Six Basic Cooking Techniques: Culinary Essentials for the Home Cook

‘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

This ‘cooking class in a book’ was 15 years in the making. Before I opened my New York City cooking school in 2002, I spent years honing my recipe writing and culinary prose skills working as a cookbook writer (Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia) and recipe editor (Saveur, The Wall Street Journal).