Six Basic Cooking Techniques: Culinary Essentials for the Home Cook

by Jennifer Clair, Meredith Heuer (Photographer)

Overview

Welcome to New York City’s most popular cooking class — now in a book! This vividly photographed manual is a peek inside culinary instructor Jennifer Clair’s best-selling class her cooking school, Home Cooking New York (homecookingny.com), where just six cooking techniques lay the groundwork for a solid culinary foundation.

You’ll learn the proper way to handle a chef’s knife, cook meat to perfection, create impressive pan sauces, and prepare restaurant-worthy vegetable dishes. Plus, you’ll discover which ingredients truly make a difference in a home kitchen (kosher salt, extra-virgin olive oil, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, to start).

Each technique chapter includes a collection of flavorful recipes, so you can practice your newfound skills while cooking delicious meals. And throughout the book, myth-busting "Students Ask" and "Chefs Say" columns feature pearls of indispensable kitchen wisdom (why you should never mince basil, mint, or sage; why blanching vegetables is better than steaming; what are the three key flavors that make all food taste better; and more).

Confidence is what makes a great cook, and this practical culinary guide is filled with the teachings you need to gain control of your kitchen.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780998979205
Publisher:	HCNY Press
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Edition description:	None
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	649,396
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Clair is a culinary instructor and the founder of the cooking school Home Cooking New York. She honed her culinary and editorial chops as a Food Editor at Martha Stewart Living and the Recipes Editor at The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Gourmet Cooking on a Budget. She lives in Hudson Valley, New York. Meredith Heuer is a lifestyle photographer, focusing on personal portraits, food, and travel. Her work has taken her around the world for publications such as Fortune, Gourmet, and The New York Times. She lives in Beacon, New York.

Editorial Reviews

05/21/2018
Those intimidated by the prospect of entering a kitchen, let alone preparing a dish, will benefit from this simple and slim debut by Clair (Gourmet Cooking on a Budget), a former food editor at Martha Stewart Living and founder of the Home Cooking New York cooking school. In this bare-bones tutorial, she clearly and patiently guides readers through six techniques: basic knife skills, cooking meats, preparing pan sauces, blanching green vegetables, roasting vegetables, and cooking leafy greens. With that knowledge, readers can prepare and serve a number of classic mains and sides, such as pan-roasted lemon-rosemary chicken; steak with a red wine sauce; mashed potatoes and gravy; and braised collard greens with bacon and onions. A recipe for Best Vegetable Soup You’ll Ever Make calls for store-bought chicken stock rather than homemade (a simple but important skill one could master). Still, beginning cooks will appreciate Clair’s insight and recommendations on outfitting one’s kitchen with the proper tools, the art of seasoning, knife-sharpening 101, and cooking with convection ovens. The book’s simplistic design and layout feels amateurish, but those hoping to learn fundamental skills and techniques will find this to be a terrifically helpful guide. (BookLife)

Publishers Weekly

"Jennifer Clair has assembled some essential lessons in a book, using straightforward text and photos to cover knife skills, meat cookery, pan sauces, roasting vegetables, blanching vegetables and preparing leafy greens. Each section gives a handful of recipes, mostly simple and very sound.”  —Florence Fabricant, The New York Times


"Those hoping to learn fundamental skills and techniques will find this to be a terrifically helpful guide."  —Publishers Weekly


"Sometimes you need the bare-bones basics all in one place... Six Basic Cooking Techniques by Jennifer Clair does a good job of culling the canon to a set of essentials." —The Kitchn (blog)


"Profusely illustrated and exceptionally well written and thoroughly 'user friendly' in organization and presentation." — Midwest Book Review


"Six Basic Cooking Techniques breaks down the most need-to-know skills to give you the confidence to prepare anything you need in the kitchen." —Metro New York


“The recipes are all sound and easily accessible to the intermediate cook. Each recipe is presented with the purpose of giving the reader an opportunity to put the main technique of the chapter into practice and includes a short introduction that offers helpful hints and informative tidbits that add to the learning process.”  —Foreword Reviews


“Manhattan cooking-school founder and food journalist Clair’s second cookbook (following Gourmet Cooking on a Budget, 2010) is a good substitute for Cooking 101, teaching the basics that make the foundation of a good home chef.”  —Booklist


"A refreshing back-to-basics approach to gaining confidence in the kitchen."—The Valley Table

From the Publisher

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