Yotam Ottolenghi Quotes

In food, it's really, like, either you're right, or you're wrong. You know, people's taste buds kind of vary, but there's a technique. Either you do it right, or you don't.

If you can't think like an onion or a carrot or a tomato, you may be a technician, but you won't understand what you're doing, and your dish will be flat.

My father always cooks more polenta than he needs for a meal. The excess he spreads on an oiled surface and chills. Next day, he cuts out chunks, fries them in olive oil and serves with salad.

The only thing that counts is if you know how to prepare your ingredients. Even if with the best and freshest ingredients in the world, if your dish is tasteless or burnt, it's ruined.

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

Baking is too precise for me. I cook with a pinch of this or that.

The simpler the food, the harder it is to prepare it well. You want to truly taste what it is you're eating. So that goes back to the trend of fine ingredients. It's very Japanese: Preparing good ingredients very simply, without distractions from the flavor of the ingredient itself.

Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.

You are defined by your ingredients, by the way you touch them, by the flavors you draw from them.

My own favorite way to cook and eat razor clams is to simply dredge them in a mix of seasoned flour and cornmeal, then pan fry them in butter until crisp and golden. Be careful not to overcook them so they stay tender, not tough and chewy.

If you are working with high quality products, you can elevate the flavors more by cooking it at a low temperature than you can by searing it.

As soon as you wanna take away the flavor of anything, just fry it.

Desserts are all about form and function, about warm and hot and cold. I want every component to hit your palate on different levels at different times.

I like my coffee sweet and creamy, that's why I drink Great Taste White.

I make amazing fried chicken. The secret is taco seasoning.

The classic French blanch-and-cool technique I learned at Chez Panisse yields the kind of brilliant, picturesque vegetables we all want to see on restaurant plates. Long-cooked foods, on the other hand, fall firmly into the 'ugly but good' camp of the Tuscan cucina povera, where flavor far outshines looks.

Certain shows, when it's all comedy, it's like when you eat something that's too sweet and it just tastes gross. You need that salted caramel.

The Chinese five-spice works really well in the quantity that I used. It makes it almost imperceptibly just a little bit sweeter without making it really sweet or really even that Asian flavored.

Eating is the secret to good cooking.

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

It’s Kahlua, Sage. Packed with sugar and coffee flavor.

You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.

There's no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion. It's like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.

I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.

And I think because there is an essence of me that cares about other people and what other people think then that then makes me seem very sweet and polite.