Yotam Ottolenghi Quotes

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.

A measuring jug is also vital when cooking rice, as this is always measured by volume rather than by weight.

To shuck oysters, you'll need an oyster knife, a handy tool with a sturdy handle and a short, rigid blade which you can pick up for about ten bucks in a kitchenware shop or fish market. A quick trip online will yield any number of videos and slide shows with step-by-step instructions on how to shuck an oyster.

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

The best pastas are cut with bronze dies that give them a rough texture and allow the sauce to cling.

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

I think I can poach a pretty mean egg the old-fashioned way.

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.

I love any excuse to work with a mortar and pestle.

If you're going to buy pasta, you should buy dry pasta. If you're going to make it you can make the real thing, but you shouldn't buy fresh pasta.

The most overrated tool: a pasta maker. Why make it when you can buy it? It's a lot of work!

I'm Italian. I love to cook Italian food, so I learned from my dad how to make sauce and meatballs and all that stuff. With my wife and kids, I started making homemade pasta. The very first time, I didn't have a pasta maker, so I had to cut it with a knife, the old-school way! The noodles were all jacked up, but it was fun.

You don't have to do everything from scratch. Nobody wants to make puff pastry!

At Spago, we make all of our pasta from scratch with egg yolks, so I'm always looking for new ways to play with egg whites.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

Frozen peas can be shelled very fast with a wringer-type washer. Put a pan on one side of the wringer to catch the peas and the pods go on through. You will think peas will go through the wringer and be mashed the moment the pod hits the wringer, but they will pop out before they go through. A very fast job can be done this way.

[Vincent Price] had a fish recipe where he wrapped [the fish] in aluminum foil and put in these herbs. And then you put it in the dishwasher and then you wash your dishes, and when you're done, your fish is steamed and it's perfect. But he was very sophisticated as far as art and food and all of that went.

I never see any home cooking - all I get is fancy stuff.

A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife.

I think with my hands, it was catching a lot of footballs and working with my father during the summer because he would always make me. My father was a bricklayer so I was a helper. My job was to make sure that he had bricks to lay.

My favorite to cook is this recipe I've been making since I was 12 years old with my mom, and it's an angel hair shrimp pasta with tomatoes, feta, garlic, white wine - it's so easy but so fresh and so delicious!

I like pork chops and country ham, creamed potatoes, stuff like that. Redeye gravy. It comes from ham, bacon, stuff like that. It's the grease that you fry it in. I eat a lot of Jell-O. Fruit Jell-O.

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

Slotted spoons don't hold much soup.

The very idea of making shoes by hand boggled her mind.