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

by Darra Goldstein

Experience the intensity of Baking and Pastry Boot Camps at the "most influential training school for professional cooks" ( Time magazine) BAKING BOOT CAMP "In 'mealy' doughs, fat coats the flour,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764572792
• ISBN13: 9780764572791
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.7" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Getting to experience the CIA's Baking and Pastry boot camps.

One of the more interesting things that I've learnt about food is that there is a basic difference between cooking and baking. Cooking is a more intuitive process, where the ingredients and methods can be fiddled with and changed to suit the chef's whim. But baking is another creature entirely -- here formulas have to be adhered to, or else what the baker has is a disaster. Longtime cookbook author Darra Goldstein decides to enter into that world of baking in this fun, insightful chronicle of two sessions of what is known as 'Boot Camp' at the top cooking school in America, known as the CIA -- The Culinary Institute of America. The boot camps are designed as week-long intensive cooking and baking classes, where the chefs and bakers of the CIA take a group of people, and show them the skills to help understand the techniques to create good food. I had purchased another book that had chronicled the 'Boot Camp' process and didn't care for it much -- while I had enjoyed the recipes and techniques, the author's writing style and attitude was simply too annoying to read. So I was rather hesitant to purchase this volume. I should not have worried -- Goldstein is a delightful writer to read. She gives a book full of humour and fun, with light touches that help to make the topic accessible to the reader, and feel as though they are standing next to Goldstein as she creates rolls, napoleons and cookies. Actually, Goldstein chronicles two CIA Boot Camp experiences -- the first one is Baking Boot Camp, the second is Pastry Boot Camp. Each one is five days long, and are open to anyone who can afford the time and fee, each one held at the CIA's main campus, located in Hyde Park, New York. Goldstein describes arriving at the campus, meeting her fellow students and instructor, and her own experiences in dealing with the hours, the routine, and the hectic pace. But she does it with a sense of humor, something that I really enjoyed reading about. Each chapter takes on a topic of baking -- from the basics of creaming, sifting, the ingredients used and the theory behind the four base ingredients -- flour, sugar, fat and eggs -- that every bread and pastry is built around. Several sidebars discuss or show a technique, entitled What We Learned. Finally, each chapter ends with a description of the dinner at each of the specialty restaurants that are on the grounds of the CIA. While most of the first section was familiar, I enjoyed reading about Goldstein's experiences, and got to learn some of the finer points of making challah and piecrusts. The second section covers pastry. It was here that I got to learn quite a few new things. While I've gotten confident handling breads, quick breads, and simple cakes and cookies, the art of working with puff pastry, custards, and showy desserts have always terrified me. However, the techniques and descriptions are very easy to follow, and should help to guide a novice pastry chef through some of the pitfalls. At the end, t

Baking Boot Camp

Having just finished a week coarse in Hyde Park at Culinary Boot Camp, I wondered if I would want to go back for the baking boot camp. After reading Darra Goldstein's account, I am ready. The first experience was wonderful and I am looking forward to going next April to further my culinary skills.

Revisiting

As I attended one of the boot camps, it was fun to read and review the week as we all experienced it. It is a very good description of the experience, in case anyone wants to read what's it like before deciding to go.

Excellent Taste of Baking Skills and Discipline. Buy It!

`baking Boot Camp' by The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and Darra Goldstein is a sequel to the delightful `culinary Boot Camp' by the same CIA and Martha Rose Shulman. Both writers are Julia Child awards winning cookbook writers, with Goldstein's speciality being ethnic Russian cuisine cookbooks and as an editor for a Russian cultural magazine in English. Both books chronicle the experiences of the authors' taking a 5-day CIA continuing education course. One major difference is that while the earlier book covers a single course, Goldstein's book covers two five day courses, one for baking and one for pastry, in spite of the suggestion on the book's subtitle that it covers only a single 5 day course. Like the earlier book, this is a fine meld of reference cookbook and culinary memoir, almost as if one took a Nick Malgieri cookbook and shuffled it together, page by page, with the Michael Ruhlman documentary work, `The Making of a Chef', with the difference that Ms. Goldstein is a far less detached observer than journalist Ruhlman. As I said in my review of the earlier book, anyone who is seriously considering baking as a career or even as a serious hobby should read this book from cover to cover. This is not so much for the baking advice, which is very good, but maybe not as good as the very best manuals on the subject. It is to familiarize one with the disciplines of baking, as exemplified by the regimens enforced by the CIA. It is not for nothing that these courses are called `boot camps'. While the instructors are not really as strict as they are with their associate degree and bachelor's degree students, they still impose a healthy discipline, starting with the legendary CIA emphasis on both being on time and the proper uniform, including the classic white blouse, houndstooth trousers (generally too big), white kerchief, and paper toque. And heaven help you if your hair falls out of the toque or the kerchief would not meet the approval of Auguste Escoffier. Like very few other `cookbooks' I can think of, this volume is really meant to be read from start to finish, or at least up to the end of Chapter 10, the end of the 10 days of the two boot camps. The first ten chapters are divided into three types of sections. The first is a diary of Ms. Goldstein's experiences outside the classroom, involving finding a parking space early in the morning, breakfast, lunch, and breaks in the many CIA restaurants and dining rooms, and chatting with fellow students. The second type of section is narratives of lectures and baking experiences. These sections are by far the most interesting, as they contain lots of incidental tips on how things are done which you may not find in the usual text or recipe. The third section type is double page sidebars with text and pictures describing particular techniques. While these classes are done for non-degree students, the recipes and techniques still come from the professional baking kitchen, using large commerci