Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Rick Stein
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English chef Rick Stein.
Last updated on September 8, 2024.
Cooking in Japan is regarded as an art, like music or painting. Every dish has a reason, including the garnishes. This is cuisine with philosophy, and the apparent simplicity belies centuries of culture.
We all know lemon is loved by salmon, but the fish also adores the flavour and acidity of pink grapefruit.
To me theres nothing nicer than a pan-fried sole and some fresh salad, keep it simple.
My first work space is my office in the cookery school in Padstow. It looks out over the Camel Estuary. I'm very lucky because I've got this office with the most fantastic view. I love looking out. There's always boats coming and going.
Food is a great thing to be enthusiastic about, its not hurting anybody.
I always could cook. Mostly it was down to osmosis. I spent so much time in the kitchen with my mum as a kid. She was always talking to me about what she was doing.
I've always been pushy as far as the business goes.
I fished with my dad and my mum was a great cook, although I didnt help out in the kitchen. It was similar with my three boys and my ex-wife Jill.
It's no surprise that cream gives pleasure. It feels great when you eat it, and it makes you feel great, too. I read somewhere that cream increases the amount of serotonin you produce in your brain - serotonin being the chemical that makes you feel warm and comfortable inside.
I'm not a baker, but my patisserie is my baby. I love the idea of good-quality cakes made with top ingredients.
I would quite like to do something on Ireland about the culture, James Joyce, Yeats, persuade Seamus Heaney to have a chat and do some cooking.
The South Coast is not teeming with fish any more; there are no fleets of trawlers left. Small local boats land their fish daily and often sell it at the back of the beach, a scenario repeated all the way from West Bay to Whitstable.
I think, for me, I just keep feeling the need to prove yourself, and thats probably from having a slightly overpowering father.
I find that the heat from chilli counteracts hunger pangs, which I believe is why it's so popular in the developing world, so I have a very spicy Vietnamese pho for breakfast.
If you are used to eating well as a child, you will end up probably being quite serious about what you eat as an adult, so I feel very blessed with that.
Around Bordeaux the landscape is lush and verdant, then towards Toulouse it gets drier, sunnier and hotter. The food changes too.
As far as filming for TV goes, I like to go where the food is definitely of interest to British people.
It's nice to see some fresh herrings on the fish stand.
My father, Eric, was bipolar and as he got older, his illness affected the family more and more. My mother was magnificent in protecting my brothers and sisters from his illness.
I find people interesting and I love regional accents. I love the Norfolk accent actually but I haven't heard much as I've only just arrived but I shall go out and find it.
Our seas do have fish in them. We have to change our eating habits, the type of fish we tend to go for. Pollack is fine, that type of thing.
My work spaces are the cookery school and all the restaurant kitchens. I eat in the restaurants a lot.
I found a great fishmonger in Southend, certainly not a place where I would have expected to find one, who specialises in skate knobs, a little nugget of meat from the head which makes for extremely agreeable eating.
The first day in Tokyo was disorientating - all neon, gadgets and extreme politeness - but I was surprised to find that I have a lot in common with the Japanese because they're bonkers about food.
I eat out a lot, so being at home is just great. I usually make a chicken rice recipe that I picked up in Thailand years ago. The chicken has to be boiled before adding in chillies, ginger, soy and white pepper. Then you make a kind of pilaf. Its delicious.
One thing I don't like is those three-star kitchens where they force the cooks to do exactly the same thing again and again. There has to be an element of chance in cookery.
My wife is always telling me that because we zip across the globe so much, we cant really keep a dog. But if youre a dog lover, its a pretty essential part of your life.
Wherever I go I'm always looking for recipes and ideas.
I am particularly fond of Malaysian food but strangely its not that well known in Britain.
I remember taking a timer into a pastry exam at college, and the examiner had never seen that before, but I was adamant about precision: getting it just right and paying attention to detail.
We did a dish called seafood thermidor, which was, essentially, a glorified fish pie. It's great because you don't use much fish in it. It's all sauce and potatoes, but people loved it! It kept us afloat.
