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...

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.