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

The Culinary Institute of America (Author), Martha Rose Shulman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2006

Discover the secrets of The Culinary Institute of America?s popular week-long "Boot Camp" course -- five days of dynamic, hands-on instruction in cooking basics that help teach the non-professional cook to think like a chef -- with Julia Child Award-winning cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman. Combining Shulman?s entertaining and compelling narrative with a wealth of invaluable culinary information, you'll take a "step up" in the kitchen with this vicarious adventure through basic training at one of the country?s finest professional cooking schools.

DAY 1: "Our 'drill sergeant' comes into the room and writes his name on the board. He wears the CIA staff jacket, a green name badge, and the chef's kerchief around his neck, which he later shows us how to tie. 'YOU ARE MINE!' he says with a sly smile on his face, and we know that he's going to give us the guidance we need. He'll be strict, but kind."

DAY 2: "Until I went to Boot Camp, I was never very comfortable around (or succeessful with) lots of hot oil in a pan. That was all about to change."

DAY 3: "One of the most important terms for dry heat cooking is 'carryover cooking.' Carryover cooking refers to the fact that heat penetrates meat from the outside to the inside, and when you remove it from the oven, the meat will continue to cook. That's why it must rest, during which time the carryover cooking continues, the temperature equalizes, and the juices relax and flow through the meat."

DAY 4: "Our dessert was a Warm Dark Chocolate Pudding Cake, and it was served with a glass of Quady Elysium from Madera County, California. They named their black muscat dessert wine Elysium because, in their words, 'Drinking this, you can almost feel you have fallen into a rose garden and been transported to heaven.' And I must say I did. I transported myself to bed instead, thinking what an appropriate meal this had been after our first wine lecture, and about the wines I would serve with my own next dinner party."

DAY 5: "We sampled each team's handiwork, and as we were polishing off this large meal, our chef stood up to congratulate us and hand out our 'certificates of accomplishment.'"

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For anyone who's fantasized about attending culinary school—or any curious cook who wants to understand more about the fundamentals of fine cooking—this book offers a peek into an über-condensed, intensive version of Culinary Institute of America training for nonprofessionals. In an era when most bestselling cookbooks eschew traditional techniques in favor of time-saving shortcuts, the book is an anomaly. Shulman (Entertaining Light), an IACP Award–winning cookbook author, takes readers along with her as she attends the CIA's five-day "boot camp" and explains the lessons she learned, from preparing stocks and sauces, to using knives and understanding proper sauté protocol, along with (occasionally overbearing) personal commentary about the experience. Some organizational elements don't make sense—the section on stocks, for example, precedes the recipes for stocks by more than 100 pages—and some recipes are unnecessary (the author criticizes the CIA's cornbread recipe and inserts her own instead). But the text is packed with good insider info, and most of the 75 recipes, such as Spinach Spaetzle with Sapsago Cheese, and Morel and Wild Mushroom Ragoût, are time-honored yet contemporary, rigorous yet approachable. 100 full-color photos. (May 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

For anyone who's fantasized about attending culinary school—or any curious cook who wants to understand more about the fundamentals of fine cooking—this book offers a peek into an über-condensed, intensive version of Culinary Institute of America training for nonprofessionals. In an era when most bestselling cookbooks eschew traditional techniques in favor of time-saving shortcuts, the book is an anomaly. Shulman (Entertaining Light), an IACP Award–winning cookbook author, takes readers along with her as she attends the CIA's five-day "boot camp" and explains the lessons she learned, from preparing stocks and sauces, to using knives and understanding proper sauté protocol, along with (occasionally overbearing) personal commentary about the experience. Some organizational elements don't make sense—the section on stocks, for example, precedes the recipes for stocks by more than 100 pages—and some recipes are unnecessary (the author criticizes the CIA's cornbread recipe and inserts her own instead). But the text is packed with good insider info, and most of the 75 recipes, such as Spinach Spaetzle with Sapsago Cheese, and Morel and Wild Mushroom Ragoût, are time-honored yet contemporary, rigorous yet approachable. 100 full-color photos. (May 6) (Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2006)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764572784
• ISBN-13: 978-0764572784
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #211,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Professional Cooking > Professional

