Tom Colicchio Quotes

After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference.

Even though I'm big on recipes, I love to make up my own dishes and when you take a risk in the kitchen, you learn a lot about food!

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.

It's very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it's merely about combining ingredients, but that's something you can do with your eyes closed.

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.

Once you know the fundamentals of cooking, then you don't need to follow a recipe - you just know what herbs go well or what meats, or what combination of what goes together, and then you can just branch out from there. But if there's something specific that I want to make, I work on the recipe and tweak it to my own.

When I make a recipe for the first time and it's fabulous, I know I'm in trouble because I don't know exactly what I did, and I can't replicate it.

Your idea of that dish has evolved, and if you're a cook, you can start thinking in different ways about it, maybe even a different way than I think about it.

I'm always changing my work, as there are endless ways to think about food.

I'm a very improvisational cook. I sort of like to make things up as I go along. I'm quite creative in the kitchen.

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

I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.

As a kid, I remember my mother always experimenting with bizarre combinations of food such as gulab jamun and pickle! Surprisingly, many years down the line, I have adapted the same.

I like that talented chefs are able to keep coming up with new ways of preparing food - it really is an art form.

When I walk into a market I may see a different cut of meat or an unusual vegetable and think, ‘I wonder how it would be if I took the recipe for that sauce I had in Provence and put the two together?’ So I go home and try it out. Sometimes my idea is a success and sometimes it is a flop, but that is how recipes are born. There really are not recipes, only millions of variations sparked by someone’s imagination and desire to be a little creative and different. American cooking is built, after all, on variations of old recipes from around the world.

An amazing invention - but who would ever want to use one?

I didn't want to imitate anybody. Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use.

I'm a cook, and I'm like, "a dash of this, a pinch of that." I cook with a lot of passion and instinct. So that's the hardest thing - to put an actual recipe together.

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.

The fact is that it takes more than ingredients and technique to cook a good meal. A good cook puts something of himself into the preparation - he cooks with enjoyment, anticipation, spontaneity, and he is willing to experiment.

You can't make anything authentic by asking people what they want because they don't know what they want. That's what they're looking at you for.

Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants everyone to use what sense they have.

I don't have to play the song all the way to the very end - I use it while it's good and while it's cool and while it's exciting, and then I get out.

I want to be remembered for only one thing: my contribution to aviation.