Home Cooking New York

Founded in 2002, Home Cooking New York provides intimate and hands-on cooking classes at their cooking school in downtown New York City, as well as private classes in students’ home kitchens. Their students range from absolute beginners to amateur home cooks who want to expand their culinary education.

HCNY’s classes cover basic cooking techniques (Culinary Boot Camp, Six Basic Cooking Techniques, How to Cook Fish, How to Cook Vegetables, Pork Lovers Workshop) to cuisine-focused favorites (Indian, Thai, Korean, French Bistro, Middle Eastern, Northern Italian). Each 2 ½ hour class includes a recipe packet and has a maximum of 10 students. The class is centered around the preparation of a complete menu and culminates in a sit-down meal with your fellow students.

Meet our instructors:

Jennifer Clair is a culinary instructor and the founder of Home Cooking New York. Before launching the school in 2002, she honed her editorial chops as the former Food Editor at Martha Stewart Living and Recipes Editor at The Wall Street Journal. She graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education on a full James Beard Foundation scholarship. She is the author of Six Basic Cooking Techniques: Culinary Essentials for the Home Cook (https://tinyurl.com/ycthk85s), a cookbook based on the best-selling class at the school.

John Scoff joined Home Cooking New York in 2006. After 15 years of restaurant work, culminating most recently as Executive Chef of a low country bistro in South Carolina, John found his true calling when he accepted a position of Executive Chef-Instructor at a recreational cooking school in downtown Charleston. That was 2004, and he has never looked back. As a teacher there, he discovered how much he enjoys sharing his passion for and knowledge of cuisine.

Erica Wides joined Home Cooking New York in 2014 after 15 years of teaching at the Institute of Culinary Education, where she oversaw the culinary education of both professional and recreational students. She is brimming with knowledge of all things food and is one of the go-to chefs when the media needs an expert to demystify what “real food” really means. She has graced the sets of Chopped, Dr. Oz, and TedX, and has just completed the pilot episode of her new web series, Funny People Making Food.

Notes:

You’ll receive a complete recipe packet and enjoy a full sit-down meal at the end of class with your classmates. Our classes are BYOB, and you are welcome to bring a bottle to share at the sit-down meal.

There is no sit-down meal for the following classes:

• The Baking Basics
• Holiday Candy Workshop
• Bubbles and Truffles: Candy Making for Adults

Our classes are hands-on, coupled with demonstration-style teaching. Everyone is situated at their own cutting board/chef’s knife station around a large wooden work table that accommodates the whole class (10 people max). We work together as a group, with the chef at the head of the table.

We focus on knife skills, preparing ingredients for cooking, and we strive to find every opportunity to offer you a hands-on experience at the stove and at your station, all within the spacial parameters of a single stove/family-style kitchen. We ask for volunteers to assist in all cooking.