Customer Reviews

Cooking School Secrets For Real-World Cooks

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I just finished browsing the cookbook section of a local bookstore, searching for something inspiring and unusual for a wedding shower gift. Linda Carucci's "Cooking School Secrets For Real-World Cooks: Tips, Techniques, Shortcuts, Sources, Hints, and Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, Plus 100 Sure-Fire Recipes to Make You a Better Cook" came out recently, and after thumbing through it pretty thoroughly, I decided this was the one. In fact, after reading more over coffee, I decided to go back and pick up another copy for myself.

Two major attractions, for me, are the recipes - more than 100 exciting and interesting dishes, from soup to sweets. Since the author is of Italian ancestry, the emphasis here is on Italian food - but not every recipe - there's a wide variety. Many of these I don't have in my own extensive collection. And, the most unique aspect of the cookbook, and second major attraction, is the information included under tips, shortcuts and gourmet cooking secrets. I consider myself a good cook and have been creative in the kitchen for many years now, yet many of these tips, and answers to frequently asked questions, are new to me. In fact, for cookbook lovers, much of "Cooking School Secrets For Real-World Cooks" reads almost like a novel. You have to love cookbooks to understand what I mean!!

The book is divided into three major sections. The first is Cooking Basics, and while I am familiar with much of the information, I found the sections on Creative Cooking, How Cooking Changes The Texture And Flavor of Foods,. Cooking With The Seasons, and Understanding Your Palate to be of particular interest. The page layout is attractive and well organized, and there are helpful illustrations throughout.

The recipes are in Part Two, and there are many sensational suggestions from stocks, ("What is a chinois and why will this make homemade chicken stock better?"), soups, ("Why are Turkish bay leaves preferable to the California variety?"), and broths, to risottos, pastas, seafood, poultry and meat, ("Why is a marinade essential when grilling a flank steak?"), mouth-watering side dishes, special salads and desserts. There are some wonderful versions of favorite comfort foods, like: Tomato Cheddar Soup; Spaghetti and Meatballs; Chicken Cacciatore; Baked Macaroni with White Cheddar Cheese and Buttered Breadcrumbs; Turkey Mole from Mexico; and Braised Calamari in Red Sauce. And then there are dishes worthy of the most special occasions and guests: Grilled Leg of Lamb with Pomegranate Marinade and Muhammara; Pork Loin Roast with Vanilla Scented Applesauce; Risotto Primavera with Wild Salmon; Grilled Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Prosciutto, Taleggio, and Pesto; and a fabulous paella. And the desserts - Bittersweet Chocolate Bread Pudding with Kahlua Sauce; Zabaglione with Fresh Berries and Peaches; Grilled Peach Ice Cream Sundaes with Short-Cut Caramel Sauce, a chocoholic cake....and so many more.

The last part, Part Three, deals with seasonal recipes, sources, and includes twelve special menus for casual and special occasions.

Linda Carucci has worked in the food industry for over 20 years. She is dean of the California Culinary Academy, has been awarded Cooking Teacher of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, (IACP), and is the Julia Child Curator of Food Arts for Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Napa, California. You cannot go wrong with this cookbook! It's terrific!
JANA

I have had this book for a few weeks and am declaring it without a doubt my new favorite cookbook. It has already become my go-to for all occasions. The weeknight chili has become my latest quick and satisfying dinner, I took the zucchini olive oil cake to a party last week and was deluged with requests for the recipe. Everything is delicious and the recipes are so easy to follow! This will be my hostess gift, wedding gift, birthday gift and housewarming gift for the seasons to come!

We followed the authors advise and threw a Timpano Pary. Our menu included Timpano and Zabaglione receipts from Cooking School Secrets for Real-World Cooks and a delicious green salad.

The entire timpano dish was prepared with our guests. The receipt was easy to follow and the "professional tips" assisted us in preparing a dish that was as beautiful as it was DELICIOUS! What a great way to spending an evening . . . good company, good food and good wine.

We have tried several recepies from the book and have had excellent results each time.

A must for every cook's reference shelf, this is packed with useful and well-organized information on techniques, tools, and ingredients and includes 100 recipes that convey a further wealth of general and specific information.

After an intro on the basics, from mise-en-place to plate presentation, the book is organized by course. Each chapter begins with a chart of recipes showing which are quick, make-ahead, and/or vegetarian, a "Secrets of Success" feature which offers guidelines for shopping, storing, and cooking, and a few frequently asked questions.

