The smell of baking bread is universally adored for a reason: it appeals to us at the core of our humanness. It’s the smell of sustenance and security.
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Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller & Sebastien Rouxel
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I also learned that a bakery is an anchor - it draws a community around it. People would sit in the bakeries to eat their croissants; they would gather in the morning, and in the afternoon. People come together at and around bakeries. Baking is a unifying force.
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Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller & Sebastien Rouxel
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I just wanna be an inspiration to people…that they can get what they want if they really put their mind to it, and they can overcome anything.
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Christine Ha, MasterChef
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Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.
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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
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Every cook has to understand that it’s not about the theatrics of the dish, it’s about the memory you’re left with when your plate is empty.
Often, admiring a chef and getting to know him is like loving goose liver, and then meeting the goose
Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone.. Bad food is fake food…food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives. Food that’s too safe, too pasteurized, too healthy - it’s bad! There should be some risk, like unpasteurized cheese. Food is about rot, and decay, and fermentation…as much as it is also about freshness.
What keeps me motivated is not the food itself but all the bonds and memories the food represents.
This experience, it’s definitely going to be changing something later on in my creativity. Right now I am kind of a sponge and I’m absorbing the culture, the lighting, the ingredients. I’m just enjoying it. And I know that somewhere - I don’t know where or when - but in terms of cooking, it will come back into a recipe in a way. I cannot really define how the light in the sky ends up on a plate, but it’s all those experiences in life that I accumulate, they definitely give me a certain.. maybe we can call that a cooking wisdom. There has been an evolution in the way I cook because of experiences like that.
This is how I judge a great meal: when I’m eating it, I don’t want to be anywhere else.