More About the Author

For over 30 years I have been writing cookbooks devoted to eating well. A pioneer in vegetarian cooking, I began my career in 1973 at the age of 23. This was long before well-educated people from upper middle class backgrounds fantasized about becoming the next Food Network star or owning a successful restaurant. I was then a student at The University of Texas at Austin. I changed my major every semester, but my passion for cooking and for giving dinner parties was unwavering. I also had an interest in health, and combined the two in my approach to food, drawing upon many of the world's cuisines to create vegetarian dishes that were much better than the standard brown rice fare of the early 1970s. Culturally I was very much a product of my era, but as far as my cooking was concerned, I have always been way ahead of my time.
Once I'd had my epiphany about my calling, I developed a series of vegetarian cooking classes that I taught through the University of Texas Extension, and I opened a private "supper club" in my home. Every Thursday for two years I prepared a sit-down 3-course dinner for 30 people. My cozy "home restaurant" allowed me all the fun and few of the headaches of running a public restaurant, and at the same time gave me a place to experiment and develop a repertoire of dishes to showcase. I also learned to cook for a crowd. Soon I had a vegetarian catering service; I catered everything from breakfasts in bed and dinners for two to wedding receptions and conferences for two hundred.
I had also been, all along, a writer in search of a subject. I knew that I would write a cookbook, and when The Vegetarian Feast came out in 1979, my career had evolved from cook/caterer to food writer and cookbook author. The Vegetarian Feast won a 1979 Tastemaker Award (a precursor of the prestigious James Beard Awards) for Best Book, Health and Special Diets category, and remains in print.
I was never doctrinaire about vegetarian cooking; I just felt that I'd had my quota of meat by the time I reached the age of 21. I admired all good cooks, especially Julia Child, with whom I corresponded. In my first letter to her, a fan letter dated September 2, 1976 in which I described my cooking classes and my supper club, my catering service and the book I was trying to get published, I told her I was "trying to shed a new light on vegetarianism, to present it as an unmysterious, classical, and memorable cuisine. The art of cooking with an emphasis on nutrition as well as flavor is my interest, and because I am a vegetarian my cuisine is a meatless one."
Two years after the publication of The Vegetarian Feast I moved to Paris, where I continued to write cookbooks and articles, revived my Supper Club, and became a much better cook. During the twelve years I lived in France I traveled extensively in the Mediterranean to research its many cuisines. My book Mediterranean Light was published in 1989, just as the benefits of the Mediterranean diet were coming to light in the United States. The region continues to be my richest source of culinary inspiration.
To date, I have 27 cookbooks to my name. My work has been of a piece; not all of my books are vegetarian, but they all have a healthy focus. Several of my books have been nominated for cookbook awards and three have won them. In addition to the 1979 Tastemaker Award for The Vegetarian Feast, I've received the following nominations and prizes for my work:
*2001: International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), The Best Vegetarian Recipes, Nominee, Single Subject category
*1995 James Beard Awards, Great Breads, Nominee, Bread and Pastry category
*1994 Bertolli Olive Oil Award, Provençal Light, First Prize, Health and Special Diets category, Julia Child Awards
*1991 International Association of Culinary Professionals, Entertaining Light, First Prize, Health and Diet category
*1991 James Beard Awards, Entertaining Light, Nominee, Entertaining category
*1989 Tastemaker, Mediterranean Light, Nominee, Health and Special Diets category
*1988 Tastemaker, Supper Club chez Martha Rose, Nominee, Entertaining category

My cooking continues to evolve, as I hone and simplify my recipes to make them accessible to a wide range of cooks. I feel that I have played a role in improving the eating habits of many Americans, particularly since I began writing a daily recipe feature called Recipes for Health for the health section of The New York Times on the Web, in 2008. Its purpose is to empower people to cook healthy meals every day by giving them straightforward, delicious recipes. Each week's column is themed around a fresh ingredient from the market, a pantry item or a type of dish, with a new recipe posted every day. The reader response has been enthusiastic; my recipes regularly appear in the "10 Most Emailed" list on the health page. It has been extremely satisfying to know that I am reaching so many people and having an impact on their cooking.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting if you are thinking about attending the CIA bootcamp, otherwise .... just okay, September 6, 2006

By 

Amalfi Coast Girl (Mid-Atlantic, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 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.

65 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Rampant ego, not enough tips in this lackluster cookbook, June 1, 2006

By 

Rebecca Huston "telynor" (On the Banks of the Hudson) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Culinary Boot Camp: Five Days of Basic Training at The Culinary Institute of America (Hardcover)

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.

41 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb insights into cooking like a professsional. Buy it now!, May 3, 2006

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Culinary Boot Camp: Five Days of Basic Training at The Culinary Institute of America (Hardcover)

`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.