Cooking Fundamentals Quotes

Learn to cook brown rice with a little salt and butter or olive oil. Learn to boil noodles properly or saute onions right. Once you get those basics down, you'll be all good and feel more confident.

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.

Fine dining teaches you how to cook many different things, and it gives you the basic fundamentals, but these specialty restaurants, they're not teaching you the broad foundation you need to become a well-rounded cook.

Sauce is certainly ancestral to French cooking. The technique is very tricky, but it's also very fundamental.

The reason I started officially learning to cook was because when I first got pregnant, I had to face the sad fact that I didn't even know how to boil an egg.

When you have a good stock, you can make a good soup.

In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second,Butter; third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea--by which I mean, generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what not. I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life are concerned.

Every chef should have an understanding of pastries or desserts.

Too often, chefs just want to experiment - they want to use liquid nitrogen before they know how to use heat.

I learnt basic cookery by watching my mum.

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.

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

Kosher salt, eggs and flour. These are the building blocks of everything. Kosher salt, above and beyond everything.