Wherever possible, I like to use home-grown or locally produced ingredients.
The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on.
I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.
There is so much to be gained from investing more time in what we eat. Buying fresh ingredients means knowing where your food comes from and what's in it.
The hardest thing about being a full time chef is leaving my work behind when I go home at night. I'll toss and turn about a menu item or forget to order produce and wake up at 4 A.M. in a cold sweat over some artichokes.
Better ingredients, better pizza - it's not a slogan. It's a way of life.
Basically, Walkers are putting real produce into their flavours, so the cheese and onion flavour is actually cheese and onion rather than just flavourings.
It's my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown.
The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.
For the longest time, chefs and restaurateurs were able to get products home cooks couldn't get, but that's not the case anymore.
The composition of my desserts is taken care of by the farmers' market.
If you consider each individual tin as just the building block for a larger recipe, it doesn't really make much difference whether it comes from a tin, or whether it's fresh because it's just being used in a lot of other things.
I really wanted my creams to feel luxurious and have a beautiful finish, and it's harder to do that with natural ingredients.
