In the ultimate food-lover's fantasy, journalist Michael Ruhlman dons chef's jacket and houndstooth-check pants to join the students in Skills One at the Culinary Institute of America, the most influential cooking school in the country. His goal is to document the training of America's chefs from the first classroom to the Culinary's final kitchen, the American Bounty Restaurant. The result becomes more than a rote reportage of a school for cooks. Ruhlman learns to cook as though his future depends upon it, and this complete immersion enables him to create the most vivid and energetic memoir of a culinary education on record.

A brick monastery on the fertile banks of the Hudson River, the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, is the country's oldest, biggest, best-known cooking school, and is the only residential college in the United States devoted solely to the study of the culinary arts. The Making of a Chef takes us to the heart of this food-knowledge mecca. Here we meet a coterie of talented chefs. We not only taste their food, we are privy to their cooking of it and the ideas underlying its creation. And we become intimate with the chefs of tomorrow-some young, some not so young-with their backgrounds, their ambitions, and their experiences.

Ultimately Ruhlman propels himself and his readers through a score of kitchens and classrooms, from Asian and American regional cuisines to lunch cookery and even table waiting, in search of the elusive, unnamable elements of great cooking.