Unconventional Ingredients Quotes

What makes the food that we do at Alinea so interesting on the outside is that we really don't let ourselves say no to an idea.

You don't call yourself the Demon Chef by being gentle. I am tough.

No rules. Don't be afraid to do whatever you want. Cooking doesn't have to have rules. I don't like it that way.

And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.

Late-night shows are 'Chopped.' Who are your guests tonight? Your guests tonight are veal tongue, coffee grounds and gummy bears. There, make a show ... Make an appetizer that appeals to millions of people. That's what I like. How could you possibly do it? Oh, you bring in your own flavors. Your own house band is another flavor.

I'll read a recipe but then decide, 'Well, it's sort of like this, then.' Or I'll go to the fridge and think, 'I'll see what I can put together,' and I'll combine beetroot and sausage and prawns with goat's cheese sprinkled on top and think, 'I like that they're all slightly pink. It looks fine and... actually, it is fine.'

North America was ready for something other than a vanilla cooking show and we were providing the double dark chocolate fudge.

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.

I love the idea of cooking, but I don't like using recipe books, so I'll put a mish-mash together, and it might be amazing by total accident, or it will be a catastrophe.

The deconstructed, postmodern pizza has been with us for ages, and the fact is that pretty much every ingredient in the world has been used as a pizza topping and liked by somebody, somewhere.

I will eat disgusting things, but only those with long established culinary traditions.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.

Everybody has to put purees underneath everything now. It's like people think we need the steak, and then we need some baby food with it.

I like to add something unusual to a dish.

I am the MacGyver of cooking. If you bring me a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pigs feet, pine cones...and a woodpecker, I'll make you a good chicken pot pie.

On 'Chopped,' the time goes down a bit and there are several ingredients, usually one that makes no sense whatsoever with the rest of the ingredients. So it gets you out of your culinary comfort zone a little bit. Like we had octopus and cheese paired up with each other.

I am not a shock jock pastry chef. I don't create desserts using strange ingredients just for the sake of doing so, like so many of my colleagues in the industry.

The unlikely combination of potatoes and pasta does appear in some Italian recipes.

I think if the ingredients have nothing that I recognize, that kind of scares me. I like unique ingredients - like charcoal and baking soda - because it's cool to be able to use products with ingredients you see at home.