Thomas Keller 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.

I would try doing a dish 30 different ways.

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

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

I think people make it too systematic in a way, like it's a chemistry formula. Food is not like that; food is very forgiving. Connecting and making do with a lot of the food elements can be fun and exciting.

I enjoy experimenting with food and dish out innovative food items as well.

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

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.

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

I have real admiration for chefs who can maintain an edge and find new inspiration in their cooking after many years.

Ferran Adria making hamburgers... some thought it was crazy. But getting them perfect was a challenge. Plus I'm fascinated by all aspects of food.

I'm surprised by the talent I find all over. There are always new chefs who propose many interesting new ideas, new ways of looking at ingredients.

Classical cooking and molecular gastronomy should remain separate. You can mix two styles and get fusion; any more, and you just get confusion.

I find cooking very therapeutic. As a creative person, I relish cooking because it's such a creative process. You can cook anything out of anything.

I'm just trying to cook good food, and I'm not afraid to do whatever I need to do to keep the food evolving.

In Tijuana, because there's such a mix and match of people and regions and we're a newer city and everyone comes from some place else, I think we're just given permission to play with our food.

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.

It is important to experiment and endlessly seek after creating the best possible flavors when preparing foods. That means not being afraid to experiment with various ingredients.

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.

There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas.

At wd~50, we have carried on, I think, a very honest, legitimate European tradition of messing with foie gras.

Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.

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.

Being a food show and being me, I always kicked it up a notch, which means I would always elevate the spice level or the complexity of a particular dish. So, it was always like we're going to kick this up a little bit.