90 Cooking Quotes

The way to any woman's heart, be she witch or Wonderwoman, princess or Pocahontas, is through her stomach.

Slicing a warm slab of bacon is a lot like giving a ferret a shave. No matter how careful you are, somebody's going to get hurt.

I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better. It's a simple as that.

I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

I think sometimes that people assume because I'm on television I'm an expert, but I think the whole point of what I do is that I'm not and I don't have any training. My approach isn't about a fancy ingredient or style. I cook what I love to eat.

I lurch from chaos to chaos. I can't find my driving licence and my clothes are everywhere - cooking is the neatest thing I do.

I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking.

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother's.

No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art -- or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here -- cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering (the wing of a Boeing 777, a suspension bridge) but they are not works of art, they are works of science. To my mind art is a matter of personal expression and the exchange of ideas; food is in the end, fuel -- a means to an end.

There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time. I use these things when they are needed in recipes and leave them out when they're not needed.

My favorite food at the moment is Pasta, with tons of shaved Parmesan on the side. Not crumbly but like the hunks, you know what I mean...when you get the thin slices.

As for substitutes, I only agree with them if they really don't change a person's response to a dish. Take mashed potatoes, for instance. I recently saw a recipe that suggested that the fat we all know that mashers need could be replaced with vegetable broth. Hogwash. All that does is lead to dissatisfaction and I think that dissatisfaction results in overeating. We like fats because fats satisfy. They break down in the digestive track very slowly so they keep us fuller longer. Now if I find a way to replace a fatty ingredient without missing it (I do this a lot with yogurt) then you bet I'm going to do it. But I repeat: there are no bad foods.

on rice cookers: The problem is, this is a unitasker. And we've got rules about that kind of thing here. (throws the rice cooker out the window.)

Of course, we're not going to have any more fresh ingredients because we're all out of hand grenades.

You're a French chef. Okay? Until great white sharks figure out how to catch rabies, that is going to be the scariest thing on earth.

Behold -- the human eyeball. Okay, it's a kettle grill with a fancy paint job. Just work with me here for one second, okay, people?

You know what, I hate sifters. You can't clean 'em, they rust, they take up a lot of storage space, and half the time, they're broken! The food processor is always there for ya.

(about salt) Don't worry about it burning. It's a rock!

Stock is like a computer--crap in, crap out.

Everybody ready to dough?

We gotta change over to the hook in order to work in the rest of the flour, of course, to do the kneading that will be necessary. So.. hook time. Pirate time. Arrrgh.

Ahhh, just smell that rosemary, I... Oh. I'm sorry. You can't. That was mean.

I always consider raisins optional.

Squishable spreads go on squishable breads.

Last but not least, one cup of heavy cream. That's right, heavy cream. Look, I said I would help you make premium ice cream. I didn't say anything about low carb ice cream, or low fat ice cream, or low anything else ice cream. As far as I'm concerned, ice cream shouldn't be low anything! It should just taste good!

Candy making is basically the manipulation of sucrose by heat. Taffy, jawbreakers, fudge, divinity, butterscotch are all made possible by the fact that between 230 and 350 degrees plain old table sugar, sucrose, goes through more changes than a teenager during prom week.

Now, these will be perfectly roasted in 30 to 35 minutes. But halfway through the cooking process, you will have to rotate and spin the pans. Meaning, the top will go to the bottom, the bottom will go to the top, the back of both pans to the back of the oven.. um, you know what I mean? Good.

Some people like their meringues all wavy on top. Me, I want mine as smooth as Kojak's noggin.

Then we have a tablespoon of fish sauce, an ingredient I keep around for making pad thai or, well, any dish where you want a little flavor of cat food and athletic sock.. but in a good way. That's why we only use a tablespoon!

Though there is such a thing as saltless pretzels, called 'baldies' , I would suggest that they are really not pretzels at all, but rather cruel jokes perpetrated by bitter bakers.

If there was a trick to [recipe or ingredient], and I'm not saying there is. But if there was...

Golden brown and delicious.

By the way, I don't recommend this for most people. I'm just a little bit crazier than most.

I like cooking with kids... and I don't mean in a Grimm Brothers kinda way.

My neighbors thought I was insane because I was standing there with a stopwatch grilling ice cubes for three days.

on Iron Chef America: The biggest surprise to me was how fierce the competition was. I mean these guys are some of the best cooks on the planet but that's so easy to forget when you see them on television. They were dead serious and amazing to watch. I wasn't (nor am I now) worthy.

I am a nerd, I guess, if you think that getting kind of excited about understanding ionic bonds is nerdy. Truth is, I was a horrible student. I sucked at everything because nothing mattered to me. History was a bunch of numbers, chemistry was a bunch of symbols, math was bunch of equations. And once in my adulthood, I started getting really interested in food. All of those things started to make sense, and now I'm into it. I can't learn enough about chemistry because now it applies to something. And I blame the educational system for that -- for making it meaningless. For making a lot of what we learn in the educational system meaningless.

