Michael Ruhlman > Quotes

“I believe it's a cook's moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

“Living in this world will change you,” she confides. “It makes me value life. When a friend has a healthy baby, I don’t think it’s normal; I think it’s a fucking miracle.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives

“Stories--from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings--appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.”
― Michael Ruhlman

“I buy onions every time I’m in the grocery store, not because I need them, but because I fear not having an onion when I do need it. Not having an onion in the kitchen is like working with a missing limb.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto

“He carried the deep, intuitive understanding of the power of food to connect people, knew that food was not simply a device for entertaining or filling our bodies and pleasing our senses but rather that it served as a direct channel to the greater pleasures of being alive, and that it could be so only when that food was shared with friends and lovers and family.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“In the kitchen, the egg is ultimately neither ingredient nor finished dish but rather a singularity with a thousand ends.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient

“There are people who can afford to eat healthfully and there are people who cannot. I’d say that represents a fundamental brokenness of our system and our food supply. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“If you have a passion for food then it’s not only your life and your avocation but it’s also your vocation and maybe that’s the lunacy.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

“Always look for sparrows before you look for canaries.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives

“It seems to me that all these factors—from the industrialization of our food to the belief that cooking for our family is a chore rather than a fundamental luxury with unrecognized benefits for the people we love—are directly responsible for our food-related diseases and illnesses, and what will ultimately drive our need to turn our food confusion into knowledge and our anxiety into assuredness.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“Right now prepared foods account for 4 to 6 percent of our sales,” Carin told me. “In Chicago, that number is 8 percent. And I expect it will see double-digit growth, which is unheard of in any other department.” “What accounts for the growth?” I asked. “The driving force is women in the workforce and how much time people have,” she said. This seems intuitive, but her second reason for the growth was, to me, ominous. “Also, nobody knows how to cook anymore. It’s mind-boggling. Some women don’t even know how to hold a knife.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“My response to those asking how they can become a food writer is the same: first, become a writer.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Main Dish

“The need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens—second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Main Dish

“‪Cooking is so infinitely nuanced that to write completely about how to cook any dish would require a manuscript longer than a David Foster Wallace novel and include twice as many footnotes within twice as many endnotes. And then no one would be able to follow it, let alone cook from it.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient

“If you’re toasting walnuts, put a walnut in the corner of your cutting board. It really works, I’m telling you.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

“To prevent salmon from extruding that unappealing white albumen as the flesh cooks, put the fish in a 5-percent brine for 10 minutes before cooking.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto

“I learned mental flexibility: You can accomplish anything, anything at all, if you set your mind to it. One must adopt a can-do-anything attitude. You were a professional. You didn’t say no, not ever. You didn’t complain. You didn’t get tired. And you showed up, no matter what. You got there. Nothing but nothing kept you from reaching that kitchen.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection

“He says that everything a cook needs to know—everything, mind you—is contained in five books: Escoffier, Larousse, Hering’s Dictionary, La Repetoire. I tell him that’s only four. “And Câreme,” he says. He pauses. “No one wants.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

“share of stomach.” “It’s a good buzzword,” Jeff said. “You can only eat so much. America is testing that a bit. But you can only eat so much food. And people want it differently than they did thirty years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago.” Indeed they do—I don’t think I’d ever heard of kale ten years ago, or wanted a quinoa salad. “They’re not going to eat more food,” he continued. “What’s going to change is how they eat it, and how they get it. And that was the beginning of prepared foods. And everybody went into it.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“You cook with your senses,” he said when someone did something stupid. “And one of those senses is common sense.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

“The social food researcher Harry Balzer noted without prompting that Americans are not cooking more, they’re simply eating more meals at home.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“Food is about community. It’s about the earth and really taking care of the earth.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

“Boiling, the technique, should almost never be used, with the exception of green vegetables and pasta. Very few food items benefit from the agitation of boiling. Boiling will fray tender food, and in stocks, soups, and sauces it will emulsify impurities into the liquid.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

“Few people put veal stock in the same category as, say, the Goldberg Variations or Plato’s cave allegory, and this lack of understanding amazes me.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

“Regardless of the recent hunger for handcrafted foods, they remain a niche market within the grocery store. America simply didn’t have many centuries during which a unique food heritage created by small pre-industrial farms might take hold. Add to that the evolving technology to process food on a commercial scale, and the large buildings we created to store and distribute these goods—the American supermarket—and you end up with a culinary tradition that consists of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, Swanson’s TV dinners, Birds Eye frozen peas, and Kraft Singles.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“You can accomplish anything, anything at all, if you set your mind to it. One must adopt a can-do-anything attitude. You were a professional. You didn't say no, not ever. You didn't complain. You didn't get tired. And you showed up, no matter what. You got there. Nothing but nothing kept you from reaching that kitchen.

Also, you accepted the implicit obligation of excellence. Every effort would be your absolute best. Otherwise it was simply not worth doing. At the same time, you accepted that your best was never your best and never could be because you could always work faster, cleaner, more efficiently.

Many of the changes a formal culinary education wrought were in one's attitude, a kind of tougher-than-thou stance. I'm tougher than you, faster than you, better than you. I'm a chef. I work in inhuman conditions, and I like it that way. I don't have to sleep every day if there's work to be done now, you get the work done. Only got a couple hours' sleep last night, and you've got eighteen more hours of work ahead of you. Good. You like that. You're a chef. You can sleep later.”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection

“And we’re going to be here for fifty years, so whatever is not right, we’ll get right.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“be used for grilling and poaching, that’s a tremendous advantage. If a student understands sautéing—I mean there are”
― Michael Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

“when a baby or a child or an adult is on the table with his or her chest open, disaster is never more than a breath away, no matter how routine or simple the case may be. One small breath.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Walk on Water: The Miracle of Saving Children's Lives

“While Americans were increasingly interested in food—watching cooking shows on television, posting photographs of their meals to Instagram, turning restaurant chefs into media stars—we were also cooking less and less, a fact confirmed by food researcher Harry Balzer.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America