Product DescriptionWhen you watch a professional magic act, you may find yourself awed by the trick. You are a willing believer in the illusion created by the magician. If, however, you are a magician, you are no longer in awe of the trick itself. You are astonished by the skill and finesse of the magician–the ease, the apparent effortlessness of motion.
Chefs are a great deal like magicians. To the novice, the transformation of a carrot to a pile of perfectly even julienne is almost miraculous. To the seasoned chef, the miracle is the skill, the coordination, and rhythm of the right tool in an accomplished hand.
Founded in 1946, THE CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA is an independent, not-for-profit college offering bachelors and associate degrees in culinary arts and baking and pastry arts. Courses for foodservice professionals are offered at the colleges main campus in Hyde Park, New York, and at its additional campus for continuing education, The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, in St. Helena, California.
What Others Say
good first start
book does a good job of inititating the user to knife techniques for a someone not attending formal training. Descriptions define the technique quite well, I would have liked to have included more information about the errors students encounter.
Overall a worthwhile book.
A very good beginner's book
Let's be honest. Learning WHAT to do with a knife takes very little time. One can read; one can watch, one can even be told without demonstration. Most of it is common sense; some of it is obsolete tradition; more than a little is flashing-blade-ego.
The hard part is HOW to do it. Skills. Mad Skilz as my younger colleagues might say. And these do not come from a book. They come from piles and piles of onions and carrots and fruits and you-fill-in. No one should expect to read this or any knife manual and think they're going to walk into the kitchen and perform like a pro.
This is a good book to give the beginner a great deal of information about how to care for knives (about which most are utterly clueless) ... Read More
A little book for a lotta money
This is a book of technique. Eighty of its pages have photos and brief descriptions of knifework, including preliminary cuts, chopping, mincing, shredding and grating, plain and decorative slicing cuts and other decorative cuts; also some particulars about handling onions, scallions, garlic, leeks, mushrooms, tomatoes, avocadoes, peppers, plantains, zucchini, apples, citrus fruit, melons, pineapples and mangos; together with knife techniques for tenderloin, cutting chops, boning a leg of lamb, disjointing a rabbit or poultry, carving roasted meats and turkey, and salmon, lobster, shrimp, clams and oysters. That's it.
Almost all the photographs of knife technique show use of a large French- not German-style chef's knife. A small ... Read More
Good Book to Learn Basic Knife Techniques
70% of The Professional Chef's Knife Kit is fairly useless if you lack any sort of common sense in the kitchen.
If you're learning how to cook from zero it should be a good resource.
The Professional Chef's Knife Kit shows all of the basic cuts and briefly covers sharpening which is good but not great. I expected more from a professional textbook.
It should spend more time discussing sharpening techniques (so very important if you want to use a cooks knife effectively) and less time showing how to flay a mango (something most chef's will rarely encounter).
If you have a lot of money, go ahead and buy it. If you don't or would like a better way to get knife skills, you'll need to befriend a local cook at a fancy restaurant. Just go in after ... Read More
Informative
I just wanted to comment based on the previous reviewer. I'd say about 90-95% of the information in The Professional Chef's Knife Kit is in The Professional Chef 8th Edition, so if you own it, it's not worth purchasing The Professional Chef's Knife Kit. The P.C. 8th Edition explains all these cuts based on the chapter you're reading. It's not all located in one section. Perhaps the reviewer "Absolutely Essential" has not completely read P.C. yet.
