Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Chris Morocco

Normally, making polenta means having a convenient excuse to use all the butter, milk, and Parmesan in my fridge. Using miso and water instead builds tons of flavor but keeps the texture light.

You never forget your first tofu scramble. I was in college, and it was my first meal at the student-run co-op where I would be eating for the year. It was steamy kale and mashed tofu dripping with Bragg's Liquid Aminos, served directly from the bathtub-size wok it was cooked in. It was soggy, salty, and vaguely nutritive.

I have half a cutlery shop's worth of spoons in my pocket at all times designated for tasting.

In some circles there's a conception that milk chocolate is the Merlot of the chocolate world.

In the BA Test Kitchen, I don't consider my station to be set up until there are at least 50 tasting spoons in the crock on my counter, and when I walk, my spoon-filled pockets jangle like a villain's spurs in a spaghetti Western.

When I cook Thanksgiving in the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen, every tool I need is within arm's reach, groceries are delivered, and colleagues know better than to talk to me when I have that look on my face.

The deliciousness of a bowl of pasta isn't proportional to the time it takes to make it: A three-hour ragu doesn't necessarily taste 15 times better than a 10-minute butter-and-Parm weeknight affair.

I use a cake tester to check the doneness of everything from fish to vegetables. The point on it is duller than a paring knife, so you get a much better feel for how finished something actually is. Oh yeah, and when it comes to cake, a toothpick is the move. The rougher surface is more likely to show you what the crumb inside looks like.

A refrigerator, to me, isn't as clever an appliance as people would have you believe. To me, it's a cold limbo, a temporary reprieve from the inevitability of spoilage. The freezer, on the other hand, is a far more satisfying solution for keeping foods at their best.

O-Med doesn't make vinegars that you would ever consider cleaning with. They're lush, like burying your nose in a platter of lavender and peaches, with the concentrated, fruity essence of a good glass of wine.

Standalone bakeries that produce everything in-house are hard to find - let alone ones that produce results as consistently good as Almondine.

My first foray into meatless burgers was BA's Best Veggie Burger, a no-holds-barred, maximalist veggie burger in the style of Superiority Burger. A year later I followed that up with a black-bean tofu burger designed to stand up to the high heat of the grill. So what was there left to say? Plenty.

I would always rather do something in moderation than simply swing from one extreme to another.

Round, crispy-edged waffles on the DIY cafeteria station at Oberlin College brought me back to life after many sleep-deprived nights.

My freezer is a labelled-and-dated marvel of soups, stews, braises, cooked grains, bread, and the occasional half-eaten dessert. Any of them can be defrosted and ready to eat in under 25 minutes.

I live on a lonely culinary island, built on (very thin) bedrock consisting of things I know, or believe, my family will eat. It is a small island. Fortunately, nachos are on that island with me, and nothing gets my family fired up like nachos for lunch.

Kombucha is a great just-walked-in-the-door, sweet-tart wine replacement.

Let's just get this out of the way: Most grocery store vinegars taste terrible. They're made from low-quality wine (or other alcohol), which gives them a flavor that's barely more nuanced than the chewing-on-metal taste of distilled vinegar.

My family is loud.

If cooking isn't fun for you, then do whatever it takes to make it fun.

My pantry pastas fall somewhere in the middle of the time spectrum. They're simple, streamlined, and flexible, with unfussy yet massively flavorful sauces that come together in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta.

Boneless skinless chicken breasts don't give a damn about their bad reputation. They don't care that you think of them as pale, dry, and rubbery.

A day at the beach with my kids is one of the least relaxing activities I can think of.

I spend a lot of time apologizing for the things I say when I am hungry. That's why breakfast, for me, is non-negotiable. It's an insurance policy against saying things I'll regret before my blood-sugar levels have stabilized.

I cook 364 days of the year. The one day I don't? Thanksgiving.

Cooking at home has made my pantry work harder than ever, and I'm constantly turning to ingredients that I know will add maximum taste-bud payoff with minimal fuss.

Stir-fried spring vegetables over miso polenta is the meal equivalent of wanting it so badly to be spring yet recognizing it is 40 degrees outside with a brisk headwind no matter which way you are facing.

Many spicy condiments blend into fiery sameness, and even the ones that don't hold back on heat often offer little flavor aside from burn. Yet occasionally, a condiment comes along that's like a black hole, compressing physics-defying amounts of flavor in a tiny package. Such is the case with Auria's Kitchen sambal sauces.

