Product Description

A complete illustrated volume of home-cooking lessons and recipes.

The Culinary Institute of America is the place where many of America's leading chefs have learned and refined their cooking skills, and its methods are widely revered as the gold standard among culinary insiders around the world.

Now everyone can learn from the best, with Cooking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America. This complete-and completely approachable-illustrated guide gives home cooks an outstanding course in the essentials of cooking along with a wealth of irresistible recipes. Drawing on the CIA's extensive expertise, it shares all the basic information on equipment, ingredients, and techniques needed to become a great cook, from proper knife skills to cooking methods such as braising, grilling, saut?ing, and stewing. Readers learn the techniques step by step, with detailed instructions and extensive color photographs that clearly explain both what to do and how to do it.

Perfect for practicing skills and building a repertoire, the book's 200 stylish recipes are delicious and easy to make, from Beef Satay with Peanut Sauce to Roast Chicken with Pan Gravy, from Shrimp in Chili Sauce to Pasta Primavera with Basil Cream Sauce, French Style Peas, and more.

Generously illustrated with 250 beautiful full-color photographs of techniques and finished dishes, Cooking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America is a complete package of home-cooking lessons and recipes that home cooks can use to master the art of cooking in their own kitchens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #113209 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This superbly organized, stripped-down offspring of the CIA's New Professional Chef has the no-nonsense tone that results when dozens of teachers collaborate on a serious project: "Keep the blades of your knives sharp and well honed"; "Don't be tempted to leave the fish in the marinade for longer than 30 minutes." It's a refreshing sobriety amid the current mania for anecdotes in the home-cooking market. Less French than most school-driven texts, the book emphasizes basic techniques, from saut‚ing and roasting to portioning a chicken and making pasta. The recipe selections were edited with an equally heavy but sure hand: Puree of Split Pea, Roast Chicken with Pan Gravy, Beef Tenderloin with Wild Mushrooms, Gnocchi with Herbs and Butter. Each has an unobtrusive sidebar pointing out the relevant techniques (seeding tomatoes, melting chocolate). Even less familiar or more complex recipes-Roast Goose with Apple-Prune Sauce, Mole Poblano de Pollo, Steamed Cod with Gingered Hoisin Sauce-rely on sure-fire methods. Since pasta is a mainstay of home cooking, the carbonara-primavera-puttanesca trinity puts in an obligatory appearance, along with various types of ravioli and lasagne. Desserts are mostly of the simple showstopper variety: Chocolate Mousse and several classic cooking-school souffles. Look elsewhere, however, for game, sweetbreads, bread and pastry. Copiously photographed and filled with impressive-looking tables and charts (including 10 pages of weight/volume equivalents and temperature charts), this makes an ideal book for committed starting cooks, as well as culinary overachievers who occasionally need reminding of the basics.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
This superbly organized, stripped-down offspring of the CIA's New Professional Chef has the no-nonsense tone that results when dozens of teachers collaborate on a serious project: "Keep the blades of your knives sharp and well honed"; "Don't be tempted to leave the fish in the marinade for longer than 30 minutes." It's a refreshing sobriety amid the current mania for anecdotes in the home-cooking market. Less French than most school-driven texts, the book emphasizes basic techniques, from sautéing and roasting to portioning a chicken and making pasts. The recipe selections were edited with an equally heavy but sure hand: Puree of Split Pea, Roast Chicken with Pan Gravy, Beef Tenderloin with Wild Mushrooms, Gnocchi with Herbs and Butter. Each has an unobtrusive sidebar pointing out the relevant techniques (seeding tomatoes, melting chocolate). Even less familiar or more complex recipes - Roast Goose with Apple-Prune Sauce, Mole Poblano de Pollo, Steamed Cod with Gingered Hoisin Sauce - rely on sure-fire methods. Since pasta is a mainstay of home cooking, the carbonara-primavera-puttanesca trinity puts in an o bligatory appearance, along with various types of ravioli and lasagna. Desserts are mostly of the simple showstopper variety: Chocolate Mousse and several classic cooking-school soufflés. Look elsewhere, however, for game, sweetbreads, bread and pastry. Copiously photographed and filled with impressive-looking tables and charts (including 10 pages of weight/volume equivalents and temperature charts), this makes an ideal book for committed starting cooks, as well as culinary over-achievers who occasionally need reminding of the basics. (Oct.) (Publishers Weekly, July 7, 2003)

