Recipe Variations Quotes

I would try doing a dish 30 different ways.

I'm brilliant at cooking my stepmother's scrambled egg recipe. The secret is to put eggs, butter, milk, and seasoning together in the saucepan, and to keep stirring with a wooden spoon under a low heat until the preferred consistency is reached.

What strikes me, the more I cook, is that the best recipes are ones where the basic anatomy is so sound it will survive multiple adjustments. When a recipe has good bones, you can change the seasoning, double the garlic, swap lime for lemon, and it still turns out delicious.

The differences between a tart, a pie and a quiche are a blur.

I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen

I think in the end there are only 20 or 30 tenets of basic cooking. It's going at perhaps the same issue from different angles, from different points of view, from different presentation styles, that really makes things sink in and become embedded.

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

A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.

A recipe is not an exact formula, but it does need a certain structure. When the bones are right, you can dress it in many ways.

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.

My students regularly spend 20 hours or more in the kitchen with me. I try to teach them that even the most well-written recipe for, say, gazpacho can never take into account the ways in which a tomato that's lapped each morning and evening by coastal fog will taste completely different from one grown in a hot, inland valley.

'Chef' is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.

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.

Some of the recipes in the book have evolved for us. Many haven't.

Potato salad is very personal: everyone makes theirs differently.

I love 'The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook' by Dione Lucas. A huge source of information and inspiration. The book is organized by menu, and the recipes are unusual and exciting.

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

Sometimes there is dogma in baking and sometimes there is not - you just have to know when to break the rules and when to follow them.

The thing with food is that you can give 20 people the same recipe and the same ingredients, and somebody's going to make it better than somebody else, and that's the creativity of it. It's like music. You could have a bunch of people playing the same piece, and somebody's gonna play it better.

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.

If you could learn how to make a perfect lemon tart then you got a story. If you don't feel like that, make a perfect chocolate chip cookie, but have five go-to dishes like that and you can move them around, change them up just a little bit, and always have something in the can.