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| Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook | 
 enlarge | List Price: $45.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 8 reviews)
Sales Rank: 196
Category: Book
Author: Martha Stewart
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Studio: Clarkson Potter
Brand: Martha Stewart
Label: Clarkson Potter
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.4
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 8.4 x 1.7
MPN: RH04500
ISBN: 0307396444
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
EAN: 9780307396440
ASIN: 0307396444
Publication Date: October 21, 2008
Release Date: October 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Imagine having Martha Stewart at your side in the kitchen, teaching you how to hold a chef?s knife, select the very best ingredients, truss a chicken, make a perfect pot roast, prepare every vegetable, bake a flawless pie crust, and much more.
In Martha Stewart?s Cooking School, you get just that: a culinary master class from Martha herself, with lessons for home cooks of all levels.
Never before has Martha written a book quite like this one. Arranged by cooking technique, it?s aimed at teaching you how to cook, not simply what to cook. Delve in and soon you?ll be roasting, broiling, braising, stewing, sauteing, steaming, and poaching with confidence and competence. In addition to the techniques, you?ll find more than 200 sumptuous, all-new recipes that put the lessons to work, along with invaluable step-by-step photographs to take the guesswork out of cooking. You?ll also gain valuable insight into equipment, ingredients, and every other aspect of the kitchen to round out your culinary education.
Featuring more than 500 gorgeous color photographs, Martha Stewart?s Cooking School is the new gold standard for everyone who truly wants to know his or her way around the kitchen.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
Martha's Cooking School November 21, 2008
This book is wonderful for a beginner or one that has experience. Very detailed instructions, easy to read. Great photo's.
Incredible teaching segments; maybe not the best recipe choices November 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am giving this book 5 stars purely on the basis of the breadth and excellence of the teaching segments. I wish the recipes chosen to illustrate the cooking techniques were less advanced. If you buy this book for a true beginning cook, you may want to also buy a cookbook with recipes geared for that skill level.
Because the point of this book is to teach cooking skills, I'll start there and come back to the recipes. The lessons in this book cover a wide range of skills and food group categories; they are divided into 8 main areas: basics; stocks and soups; eggs; meat, fish & poultry; vegetables; pasta; dried beans & grains; and desserts. Each chapter has several lessons on the different techniques for preparing that type of food and recipes to use some of those techniques.
The basics chapter truly does cover the basics. Besides discussions on equipment and knives, there are detailed instructions on chopping vegetables, onions, garlic & herbs, making a bouquet garni, and zesting and juicing citrus fruits. The great thing about the instructions throughout the book is that they are not just written but illustrated with lots of close-up pictures. You can learn from reading the explanation and seeing what it looks like, step by step.
The soup section teaches how to make various types of stock (good to know even though it is easier to reach for canned, which does not taste the same), some soups to make with the stock, and cream & pureed vegetable soups. The eggs chapter goes back to real basics with instructions on boiling, poaching, frying, scrambling, coddling, & baking and how to make an omelet and a frittata.
The meats etc. section has both a wide variety of cooking techniques and types of main ingredients. You learn how to roast, grill, braise & stew, steam, poach & simmer, saute, and fry. There are also instructions and photos on how to cut a whole chicken and bone a chicken breast. With good fish sections in most grocers, I'm not sure the lessons on how to fillet whole fish are as important as other parts. Vegetables get a similarly wide range of preparation techniques: steam, wilt, blanche, simmer, boil & poach, roast & bake, saute, fry, stirfry, braise & stew, & grill and how to make a green salad.
In the pasta section, you don't bring out the box of dried pasta, you learn to make fresh pasta & gnocchi and some sauces to go with them. For dried beans and grains, there are photos of the various types of each and lessons on how to cook them.
Desserts cover basic things such as how to cream butter, how to cut butter into flour, and how to make meringue, souffles, genoise, custard, pate a choux, and sorbets & granitas.
The instructions in these chapters can take a beginning cook a long way. I only wish the recipes selected to use the lessons were equally appropriate for a beginning cook. The recipe selection is why I ultimately decided not to buy this book for my young adult niece who wants to learn to cook. The best way to sum up my disappointment with the recipes is the say they are too "Martha." A cook who needs basic lessons on how to cut vegetables and make eggs also needs a lot of beginner-grade recipes before getting to duck confit and cassoulet (both of which are in this book).
There are some great basic recipes, but also many that use ingredients that tell me Martha Stewart doesn't know what people in the middle of the country eat. There is a recipe for sauteed skate wings. I didn't know there was a fish called skate, much less that it had wings. Also, the meat departments here in the Midwest don't stock much lamb or duck, and rabbit is probably a special order. But there are several recipes using those meats. Even recipes for simple foods, like scrambled eggs, go over the top with the eggs being piped into empty egg shells and topped with caviar. I'd much rather have seen basic recipes with options for alternate ingredients or sauces to go with the basic lessons.
Despite the recipe choices, this is a wonderful teaching tool. The quantity and quality of the photographs put it at a level beyond most instructional cookbooks. However, I believe it is better for people who are committed to learning to cook gourmet dishes than for young women just starting to cook.
 Not For The Beginner Cook, Too High End. November 14, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
My thoughts are if you're a beginning cook then this is too high end a book for you. I'm not saying that to be mean but I'm saying it because a beginner would be too intimidated by Martha Stewart's style. A beginner needs "How To Cook Without A Book" by Pam Anderson, or even better, "Betty Crocker Basics". Another great one but it has no photos is "Saving Dinner Basics" by Leanne Ely. All of which are books that teach beginners how to begin cooking. These books tell you how to make, cut, chop, dice and then actually give you the recipe so you can do all that step-by-step while preparing a complete meal. Which is what we need for everyday to bring families back to the dinner table.
I have all 4 cookbooks and by far would turn to the "Betty Crocker Basics" over and over. This Martha Stewart book (while I am a Martha fan) gives you instructions for making your own lemon curd, Cassoulet, Pate a Choux, court bouillon, etc. I just don't see a beginning cook tackling these dishes.
This book is for making scrambled eggs with caviar in eggshell cups which is on page 87. And for steaming eggs inside artichokes and making homemade Hollandaise Sauce which is on page 83. And making Fish Fumet from scratch, page 55. And Duck Confit, page 232. The list goes on and on.
This book is published in the typical Martha Stewart fashion. It has beautiful photographs, heavy weight pages, the book is 503 pages so it is huge and overboard on everything. But if you really want real recipes and real cooking lessons and real everyday meals, turn to the other three books I mentioned. If you had to choose I'd start with the Betty Crocker Basics, it has pictures and clear instructions. It also has a complete entertaining section so if you do need a fancy recipe they're in there. The other two I recommended don't have pictures.
I also have "How To Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman but I would pass on that one as well.
I just don't know that this is for the real home cook, and if you're a Martha Stewart type cook then you already know how to do most of these dishes. Good luck and Happy Cooking. I hope this helps.
Martha and Ayurveda? November 14, 2008
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
Martha's book is great, as are her other endeavors. She gives us the impetus and enthusiasm to be better and have quality lives. Believe it or not, I read her book together with the Yale doctor's book on Eastern/Oriental medicine: Ayurveda: A Comprehensive Guide to Traditional Indian Medicine for the West. Frank John Ninivaggi MD has combined nutrition with healthy mind and spirit. I recommend both books.
a must have for beginners like me November 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I enjoy cooking but often when I find recipes to make they are very complicated with a lot of ingrediants and do not give very good directions. This book explained so much to me and I often use it as a reference when I don't know how to do something. All the recipes I've tried taste great and don't require excessive ingrediates. Martha Stewart created a winner with this one.
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