The New School Culinary Arts Program

I love the New School Culinary program. I have had consistently fabulous experiences here. I have taken MANY classes, both as a paying student and as a teaching assistant and I have loved all of them. I took both the Master Class in Cooking and the Master Class in Baking before going to culinary school. These are fabulous, but time intensive classes that give you a very good overview of technique and skill. You will learn a lot of kitchen terminology and you will get a good dose of knife skills, not to mention an arsenal of FANTASTIC recipes to take home. I give much respect to Karen Snyder Kadish, who taught my Master Class in Culinary. I wasn’t always fond of her as a person, but her class is very educational and she spends a good bit of time on knife skills. I cannot stress enough the importance of good knife skills and this is one area that I found my professional culinary program to be lacking.
I have also taken some of the recreational classes. The introduction to chocolate is SO fun. You get to learn how to temper chocolate, make truffles and ganache centers for chocolate bon bons and also make nut clusters and dipped foods like strawberries. I found the instruction in this to be incredibly good. My class was taught by Bruce Beck and I can’t sing his praises enough. He is an AMAZING teacher with an insane wealth of knowledge to share, not just about making food but where to buy supplies and styling food. I recommend anyone take one of his classes if they can (he also did a good bit of the teaching for my master classes when it came time for desserts.) I see that they now have a master class in Chocolate that I am yearning to take, but I just don’t have the time. Someone PLEASE take it and let me know if it is good!
I also recommend taking a class with Michael Krondl if you can. He is a hoot to work with and his classes are very laid back. He teaches a pasta class that is excellent (I use those recipes regularly), where you will learn to make fresh pastas and filled pasta, as well as sauces to compliment.
One final teacher I have to shout out is Lynn Kutner. If you can take a bread class with her then definitely do it. She has a huge amount of knowledge in the area, especially for the home chef who doesn’t have the benefit of working with a steam infusion deck oven. I use her recipes for bread all the time, especially her honey rye and the bagel recipe she has. The white bread recipe she has can also be made into AMAZING cinnamon rolls and that is a favorite of my overnight and brunch guests. She is also incredibly sweet, which always makes the class more fun.
The location for the classes is nice, inside the Inn at West 23^rd Street. It gives the classes a very homey, comfortable feel. The kitchen here isn’t that spacious when you have a full student load, but it is never uncomfortable. It is nice to get to sit around the big breakfast table and try all of your creations at the end of a class. I have met some incredible people at this school, and had some amazing culinary revelations. I am always excited to take a class here, even now that I work in the culinary field I like to take the recreational classes when I have a chance (unfortunately that is rare lately). I do recommend taking the classes as a student when you can, I found I often walked away feeling like I didn’t learn as much as I could when I was a teacher’s assistant, but sometimes it is interesting to get to talk with the teacher before class and get their insight on things. The classes here are fairly reasonable in price, and whats more important is the teachers are good.