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

nearly new, except for one dog-eared page. For a welcome change, NOT packed in plastic, but cardboard!

As a recent graduate of the CIA's Career Discovery program, which was very similar to the Boot Camp, I found the book to be a wonderful summary (and then some) of the entire week.

Very good transaction. Timely delivery, book very useful for my son who is enrolling in culinary school. Many thanks!

Martha Rose Shulman artfully captures her experiences while attending the CIA's five day Culinary Boot Camp in Hyde, NY. This book caters to both beginning & "seasoned" cooks, featuring noteworthy information e.g. mise en place, knife skills, maintaining stocks, soup production, frying techniques, dry & moist heat cooking methods. Recipes utitlized during the 5 day course are printed in their entirety, often times with helpful commentary by either the author, Chef Hinnerk, or Chef John. Additional recipes are also included, which allow you to practice the skills/techniques introduced in the book. Excellent organization, phenomenal instruction, and a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in the culinary arts.

This book started out as a great resource for some nice info. on how to cook some foods and gave me some insight on a few things. But, the story in general on the whole experience and what actually went on in the kitchen was pretty boring. I like reading stories about people who work in the cooking business because it will help me be prepared for working in an actual resteraunt. But, this story just lacked. And the photographs just bugged me to no end on how poor they were. Ok, yes, I understand that they are moving fast through the kitchen, but the pictures where everyone was sitting down it was blurry. Could have been better quality. Other than that, great recipes, great information on cooking. I would recommend it for those who want to learn a few things on cooking.

`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 enoug