Recipe Adaptation Quotes

Since we married, Peta's taken over a lot of my cooking and she's incredible. She'll do different meals for me and the kids, depending on my regime. If I name 10 ingredients she'll change the recipe every day.

When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.

I may find something that looks interesting and then go on to alter the recipe by adding spices, things of my own. I also look for time-saving recipes, dishes that can be prepared ahead and stored.

You know, for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?

A cookery book should be there for inspiration. Recipes should be a guideline, and they shouldn't be cast in stone.

Omit and substitute! That's how recipes should be written. Please don't ever get so hung up on published recipes that you forget that you can omit and substitute.

Only advanced bakers should endeavor to adapt non-vegan recipes to be vegan, or gluten-full recipes to be gluten-free. There are all sorts of tips and tricks when it comes to subbing vegan ingredients for eggs and dairy, but it's tricky to say the least.

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.

I know how to bring recipes down to the level where people with no experience can feel comfortable making them.

I love a good challenge of looking with new eyes at a tried and true recipe in my recipe Rolodex.

In my early days, I copied the great French chefs, like most chefs do. Copying is not bad. Copying and not recognizing that you are copying is bad. For me, when I go to a restaurant and am served a dish influenced by something we created at elBulli, if it's well done, it makes me extremely happy.

I'll transform anything as long as it's edible.

I'll read a recipe but then decide, 'Well, it's sort of like this, then.' Or I'll go to the fridge and think, 'I'll see what I can put together,' and I'll combine beetroot and sausage and prawns with goat's cheese sprinkled on top and think, 'I like that they're all slightly pink. It looks fine and... actually, it is fine.'

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!

If a dish doesn't turn out right, change the name and don't bat an eyelid. A fallen souffle is only a risen omelette. It depends on the self-confidence with which you present it.

I simplify the spices. I'm the same way as everybody else: if I look at a recipe and there's ten spices in it, I'm going to have to think long and hard about when I'm going to be able to make that... so I try to simplify the spices to three or four.

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.

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.

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?

I like to talk about food, ingredients, and how to adapt recipes. It's a dialogue.

On TV, I really try to go back to the basics and break down a recipe until it's very easy.

That said, there are certainly still cooks out there who make fantastic historical cornbreads, though the old recipes have often been changed to include modern techniques and ingredients.

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.

An awful lot of people think it's easy to lift recipes out.