate, the better
to froth up beet foams or make gelatinous molds that hold their
shape despite temperature fluctuations. "Will the market
support numerous molecular gastronomical havens? Probably not.
They take a lot of work and are very expensive to run. There is
also a very small market for it; people still want to eat ‘normal
food.' Having said that, there is certainly room for experimentation.
[Chefs like] Wiley Dufresne and Grant Achatz will advance things.
They'll create fifty new dishes using unusual techniques,
and a couple of those will catch on and ultimately become mainstream.
Eventually, sous vide will be mainstream."
Bryan Zupon dreams of one day making a pilgrimage to Spain's
inimitably outré El Bulli restaurant, where the thirty-five-dish
tasting menu created by chef Ferrán Adrià started
with a new take on the classic gin and tonic: a martini glass filled
with gin foam poured over a cube of cucumber and topped with an
orange-peel twist. Still, Zupon agrees that some of today's
avant-garde chefs can go too far. He mentions one who insisted
that diners wear masks while they ate so that their sense of taste
was heightened by the deprivation of sight. Like Ruhlman, he has
deeper respect for those chefs whose heart and soul are devoted
to the craft of cooking rather than the cult of celebrity. After
all, Zupon says, sometimes at the end of the day, there's
nothing better than a simple, perfectly grilled steak with a side
of crisp, golden fries.
—Bridget Booher
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