Wylie Dufresne Quotes

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.

I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better. It's a simple as that.

Cooking is chemistry, really.

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.

There will never be a right or wrong way to cook something, but there will always be a more informed way.

That being said, I often write into recipes techniques I learned in the restaurant kitchen. There are ways of organizing your prep and so on that are immensely useful. Those are woven into all the recipes I do.

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.

With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not.

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

The thing about cooking is it's so interesting to watch. I don't know why, but if you go to somebody's house and they're making something, they usually say interesting things while they're cooking.

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

The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.

My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.

Recipes tell you nothing. Learning techniques is the key.

The temperatures required for caramelization and browning almost always far exceed the boiling point of water. So the presence of water on the surface of a food, or on the bottom of a pan, is a signal that browning can't yet occur.

I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it is cooked through do I welcome it as my food.

When people think science and cooking, they have no idea that it's not correctly expressed. We're actually applying the scientific method. People think chemistry and physics are science, but the scientific method is something else.... It's the science that the world of cooking generates: science of butter; science of the croissant.

If you learn a recipe, you can cook the recipe. If you learn the technique, you can cook anything.

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

I think a rotisserie is like a really morbid ferris wheel for chickens. It’s a strange piece of machinery . . . We will take the chicken, kill it, impale it, and then rotate it. And I’ll be damned if I’m not hungry! Because spinning chicken carcasses make my mouth water! I like dizzy chicken. With a side of potatoes of some sort.

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

As far as cookbooks go, I think Joy of Cooking is a classic. I've used it over and over again. Julia Child frustrates me. By the time you get all her herbs together, you're exhausted

He toss my salad like his name Romaine

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.

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!