People feel very strongly about restaurants if theyre involved in them. It tends to take over your life for good and bad.
In Australia you're not allowed to go down to the beach and eat anything from the rocks. You just can't do it - help yourself to mussels and things like that because there's hardly any left and the government has now legislated against it.
Ive definitely got a sense of not being very good at stuff. Its sort of absurd because, you know, Ive done really quite well for myself, but I still really doubt myself. Its just the way I am.
I enjoy mending leaking pipes and dodgy plugs, as it helps me to unwind when my mind is on something else. Im pretty good at it - no one has ever been harmed by one of my repairs.
People want to go out and eat, theres no question about that. Its not something thats just going to go because of Covid. Its heartening the way people have come back to restaurants.
On the whole, my dad was a hero, its just that it got really difficult in his depressive phases, very introspective. And I think he took it out on me really.
Naturally, as a little boy, I did lots of naughty things. With Les, the son of the farm manager, I was always climbing on high roofs, then tumbling off, or building dangerous networks of tunnels in the hay bales.
As a child, I was embarrassed by my dads effusive episodes, but I suppose I got used to living with someone who was intermittently sad.
I suppose I've got a restlessness about me which is only alleviated by travel and I like being on the road.
On the whole Im a good companion, I like travelling, I dont mind airports or planes, I quite like it - theres always a sense of excitement.
A lot of my customers wouldnt go to a McDonalds but we are all after the same thing in this business: pleasing the customer. I dont know why people get so aerated about it. I like McDonalds.
When I started out in the early 1970s French cooking was really my only serious influence. For the first 10 years of having the seafood restaurant open I went to France, and particularly Brittany, to pick up ideas.
If you want to eat my fish, you have to come to Padstow. It's like the Med - people want local fish in a local restaurant. I think it tastes better in Cornwall.
In my eyes, baking and pastry-making is like a science - all the measuring of quantities and temperatures.
Going to Goa was a rite of passage for me, because it's where I learnt that you could mix fish with really strong flavours.
You might say that Britain is a world leader in cream. No other country makes the range of creams we have, and I'm not talking about any low-fat, no-fat nonsense. There's single, double, extra-thick, whipping, sour and clotted. To those, I suppose we can add crme frache from France, mascarpone from Italy and smetana from eastern Europe.
I always had a slight problem in that my older brother is extremely bright. He's a neurophysiologist and a don at Magdalen College, and I always felt I was stupid because I couldn't get anything like the same results as him.
Unless its Michelin-starred food, people wont pay top dollar for top food so its hard to do good old-fashioned French cooking and get people to pay for it.
I fell in love when I was 21, after returning from Australia. It lasted for about two years before she dumped me. It was, in retrospect, a really wonderful thing because it made me very poetic and melancholic.
We have all these restaurants and the worry is that they have to deliver the same quality.
This is what London's all about for me: good local restaurants. It's what makes a civilised city. For me, as a country boy, it's a real pleasure being able to walk to a restaurant. It seems very sophisticated, somehow.
I did have a very determined idea of making money. I was quite savvy about that. And that was my most basic lesson. You do have to understand the economics. It's pointless putting in all that work and losing money. If you're not making a profit you're stuffed.
On the surface, our lives seemed idyllic. My four siblings and I grew up on a 150-acre farm in Oxfordshire, and spent every holiday at our other house on the Cornish coast.
I do think there is continuing sense in people buying recipe books from somebody they trust.
South-east Asian salads are a great balance of salty, sweet-sour and spicy. Its important to have both pork and seafood, but you can vary the seafood from prawns and squid to crab meat or even small pieces of firm fish such as monkfish, John Dory or gurnard.
My grandparents were born in England but spoke German and had a German name.
Add a teaspoon of single cream, say, to a sauce just before serving to give it a touch of extra smoothness and depth. You also need single cream to float on top of Irish coffee. And you should probably use the finest unpasteurised double cream to make syllabub.
I was brought up on a farm in Oxford but my parents always had a flat in London, and we'd go to pretty smart restaurants, so it's always seemed important to eat well.
Its challenging getting people to pay the right money to eat really good food and finding great people to work for you.
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