Daniel Boulud Quotes

A great ratatouille is one in which the vegetables interact with each other but are still discernible from each other. The trick is to cook them just right: not over, not under.

If you don't treat an ingredient and its flavors with respect - if you drown it in oil, for instance - you'll spoil it.

All the great chefs I know - Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - they are technicians first.

It's not good to thicken sauce with too much butter because it can cause heaviness. You don't want to avoid butter, but you also don't want to put too much - add it slowly.

I love big shrimp, like Japanese botan shrimp and the meaty ones from Santa Barbara, Calif. In classic Japanese cooking, shrimp like these would be dropped into a broth or boiled as served with sushi. But I think boiling dilutes their great flavor, and they are better when stir-fried.

Having sharp, great knives will enable you to cook very precisely. Knife skills are essential in cooking.

I like to cook with the philosophy of using great ingredients and not altering them too much.

I concentrate in my work on preserving and displaying the original flavor from each ingredient in a dish.

I cook a great fish, a great salmon. I grill it, get the skin nice and crispy.

Sauce is certainly ancestral to French cooking. The technique is very tricky, but it's also very fundamental.

I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that's been refined over many years. I won't tell anybody what it is.

The key to sauces is having patience. I'm not a patient woman, but I learned with sauces that you have to get everything on a slow roll and layer the flavors. That's where you get robust tastes: it starts one way and ends another.

Habaneros have a great fruity flavor, but the challenge is that you have to deflect the heat in order to taste the flavor. If you don't, you're dead. They should really have a warning sign on them. Deflect the habanero's heat by pairing it with sweet food.

There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.

Taste as you go. When you taste the food throughout the cooking process you can make adjustments as you go.

With sushi, it is all about balance. Sometimes they cut the fish too thick, sometimes too thin. Often the rice is overcooked or undercooked. Not enough rice vinegar or too much.

There's a point of no return when you're cooking tomatoes. A little too much heat, a little too long in the pot, and you lose that sense of fresh ripeness that makes tomatoes so great.

I lived with a German family. I learned about schnitzel from Ritta Seiffer. When she cooked she'd get the oil really hot so that it sealed everything and in the middle was very juicy. That's the secret to a great schnitzel.

I never try to marry more than three flavors in one dish.

I always have homemade chicken stock in the refrigerator. I'll reduce it, maybe add a little cream and a few shallots. Before you know it, eureka! It's the best.

I use vinegars to deglaze saute pans for sublime sauces.

I prepare my style of biriyani by sauting sliced onion, tomato, green chilli, ginger garlic and add required water and rice. If I end up adding a tad too much of salt, I used to add curd to balance it.

There are very few chefs both in Britain and the States that really identify the secret of being consistent. And combine consistency with flavor.

A crier of green sauce.

The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of Nature.