Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Andrew Zimmern - Page 2

I was born and raised in New York. My family has been in New York City since the Civil War. I have a ton of N.Y.C. in my DNA, from both sides of my family. I had a wonderful childhood in the city.

Even as a kid, I ventured out to ethnic restaurants all the time.

I grew up in a time when we didn't have the Internet, and we didn't have smartphones and things like that.

In tribal Botswana, I received some woven necklaces and a handmade bow with three poison arrows. It's framed and hanging on the wall in my living room and is, without a doubt, one of my favorite possessions.

Be aware of what you cook tomatoes with. The high acid content of the tomato slows down the cooking process of some other foods. Dried beans cooked with tomatoes added to the pot can take up to 20 percent more cooking time than beans without tomatoes added.

Way back in the day, I used to cook for Thomas Keller at Rakel in New York City. Keller is a down to earth, kind, supportive person. I wish people could see that.

After attending The Dalton School and then Vassar College, I began cooking in New York City restaurants helmed by Anne Rosenzweig, Joachim Splichal and Thomas Keller.

You can tell the history of people on a plate.

Good vinegars come in all shapes, sizes, strengths, and viscosities and are probably my most often used seasoning agent in the kitchen after the other major acids we use in solid form: sugar and salt.

I use vinegars to deglaze saute pans for sublime sauces.

For wok cooking, use oils with a high smoke point and low polyunsaturated-fat content: grapeseed oil, peanut oil, etc. Sesame oil and olive oil will burn and taste bitter. Oils with high polyunsaturated-fat contents like soybean oil will also make your food texturally unpleasant.

I log 250 days a year on the road. I need pants that are versatile, easy to clean, and dry in my hotel room if necessary.

Surrounded by a sweltering state known for its staunch conservatism, Austin is an oasis. It's home to the University of Texas, which continuously fosters a well-educated youth culture who have been funneling their collective creative energy into building a vibrant music, film, and technology scene for decades.

I find that most home cooks don't get vinegars. They're misunderstood, mostly due to the factory-made red wine vinegar that everyone commonly cooks with... that, and the giant gallon of white distilled vinegar that we all use, mostly to clean and disinfect things!

When I go into a steakhouse and order a steak, I'll order the cut of my choice, and I'll order it black and blue. And I'll ask them to bring it with my first course, and I'll just let it sit there.

My parents divorced when I was six but stayed close.

As a teenager, I spent my days at the beach and nights cooking in Long Island restaurants.

In a world that is defined by what separates us, sharing a meal with someone from a different country, showing what we have in common with the people, it's very powerful and important.

Never use an aluminum pot, pan, or utensil when cooking tomatoes - or any other soft metal items for that matter. The acidity in the tomato doesn't do well with them; they create a chemical reaction that can turn cooked tomatoes bitter and fade the color, and the food will absorb some of the aluminum!

I like to talk to media.

A five-pound boneless rolled-and-tied breast of veal, like any other piece of meat fit for braising, can come in many shapes and sizes. So recipe times aren't uniformly applicable. A long and thin tied roast will cook more quickly than its stouter, football-shaped cousin.

I rest my proteins in their liquid when I am done with the heat braise.

The restaurant industry in New York in the '80s was a good place to hide out if you had issues.

The people who are afraid of talking to press are people who have something to hide.

Thanks to my parents, who had me traveling around the world mouth-first, I knew from a young age I wanted a career in food.

I love the Mexican chapulines. These little crickets are beautifully roasted with salt and lime.

My life gets better every year.

We will, as Americans, inhale another culture on a fork before we try their music or their art or even, God forbid, hang out with the actual people.

Any decision that I make, anything that I do, every single consideration of my day goes through the prism of what my former experience has been.

When I was 13, I came back from summer camp - summer of '74 - and my mother had had an accident during surgery and was in an oxygen tent in a coma. It was so traumatic. My parents had been divorced for six or seven years at that point, and it was sort of the seminal event of my life.

In everything I do, I want people to get the message of acceptance, to learn not to practice contempt without investigation. I have an obligation to do it.

As I famously said before, I don't like to waste meals. I'm no one's food snob.

I think a lot of chefs are afraid of media outlets, and especially web outlets, because they're afraid there's some 'Borat' situation going on.

Don't ripen picked tomatoes in the sun. Put underripe tomatoes and stone fruits in a paper bag in cool, dark place, and magic happens. And never, ever store them in the fridge: they turn mushy and flavorless.

I think we have cultural bias and practice some ethnocentrism when it comes to ethnic food in America.

I don't like being at food festivals and have someone from some weird cable access show that's all about lifestyle get in my face with a microphone and wants to know which party I'm going to later... That just is pointless kind of stuff to me.

