The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.
All food is comfort food. Maybe I just like to chew.
Food should be fun.
I don't think there was ever a dish that changed my life. I certainly remember a constant series of things that I had for the first time and thought, 'Where has this been all my life?' One was brie. I mean, oh my God! One was my first soft-shell crabs.
A different spice is the most interesting thing to me.
Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.
Food can be very transformational, and it can be more than just about a dish. That's what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.
I'm a simple cook, and there's a lot I don't eat. But food is important. It translates so easily into pleasure.
Food to me, in one word, is 'creativity' or 'expression.' It's simply, 'This is who I am at this point in time, and this is what I want to cook for you.'
The biggest hits - be they Coca-Cola or Doritos - owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.
You are defined by your ingredients, by the way you touch them, by the flavors you draw from them.
There is no right or wrong way to pair or prepare a dessert. Follow your instincts, edit, and taste-tweak-taste until you get it just right!
If you don't use good ingredients, the outcome is never going to be excellent. But if you buy the freshest ingredients that are in season, at their peak, and you cook with them, you can't really go wrong.
I believe that a cook in a kitchen isn't producing an entree: he's producing a reaction. The product is the reaction; the entree is just the vehicle.
Whenever we create dishes, we work very carefully and ask ourselves, 'Is there anything on the dish that really doesn't make the dish better?' Then we eliminate that. We try to stay very focused on really showcasing everything on the plate so nothing gets lost.
'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.
Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.
We can create any sort of flavor on a printed image that we set our minds to.
Clouds of flavors and savors float around the thing-in-itself.
I concentrate in my work on preserving and displaying the original flavor from each ingredient in a dish.
I think that to capture food in music, you really are capturing an emotional response to food.
If you can't eat incredible food, then what's the point?
Find combinations of flavors you love and buy the best quality ingredients you can afford. Your food is only going to be as good as the sum of its parts, like anything else.
Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors - that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.
Cooking well, with love, is an art.