Bobby Flay's getting ready to crack some coconuts. He's choosing his arsenal for that.. his head, he's using his head--which may be the hardest thing here in Kitchen Stadium, I'm not sure. (He and Flay both laugh.)

(takes a deep breath) Can you smell it? Can you smell Kitchen Stadium? Awww, of course not--you're watching television. But hey, at least you get to watch!

She has a dessert with the ice cream, streusel, and pork! Yummy! (laughs nervously)

Okay, so all of those items are being made into a frosting for the chocolate eggplant cupcakes. What a magical world we live in!

Cat Cora's got a fascinating way of getting creme fraiche out of the container. Instead of simply removing the lid by lifting it up away from its interlocking device, she just simply whacks off the whole top of the thing. The woman is positively medieval!

George Bernard Shaw wrote that there is no greater love than the love of food. If that be true, then Kitchen Stadium must surely be Love Central. Granted, I admit, it's kind of tough to feel the love, you know, with all that battling, and yelling, screaming, chopping, and searing going on. But hey, tough love can still be true love, and I, for one, could use a big fat hug. So let's get to cooking, shall we?

That's a big, big fire.. Iron Chef Bobby Flay, willing to sacrifice life and limb all in the name of flavor!

Anne Burrell, just putting down a piece of that dough right on the grill. It's very thin, and I bet it's got a sexy name.

Now I have to tell you, sometimes, occasionally, when I've been very very good, the chairman allows me to glimpse the secret ingredient before that two-ton lead shield seals its secrets. Now I gotta tell you, get ready to lick your TV screens, America, because today's battle is going to send your salivary glands into hyperdrool.

If you take a raw egg like this and you give it a spin and stop it and let go, it'll start spinning again. However, if you take a hard cooked egg and spin it and stop it, it won't spin again. That is because the liquid has set in here, but this is still free to move around. That is so cool! But then.. I'm kind of.. a geek that way.

That truffle probably cost more than my first car. But let's not be wowed by flashy fish and expensive pounding fungi, this is about cooking and this is about egg!

Food: the final frontier. These are the battles of Iron Chef America: our continuing mission to discover strange new groceries, to seek out talented culinary combatants, and boldly go where no kitchen arena has gone before. Let's cook.

Over on the challenger's side, we've got some chemicals at play. And I understand that that is methylcellulose.. and methylcellulose, it's a gelling agent. But guys that are getting on an age like me, know it mostly as the main ingredient in Metamucil. And goshdarnit, you've gotta be regular if you're gonna be happy on this planet.

Hi, I'm Alton Brown here in Kitchen Stadium, the culinary coliseum where the only ingredient that isn't allowed is FEAR. Well, that, and those little containers of yogurt they give you on airplanes that always blow up in your face? Oh, and mothballs. We frown on those, too. Anyway! Are you ready for some down and dirty deep-fried fisticuffs? I know I am!

All right, kids. Up to this point, I've been okay with you drifting away, going into the kitchen, getting a beverage or maybe some reference books to look up all the ingredients today. But at this point on, you have got to stay RIGHT THERE. Let's get back to the action!

There on the challenger's side, we can see those crawfish being peeled. That's a lot of work; it would be a lot easier to suck them out with his mouth.. but that would be a sanitation violation here in Kitchen Stadium.

So.. the challenger has already rubbed his meat and spanked his pomegranate right here on national T.V.! So at least somebody's having a good time here in kitchen stadium.

you take some chocolate ... and you take two pieces of bread ... and you put the candy in the middle and you make a sandwich of it. and that would be a cake.

Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.

Are you cooking beans? What time is it? Is Zorro on?

Cooking aside, I am what you'd call a domestic slut. Cooking is really the only domestic activity I enjoy. I would do anything not to do the normal bits of household work - it's not one of my strong points.

I think cooking should be about fun and family. I'm not a trained chef. I don't pretend to be and I think part of my appeal is that my approach to cooking is really relaxed and not rigid. There are no rules in my kitchen.

Lawson's sexy roundness mixed with her speed-demon technique, makes cooking dinner with Nigella look like a prelude to an orgy.

I cook a lot, almost every night.

We smoke the bacon so you don't have to.

We use only the finest days of the week in this dish.

from a Feasting on Asphalt vignette on YouTube:

You need to have the courage to say to your wife, get in there and make me some bean dip.

Thank you, Thing.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Martha, telling Phil her new recipes from prison:

Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.

Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.

A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe.

I enjoy cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food I'm cooking.

I was thirty-two when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.

If you're afraid of butter, use cream.

Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet.

The best way to execute french cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken. Bon appetit.

Cooking for six people every day is like having a cafe.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again.

Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother's tasted better the day before.

My mother is such a lousy cook that Thanksgiving at her house is a time of sorrow.