Like many other chef-entrepreneurs, I am convinced that fast food does not mean bad food.

The big mistake people make is eating their grilled beef hot. I prefer room temperature or cool. When the meat rests and starts to get cool, all of that fat goes back into the muscles and becomes much more tender.

I'm no saint, and I don't want to come across like one, but there is not a day that goes by that I'm not doing something for someone else with a very large chunk of my time.

I'd rather be a good guest in someone's home than tell them I don't like their food or make fun of them.

It's just starting. I think it's going to take another year and a half to get up to critical mass, but everybody loves Chinese food, Thai food, Japanese food, and it's all been exploited. The Filipinos combined the best of all of that with Spanish technique. The Spanish were a colonial power there for 500 years, and they left behind adobo and cooking in vinegar - techniques that, applied to those tropical Asian ingredients, are miraculous.

Don't eat till you're full, eat till you're tired.

The whole decision to do my show was that I was trying to "true up" my work life and my personal life and I wanted the principles in both of them to be the same. And the only way that I could think of to do that was to make a show about exploring cultures through food that demonstrated those principles with every story that we told.

I have a bigger problem at food events when I turn over a wine glass and people insist on pouring me a glass of wine. I have a bigger problem with drunk wine representatives, drunk wine salesmen at food events who keep trying to push a glass in my hand.

We currently reside in the wealthiest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world. The idea that someone should go hungry or be without the bare essentials of life is, to me... It's not shameful, I actually think it's criminal.

When someone who's been homeless and actually had to take meals on the handout or steal purses on the backs of park benches to be able to eat, not that that was right. My head was definitely not in the right place when I was out there using but when you share your greatest weaknesses and the most intimate parts of your story, I think it makes a real impact on people. I think what comes from the heart reaches the heart.

You never know when the next person to shake your hand at an autograph session, or the next guy you bump into on line at the pizza parlor, that could be your best friend for the rest of your life. Or it could be the person that two years later pushes you out of the way of a speeding bus. I mean, you just don't know.

Being honest about where you come from and what your story is is the only way to connect to other people, to really connect with them.

I'm always surprised on my social accounts that people assume that because you have a job in television you don't have a political opinion, or don't have a family, or don't have an interest in the rest of the country. It's just absolutely shocking to me how closed minded some people are.

I know what it's like to be hungry. I know what it's like to be homeless. I know what it's like to have to choose between breaking the law and feeding yourself. I know what it's like to take meals at shelters and at Salvation Army facilities. I know what it's like to beg for money on the streets.

Your worst parts of your life, the things that you're ashamed of will become your strongest assets in a very quick amount of time. And the implication in that is your story is all that you have so passing it on to someone else who is struggling behind you coming up the ladder helps them. And so in the spirit of service in recovery we often talk about the power of our own stories to connect with other people and show them that they too can get well. I have found that not only is that true in the recovery world, but it is true in the social world in the social milieu in which I exist.

I love wine, I love wine reps, I love everything about the drinking world. In fact, as a recovering alcoholic, I adore the drinking world. I can't participate in it any longer and the only thing I don't like are people who don't listen to the words that are coming out of someone else's mouth. Which is why I try very hard to listen to the words that are coming out of someone's mouth.

I was just thrown out of the barista parlor. Came to close to the Slayer. Amazing place!

The single greatest pleasure that I have in doing ('Bizarre Foods') is when I meet families with 6, 7, 8-year-olds, or teenagers, who say, 'It's something the whole family can watch, and it lets us show our younger children that one man's 'weird' is another man's 'wonderful,' and we all kind of live in the same place.' It's just the best part of my day.

When someone tells me that they insist on having drinks with me, and there are some cultures where sealing the deal or celebrating or having a guest in the home, it is very traditional to slam down a couple shots or whatever the local grog is. I just tell them I'm allergic, which is not a lie, you know alcoholism and drug addiction in many ways are described as an allergy of the body and the mind. So I just tell them I'm allergic and they're like, "Oh, no problem."

Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what's right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.

There's a great book by my friend Nate Garvis called Naked Civics that was very important in my development as someone with a social conscious and that has become, I guess, something of an activist.

The food to me is just a hook, it's a button, it happens to be the social construct and the cultural totem that I'm most familiar with. So of course I built the show around food because it's where I'm familiar.

I don't want people to judge books by their cover, I want people to be open minded to the rest of the world.

Remember, one in every five people in America goes hungry and there are certainly a whole lot of folks who are getting three meals a day who do know where their next week's food is coming from who are very sensitive to this issue who would like everybody to be fed. Add to that the number parents who have children in schools who would like their children to be eating healthy, wholesome food and don't want sugary sodas or chocolate milk to be chuggable at any moment of the day by their kids.