The huge textbooks from the Culinary Institute of America (with campuses in Hyde Park, NY. and Greystone, CA) are standard references for professionals; now the well-known school offers the culinary insights and experience of its staff to home cooks in a far more accessible work. An introductory section with dozens of step-by-step photographs covers equipment, basic pantry ingredients, and essential cooking techniques. Each of the recipe chapters opens with more specia1ized techniques related to their subject The 200 recipes, many of them shown in color photographs, include both classic and more contemporary dishes. While some of these are closer to comfort food than haute cuisine, the book ultimately emphasizes technique and more sophisticated recipes and will therefore appeal only to ambitious home cooks. (Library Journal, September 15, 2003)

This oversized, beautifully photographed collection offers not only recipes but also techniques, as well as details on equipment, tools and styles of cooking, all clearly explained in words and pictures. Many of the dishes you'll know or think you do — Puttanesca sauce, roast chicken with gravy, orange and fennel salad, a basic vinaigrette, a gratin of fresh berries — but some finer point on how to make something better is added in the terrific margin notes. (USA Today, December 4, 2003)

About the Author
The Culinary Institute of America began life in 1946 as a storefront training school for World War II veterans, with an enrollment of 16 and a staff of three. Today, the Institute is an active training facility for food professionals in Hyde Park, New York, which houses its degree programs in culinary arts and baking and pastry and St. Helena, California, which provides life-long learning opportunities for food professionals. The Institute's vision 'has changed the way Americans eat' (The James Beard Foundation) and has earned CIA its industry-wide reputation as the 'Harvard' of cooking schools.

Customer Reviews

Textbook from Reliable Authority on Cooking. Some lapses
'Cooking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America' aims to arm the amateur cook with many of the tools of the professional and communicate the things which inspire a professional chef and set them apart from the amateur. The book comes to us with the authority of the foremost culinary school in the country and the aura of being a textbook with which it may seem to be sacrilege to take issue. This book does many very good things, but in popularizing it's subject, it does loose some depth and credibility.

The book does several very good things that almost entirely outweigh its few blemishes.

The first valuable lesson from this book is its characterization of the way students of professional cooking come to think about their vocation and its materials. In this way, the book can make you a more successful cook by adapting professional methods. The heart of the matter is to 'learn to think critically about cooking' and 'learn how to look at, touch, smell, and taste a dish to judge whether it is coming together'. A professional cook knows how to rescue a recipe when a step fails or an ingredient is unavailable. They know what Alton Brown calls the map of culinary facts and techniques, which surround recipes, and explains how they work. That is not to say that this book deals with culinary science a la Shirley Corriher. The terms 'acid' and 'gluten' don't even appear in the index.

The second valuable type of lesson in this book is the descriptions of general techniques and the explanations for how they work. An example is in the technique for preparing stocks where the book explains that flavors are extracted from vegetables within an hour after adding them to the simmering stock water. This means that if you expect to simmer your veal bones for four hours, you can wait for three hours before adding the vegetables. This measure is irrelevant, of course, for fish stocks, where the fish flesh and bones should be simmered for no more than 30 to 45 minutes. Much of this information is given in easily used tabular form as in the table of best cooking methods for cuts of beef, veal, pork, and lamb. My most useful suggestion regarding this information is to recommend you view this information with a critical eye. In one part of the book, it is said that analogous parts of animals are often best cooked by similar methods. However, the book cites braising as a preferred method for cooking beef chuck (shoulder), but does not give braising as a method for cooking lamb shoulder. While I see many recipes for grilling and broiling lamb shoulder, Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby in 'How to Cook Meat' specifically say that lamb shoulder is an excellent cut for braising. Regarding cooking temperature endpoints, the book is typically very conservative, largely following the USDA recommendations for reaching up to 180 degrees in chicken thighs when cooking whole birds. Reliable sources have recommended that reaching 165 degrees is quite enough, with less danger of drying out the white meat in the bird.

