Culinary Boot Camp: Five Days of Basic Training at the Culinary Institute of America [Hardcover]

A passionate home cook that has been honing her cooking skills for the last 25 years, concentrating on Italian cooking for the last 10 years, writes this review. My favorite cookbooks are "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute and "Culinary Artistry". With more than 500 cookbooks in my collection I am usually disappointed in my recent cookbook acquisitions. I purchased this book to see what the Culinary boot camp at the CIA was all about since I was thinking of taking the course. I am glad that I bought the book and didn't spend thousands on the course.

If you are considering the boot camp at Hyde Park the book is informative. However, the book did not encourage me to take the course, it had the opposite effect. The recipes and tips that the author covers were nothing. I felt as though I was reading the experience from the perspective of a kitchen novice. The techniques and methods that are discussed are basic kitchen ideas used by skills home cooks everyday. If you own any good cookbook you will know or have read about all the techniques before. If you are looking for an in depth discussion on cooking techniques buy "The Professional Chef" by the CIA instead. It is a much better book.

This book is subdivided as follows:

Day One: Into the Kitchen: Stocks and Sauces

Day Two: Soup Production and Frying Techniques

Day Three: Dry Heat Cooking Methods

Day Four: Moist Heat Cooking Methods

Day Five: The Final Exam

Mise en Place and Knife Skills

Additional Recipes

The book is 242 pages in length and the "additional recipe" section begins on page 140. The recipes that are included are okay, but nothing to rave about. The only recipe that I found to be exceptional was the Fresh Spinach Spaetzle.

Bottom line, if you are new to cooking or don't own many cookbooks this would be a reasonable choice. If you were thinking about taking the CIA course at Hyde Park purchasing this book would also make sense. However, if you own many cookbooks, or having been seriously cooking for 5 or 10 years then pass on this book. There isn't much that you will learn from this book.

Cookbooks, it seems, has taken a huge chunk of the publishing marketplace. Nearly every day I hear of a new 'hot' chef, or cookbook or trend. Nowadays, it seems that there is great delight in taking ordinary folks, and throwing them into situations where high stress, competition and trying to cram everything possible in a short amount of time and then showing it all happening on either the written page or the television screen for the viewer's delectation.

Most of the time, it's pretty embarassing to watch or read about. Sadly, this exploration of what it's like to be a student at the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York -- when a chef refers to the CIA, this is what he's talking about -- is more of the author's opinions and incessantly rubbing the nose of the reader in to how she would or not do it. After a while, it gets very annoying, and more than a little smug -- personally, I didn't care how she would do something different, I wanted to learn more about the techniques and tips to be able to turn out a good meal in my own kitchen. Along with about fifteen other students, Martha Rose Shulman -- evidently a cookbook author herself -- entered what is called the CIA's "Boot Camp" -- a five day course that hits the high points of what is usually a six month course at the Institute.

Shulman starts the book off with an introduction, and a mention that she's done this before at the CIA. Then there are five chapters that cover each day, with a different style of cooking covered in each one. Along with an illustrated reacipe and a two page spread showing how to do the technique and putting the dish together. Inserted here and there are little tips and suggestions on how to improve your own cooking, and some truly excellent science as well -- I never knew that the trick to making a great stock was to add the mirepoix and herbs at the end of the cooking process. Along with the main dish, there are also some basic menus that each team put together. Then the teams gathered that evening for dinner at one of the CIA's signature restaurants, and the author talks about her dinner and wines. Finally, the book's second half has a selection of recipes -- several of which look to be very tempting -- and a glossary of cooking terms.

To say that I had very mixed reactions to this book is an understatement. I'm not sorry that I read it, as I've always wanted to take the CIA's Boot Camp, but this particular author was so unpleasant to be around -- an example is when she talks on the phone to her young son, and she tells him that today she had made the perfect french fry, and the little boy says that he wishes that she could bring him one, and then in the next breath states that she will never make french fries at home -- sheesh. To me, that's cruelty, especially when you tell your kid something like that. Too, she makes constant references to vegetarianism, and how she prefers that, in the meantime, she's making chicken, beef and veal dishes. Over all of it is the author's own smug attitude, that she's taking the course again -- this is mentioned close to a dozen times -- and how wonderful her own very own, style of technique is.

To be blunt, it's sickening. She even makes Martha Stewart look humble.

The other big flaw is that there is a presumption that the reader already knows such terms as mirepoix, what reduction is, that they have access to a good fishmonger or butcher that can do fancy cuts and trims, and finally, that the glossary is an afterthought, along with nothing being said about one of the most important aspects of cooking -- mise en place, where everything from ingredients to tools, are measured, prepped and laid out before the cooking starts. Once I had learned that, my cooking improved dramatically, and I was amazed that nothing is given in the book to such basic terms and techniques.

