Michael Ruhlman Audiobooks

Inside the professional kitchen with The Soul of a Chef, by a writer the chefs trust

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Who is Michael Ruhlman?

Michael Ruhlman, born in 1963, is an American author, home cook and entrepreneur who has made the working kitchen his life’s subject. He has written or co-authored more than two dozen books spanning non-fiction, fiction, memoir and cookery – an unusually broad shelf for a food writer, and the mark of someone who is a writer first and a food obsessive second, or possibly the other way round, depending on the book.

The company he keeps tells its own story. Ruhlman has co-written books with some of America’s most celebrated chefs – Thomas Keller, Eric Ripert, Michael Symon and Jean-Georges Vongerichten among them – the kind of sustained access that only comes when the professionals trust you to get it right.

Michael Ruhlman in audiobooks

Food writing works surprisingly well in audio: it is storytelling about craft, pressure and obsession, and it needs no photographs to land. The Soul of a Chef is Ruhlman in exactly that vein. His particular gift is the insider-outsider position – a home cook and writer moving among professionals and translating their intensity for the rest of us – and listeners who enjoy hearing how experts think, rather than just what they produce, will find plenty to hold them. For UK listeners raised on television kitchens, it is an invitation to go deeper into the discipline behind the theatre.