In San Francisco, the majority of the restaurants are ingredient-driven. In New York, that is true as well, but there's also a greater focus on technique.
In food, it's really, like, either you're right, or you're wrong. You know, people's taste buds kind of vary, but there's a technique. Either you do it right, or you don't.
If you taste something, you're not at the maximum of your ability. What I think about in competition is temperature and texture. It has nothing to do with taste or emotion.
At some point during every cooking class I teach, I do my signature move: dramatically add handful upon handful of salt to a large pot of boiling water, then taste it and add even more.
The addition of vinaigrette to freshly roasted vegetables gives them a freshness and juiciness they don't normally have; the acidity brings out new shades of flavour, too.
Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.
Simmering vegetables in a covered pot over low heat so that they steam in their own liquid - a French technique called a l'etouffee - is the ticket to achieving a soup with pronounced depth.
When you use Tabasco in the marinade, it kind of infuses everything.
Taste as you go. When you taste the food throughout the cooking process you can make adjustments as you go.
I like food to be really simple but have a lot of technique all the same.
The great American food writer M. F. K. Fisher once wrote an essay called 'The Anatomy of a Recipe.' To have a good anatomy, in her view, a recipe should have a sense of logical progression. She despaired of recipes with 'anatomical faults,' where the reader is told to make a cake batter and only then to grease the loaf pans.
Often for hors d'oeuvres, I serve room temperature vegetables, something like that, so that the main course might be quite rich but the first course has balanced it out.
Confit is not something that comes to mind for summer. Usually it means duck confit, made by cooking the legs and thighs in duck fat to preserve them for winter.
If you throw a lamb chop in the oven, what's to keep it from getting done?
If you don't treat an ingredient and its flavors with respect - if you drown it in oil, for instance - you'll spoil it.
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.
Cooking is about the ingredients and responding, but risotto, specifically, is about the technique.
I always use my 'Holy Trinity' which is salt, olive oil and bacon. My motto is, 'bacon always makes it better.' I try to use bacon and pork products whenever it can.
The Chinese five-spice works really well in the quantity that I used. It makes it almost imperceptibly just a little bit sweeter without making it really sweet or really even that Asian flavored.
When we eat something at a restaurant, however simple it may look, there's something in it that makes you think, 'Well, I couldn't quite do this from home.'
There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!
I don't overcook, because you lose what's good in the food.
You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.
There are two schools of fried chicken. One is brining in salted water and the other is soaking in either buttermilk or milk. I just combine the two.
It doesn't matter how precisely the onion is cut as long as the person chewing it is happy.