While I do urge anyone with the time, money and desire to try the cooking courses at the CIA, I don't suggest this book as a way to get there. The best way to use this book is to skim through it, find the techniques and recipes that interest you, and copy them down. The text in and of itself, is only interesting when the author isn't blaring on about herself. The photography is stock, with nothing particularly interesting except for some great beauty shots of some of the completed dishes and the various restaurants within the CIA.

It's a lovely book to flip through, and it has some truly tempting recipes to try, but overall, it's a grim disappointment and certainly not worth the hefty price of nearly thirty dollars. I give it about three stars, but that's all.

`Culinary Boot Camp' by The Culinary Institute of America and culinary writer, Martha Rose Shulman is a must buy and must read for anyone who is starting out with cooking as a hobby, avocation, or simply as a necessary chore they take seriously.

Unlike Michael Ruhlman's journalistic memoir, `The Making of a Chef', which covers the full two year associates degree program, this textbook with stories covers only the five day crash course given to both culinary professionals and hobbyist cooks. It is also much less journalistic and much more about the lessons learned. It has some sense of being a `Gourmet Cooking Techniques for Dummies', in that it is a sized down presentation of a lot of material in the `big book', `The New Professional Chef'.

Martha Rose Shulman, the voice in the foreground, took the `boot camp' course twice, from two different instructors. She supplies the narrative of how the classes were conducted. The CIA provides the sidebars and recipes.

The value of this book is in inverse proportion to your current state of culinary sophistication. If you have done nothing more than cook from simple recipes, without ever making your own sauces, stocks, or soups, and if you own no good cooking texts, such as `The New Making of a Cook', this book will be a revelation. Here, the high priests of French cuisine training in the United States are essentially teaching techniques to wean you away from depending on printed recipes. This is an interesting and attractive premise when put out by good popular cookbook authors such as Pam Anderson or even by English home cooking guru Nigel Slater. But, to see the same objective raised by people who cook the same dishes as you find in three to five page recipes in Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking', you really sit up and take notice. And, this is not an idle point. The concept that recipes, by their very nature, simply never tell you everything you need to know about preparing a particular dish, runs through the whole book. For example, the recipe will not know how much fat there is on your meat, how big your pan is or of what material it is made, or how hot your burners are running. This is absolutely the best confirmation I have ever read of my `first law of quick cooking' that you simply cannot cook quickly unless you have sound basic cooking skills which allow you to read beyond the printed page.

For the more experienced cook, it will be obvious that this 242-page book cannot possibly contain all the material you probably already have in your library, which has at least one and probably several excellent cooking textbooks. On the other hand, I have all these books, but I find this little book to encapsulate some really important culinary wisdom and present it as well or better than, for example, any other CIA book I have read or other important manuals. I have read and reviewed two excellent books on sauces, and yet this little book's chapter on stocks and sauces is more than enough to fill you in on the subject, unless you wish to take up those subjects on their own.

Another refreshing point of view we find in the book is the notion that while science will go far to explain why ingredients and techniques work in a certain way, cooking is still a craft and not a science. One can do quite well in the kitchen, thank you, without reading a word of Shirley Corriher or Harold McGee or watching a single episode of Alton Brown's `Good Eats'. That is not to say the CIA profs are out of touch with modern cooking knowledge. When the chestnut of whether searing meat is done to `seal in the juices', every student agreed, but the instructor stated that this is a false belief.

I have read many books on cooking tips, and all suffer from something this book avoids. By giving us tutorials on some very specific techniques, the instructors, through Shulman's telling, wrap a lot of wisdom up into a complete lesson. When sauteeing, for example, I have heard it said that you heat the pan before adding the oil, so that the pan comes up to searing temperature without bringing the oil to its smoke point. Tie this in with using the right kind of pan and a big enough pan, and the sensual endpoints to look for, and you get a complete picture of the saute.

While this book may be the very best I have seen from the CIA other than their big textbook, it's size still leaves a lot out. Sometimes, those omissions are mysterious. In the technique on roux, the procedure states that the fat is usually butter, and it follows this section with a technique for making clarified butter, it does not say that a roux is best made with clarified butter, per sauce expert David Paul Larousse in `The Sauce Bible'. And, while it has much to say about knife skills, the treatment is brief, and you will get much better detailed instruction from Jacques Pepin's `Complete Techniques'.

All in all, this book would make a superb textbook for a community college short course on cooking or even as a text for a private tutor with a class of one to five students. It will offer an invaluable point of view on cooking skills for just about everyone except an accomplished professional.