When it comes to store-bought sauces, it takes a lot to impress me.

A normal conversation between my uncles about whether or not the lamb is done will come across as a shouting match between four guys all doing their best to impersonate Tony Soprano.

I have a well-documented obsession with spoons.

I don't want to hack my dinner, and I don't want to disrupt my cookware. I just want to cook tasty food like everyone else, using cookware that works. But if someone comes along with a product that is genuinely better, well, I'm all ears.

Once you get your hands on some nduja, chances are you will find all kinds of ways to use it.

While a lot of milk chocolate just so happens to be poor quality, milk chocolate itself is not the problem.

I break out in hives whenever I hear the word disrupt applied to cooking.

Veggie burgers, by nature, take more work than meat-based ones, but they should never feel (or taste) like a compromise.

I sound, convincingly, twice my age whenever I visit New York City neighborhoods I frequented in my 20s and grumble about how much they have changed.

Almondine is the kind of spot that seems to be on every corner in Paris - packed with classic French pastries, unpretentious and yet insanely good. The pain aux raisins is my favorite, a tight coil of croissant dough layered with a whisper of unctuous pastry cream and jammy-glazy raisins.

Remember in 'Goodfellas' when Joe Pesci stops by his mom's house to get a knife but within minutes is served a full-on red-sauce dinner despite his mom having been asleep when he arrived? That is the constant state of preparedness that only a freezer can get you.

Volume can vary a ton when you're cooking, depending on how you measure. Do you carefully spoon the flour into a measuring cup, or do you scoop with the cup? Are you using chunky Morton kosher salt, or finer Diamond Crystal? There can be a 40 percent difference in volume depending on the brand.

Meatloaf has never quite risen above its name. It offers comfort and predictability, but rarely fireworks.

Molokhia as a dish can take many forms, but usually involves a braised meat.

Snapper is pretty forgiving for a white fish. The skin crisps up beautifully, which holds it together.

A sharp knife is the best tool you can have in the kitchen.

I am not someone who ever feels bad about eating a big bowl of pasta for dinner.

Thinly slicing even the bulkiest vegetables, like cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, or cabbage, then aggressively cooking them in a hot skillet and finishing with a shower of spices means they cook and develop flavor super quickly.

My wife is English and grew up eating Dairy Milk and Flakes and Twirls, so while she loves dark chocolate, she also has a soft spot for the milkier stuff.

The brilliance of nduja is that while you can certainly eat a lot of it very quickly (and nobody would blame you) it is so packed with flavor that even a small amount can go a long way.

When done right, sheet pan dinners are a dream come true: Your whole dinner goes into the oven on one pan and comes out ready to eat. But it takes a little finesse and a few rules to get everything done right.

I would never try to make ketchup from scratch. Or Dijon mustard, for that matter. These condiments, and plenty of others, are hard to improve upon and even harder to reproduce in a home kitchen.

Surprisingly, fish works great for sheet pan dinners because it cooks quickly through direct pan contact.

I would rather have 1/4 of a cookie for four days than a big cookie on day one followed by three days with nothing - this has been documented by my colleagues.

In July and August, when everyone I know is at the beach, I am cooking through turkey, potato, and pie recipes for Bon Appetit's November issue.

Simply put, Hestan NanoBond cookware is the most durable stainless cookware that I have ever seen.

I was Bookings Production Manager at Vogue, a fancy way of saying that I helped produce photo shoots and booked hair, makeup, and modeling talent.

The zeitgeist tells us that we 'should' prefer dark chocolate much the same as we should prefer wine, coffee, and whiskey with flavor profiles that run toward the extreme. But sometimes I just want to eat something accessible and enjoyable without embarking on a cerebral tasting exercise.

Invest in decent cookware. One $80 skillet is better than a $100 13-piece set that has nine things you don't need.

The story of my life could be told in a series of waffle snapshots. I spent childhood weekends watching the lid of our Munsey waffle maker rise and fall as it chugged through a single square waffle at a time.

Tasting food, thinking about it, talking about it, and deciding whether it can be better is the crux of my job - and my life. So when I discovered a tasting spoon that felt better in my hand, a touch softer against my bottom lip, and that stood a little taller on my counter, there was no going back.

I'm not a food-optional person. People who forget to eat meals are like aliens to me and, even now, in the age of Seamless and Caviar, I have a hard time relying on strangers to feed me.