The third and possibly most valuable resource in this book is the collection of classic recipes with expert procedures which all but guarantee a satisfactory result. The pasta chapter, for example, begins with a basic tomato marinara sauce followed by such classics as pasta Puttanesca, pasta Primavera, pasta alla Carbonara, spinach and escarole lasagna, and (potato) gnocchi with herbs and butter. The collection does not contain every 'classic'. You will not, for example, find coq au vin in the poultry chapter. But, the selection is very good. Each recipe contains a sidebar giving some insight into either an ingredient, technique, or serving suggestion. Each recipe also contains one or more references to other parts of the book where relevant techniques are explained.

One surprising weakness in the book is the cursory coverage of some basic cooking techniques. The chapter on poultry gives a description of how to cut a chicken into serving pieces, with only four steps and four pictures. A similar description in James Peterson's 'Essentials of Cooking' takes thirteen steps with thirteen color photographs. The coverage of other basic techniques seems similarly skimpy.

One subtle but surprising lapse is in the description of basic cooking techniques. If you read the descriptions of shallow poaching and pan frying, it is quite unclear what the difference may be between the two methods. Neither method cites the most important fact that poaching is done in water and pan frying is done in oil and the difference in effect is based on the difference between 212 degrees of water cooking and 350 degrees or higher of oil cooking. The description of these methods does have some secrets to offer. I never before saw shallow poaching as an efficient method for creating a sauce by reducing the poaching liquid after the food has been cooked.

If you have no other cookbooks or no cookbooks that discuss general techniques, this is an inspiring introduction to cooking. Even if you have a small cookbook library, this book can be a worthy addition if you have no good books covering egg cookery or what this book calls 'Kitchen Desserts'. These are dishes based primarily based of fruits, custards, puddings, cream, and prepared doughs such as puff pastry. The book does not cover breads, pastries, cakes, cookies, or other baked desserts typically done by a pastry chef. If you are interested in thorough discussions of cooking techniques, I recommend Alton Brown's 'I'm Only Here for the Food'.

Recommended for sound, straightforward recipes and a great primer on cookspeak. Other books do a better job of explaining basic techniques.

A good basic cookbook-compared to other similar books
I have bought several cookbooks lately that aim to show one how to cook rather than simply list recipes. I will share with you my experiences.

This book is an excellent basic cookbook that explains many basic techniques and has many recipes of good, sophisticated recipes that won't require shopping in a specialty market. While there are some pictures of techniques, most are beautiful full-page colored pictures of finished recipes. Most, but not all, recipes have a picture of the finished product. It is excellent for the beginning cook that wants to produce food that is a step above the daily grind, but yet doesn't require outrageous demands skill, time, or one's grocer.

A similar book, Le Cordon Bleu's Complete Cooking Techniques, has many more techniques and many fewer recipes, with only very basic recipes. The pictures are primarily series of small size colored pictures that explain how a technique is done. In comparison to the one above, the techniques are more comprehensive and more complicated. I found this one much more useful than the above, since recipes themselves are so common.

Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques is half the price of the two above books, presumably because of its black and white pictures and because it is a paperback. And, while the pictures are a serious drawback to this book, being a series of small black-and-white pictures for each technique, I absolutely adore the book because of the fabulous, imaginative recipes and the many imaginative techniques. If only the pictures had been larger and in color, this book would have been an excellent buy at three times the price. Although it is frustrating to have to deal with the pictures, in truth, most of the techniques are adequately explained by the pictures. However, some of the techniques, such as how to debone a bird, absolutely require more information than can be gleaned by the photos. Still, though, I would not part with this book and adore it for the many ideas that would impress one's guests.

Required reading for anybody with a kitchen
Well organized, straight forward information about preparing everything from soup to nuts...literally. The instructions and photographs are detailed, yet not overly complex, and the recipes and variations allow you to refine your skills at your own pace.

This book lays a perfect foundation on which to build an impressive repertoire of culinary skills.