Wylie Dufresne Quotes

At culinary school, none of the things we use to define ourselves outside that world - actor, producer, student - none of that matters. It's a magical art form.

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

It's my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown.

No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art. Or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here. Cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering.

When I first started cooking, I was very much an intuitive cook when it came to taste, but that didn't mean I didn't want to know why some things worked and why others did not. My interest took me to culinary school.

Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.

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.

It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge.

I love food and am very good at improvising when preparing it - it's a really creative experience for me.

I love Alton Brown's show 'Good Eats,' about the chemistry of food. It's really thoughtful.

To become a good cook is to know yourself, and I, at this point, know myself. I know myself, and I know the cook I want to be and the cook I am striving to be.

I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.

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

Cooking is chemistry, really.

I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.

Recipes tell you nothing. Learning techniques is the key.

Cooking is an art form, a creative thing.

As a chef, I got into this because I love the creative energy and I love the science, but I also love to feed people and make them happy.

My students regularly spend 20 hours or more in the kitchen with me. I try to teach them that even the most well-written recipe for, say, gazpacho can never take into account the ways in which a tomato that's lapped each morning and evening by coastal fog will taste completely different from one grown in a hot, inland valley.

I came literally to the table with a wealth of knowledge by simply understanding how food should taste.

I think baking is an incredible thing; cooking in general is an incredible thing.

A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there.

I lived my whole life in the kitchen. Not only that, but it's the passion, it's the love for cooking and food. It's dictated my entire life - every aspect of it.

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.