In addition each recipe includes more "secrets." French Onion Soup, for instance, advises a Dutch oven and European-style unsalted butter for the slow onion caramelization, a food processor for the vast quantity of onions, several methods for keeping oniony tears to a minimum, advice on cutting the bread, and the tip that onions and potatoes stored together cause each other to rot.

The amount of information is vast, but the book is so well organized it never seems overwhelming. A cooking class between covers, it includes all the basics, from stock to risotto, from brining meats to sweating vegetables, from planning a menu to picking the perfect melon. Carucci hits on safety issues in storing, cooking and cooling foods and tells which dozen fruits and vegetables should be purchased organic in order to avoid 90 percent of ingested pesticides. She doesn't shy away from recommending brands either, be it coconut oil or cookware.

Recipes like Braised Short Ribs, Poached Salmon with Shortcut Hollandaise, Turkey Mole, Wild Rice Pilaf, Polenta, Roasted Root Vegetables and Devils Food Cake lend themselves to advice that can be used in numerous other contexts. Invaluable for the beginner, this opinionated, lively book contains useful tips and ideas for cooks at any level of skill.

- Portsmouth Herald

The only danger in picking up this cookbook is that you may never get to the cooking, because it's so easy to just sit and read it. However, once we tried the first recipe (Rigatoni with Sausage and Mushroom Ragu, yumm) we had to force ourselves to keep exploring others, because it was so good we kept making it again and again. A jewel of a cookbook.

This cookbook is great. It has very good and easy to follow recipes. The special part of this book is that it gives home chefs those extra tips and secrets that raise your cooking to another level. I absolutely love this book and highly recommend it.

Does the world really need another cookbook? There's no question in my mind about this one...we need it! As experienced home-cooks, my wife and I have gleaned a lot of new information from Linda Carucci's book. This book is as valuable for the "basics" and "secrets" as it is for the exceptional recipe content.

Permit me a brief digression that will later bear on the review. I once attended a massage therapy school in a city with three competing schools, and I was continually amazed at how limited the competing graduates from the other schools were in basic anatomy, assessment, and palpation skills compared to what I learned. On the other hand, those graduates were way ahead in actual "salon/day spa" cosmetic techniques, so they tended to land positions more easily. They couldn't find a trigger point, balance a meridian flow, or treat a muscle tear, but they could select the best aromatherapy oils for various emotional stresses. Which set of skills were more valid, or "better"? It all depends on what you think is important in massage therapy.

Any course of education and training from a particular institution will have its prejudices, limitations, and standards. Other, competing training schools (and schools of thought) may well differ from the curriculum taught here and may well criticize and castigate these shortcomings. The important thing, you need to understand the rules and conventions of a craft or an art before you can successfully experiment with them or break them for effect (something that people like Alton Brown, Mark Bittman, and Mario Batali do all the time). And Carucci's book does an amazingly thorough and accessible job setting forth those conventions, heuristics and "secrets" in one place, in an easily absorbed format. And she offers them AS conventions and secrets, which implies that other, alternate techniques may well exists. (I didn't even know that the ratios of the ingredients in "mire poix" were an issue, for instance). So to me, this book really is a cooking school between two covers, with all the advantages and limitations that would imply. Mastering the contents of this book will give the aspiring cook/chef a useful set of tools and protocols for "serious" cooking...but other cooks and chefs, trained in other ways of thought may well disagree with many of the "secrets" presented here. The important thing is to understand that the issues exists and that no "secret" is any better than the understanding and perception of the person trying to use it.

So to me, the most important (and useful) part of Carucci's book are the parts were she emphasizes the actual use of the senses and intuition as part of the cooking process. That takes this book to the next level as far as I am concerned and makes it a valuable resource in the education of would be cooks. I've learned a ton of stuff in the three short weeks that I've had it, and more important, I understand the extent and depth of my ignorance, in ways I never did before from working with these pages.

This is a great book to have. The only cookbooks in my collection that I like better are Alton Brown's (and I know that many people consider his recipes hit-or-miss See how personal perceptions enter into it, no matter what you do in subjects like cooking?) I'm delighted that I found this on the stands and decided to give it a chance.

The information is fairly helpful, but all spread out. You have to go through and look at every recipe to get the tips. I like the background of the recipes Linda gives, and the sources information in the back is pretty helpful. Might have been better if not written as a cookbook with extras.

This is a book I use almost daily. There is so much information beyond just recipes. The recipes themselves are great, a nice change from the yuppie chow we are being bombarded with. These are things real people really cook and really eat. But the real treasures in this book are the tips and techniques that answer so many questions. It is useful for beginning cooks as well as someone who has been cooking for many years. A great bridal shower gift!