Michael Mina Quotes

I love to cook. My mom taught me to cook at a very, very young age.

I grew up in a house where I was a spectator to the sport of cooking. In that way, I just learned so much about what it really takes to make food.

Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.

Some of the best cooks that I've cooked with, whether it's in New York or Chicago or even here in Philadelphia, are actually Ecuadorians. And there's something about their palates that really just inspires me, and has a really deep sense of flavor.

I can cook really well. I started cooking as a kid, so I can fend for myself in the kitchen and even do a little gourmet action.

One must know combinations, one must have a true knowledge of food to be in the moment.

I started culinary school at a very young age, and really I wanted to be out working, cooking, more than I wanted to be in a classroom. You could say I wasn't a very good student - I wanted to be a student of life and experience.

Between the ages of six and nine, my palette was taking shape as well as my identity as a chef. It was then that I learned the difference between salty, sweet, sour and even spicy.

I'm no cook, but I love to eat. Usually, food tastes best when there isn't a recipe, just a cook who knows what foods and seasonings go well together.

I love learning how to make new dishes.

A splash of red wine vinegar can pull things together like a pinch of salt.

I can chop and peel vegetables but can't cook full meals.

Salt's relationship to flavor is multidimensional: It has its own particular taste, and it both balances and enhances the flavor of other ingredients.

Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good.

I love cooking and eating - I'm a total foodie. It started off as a survival thing as a student, when cheese and potato pie was all I could afford to make. My most successful results come from concocting something with leftovers. Any chef will tell you that you should taste as you cook, so I might make it a bit more spicy, yogurty or eggy.

The best way to learn to cook is to do some serious eating.

I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater.

Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

As in cooking, living requires that you taste, taste, taste as you go along.

Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!

There are two activities in life in which we can lovingly and carefully put something inside of someone we love. Cooking is the one we can do three times a day for the rest of our lives, without pills. In both activities, practice makes perfect.

...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.

I cannot teach anybody how to cook. All I can do is show them, share methods with them.

Of Cooking. This is an art of various forms, the object of which is to give ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy. One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select only those which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unhappy if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up.

You don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.