For me the best food in the world is New British. It's quite classical cooking with really simple but good-quality ingredients. I also like top-end restaurants and pub grub done well.
It's so important for me to keep a good house. I take a lot of pleasure in cooking and I think there is a lot in common between cooking and film-making. You put all these ingredients together to make something wholesome. Except the rewards in cooking come a little sooner.
No matter what it is you are cooking, buy the best ingredients you can afford. I don't care if it's a simple salad or Beef Wellington. A quality product stands alone and won't need any dressing up.
The traditional fast food model is built on buying the cheapest ingredients - and that usually means poor-quality, heavily processed foods. But you can use quality ingredients, cook food using classic cooking techniques, and still serve something that's fast and inexpensive.
Chipotle is based on a very simple idea: We start with great ingredients, prepare them using classic cooking techniques, and serve them in a way that allows people to get exactly what they want.
There are only three questions that matter in the kitchen if you're cooking and not baking. The first is how good are your ingredients; the second is how much salt to add; and the third is how long to cook whatever it is you're cooking - the question of doneness.
Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way - that's the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.
When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn't require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.'
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.
There's not much cooking in our household. We do a lot of raw food, so it's more about putting the right ingredients together to create something scrumptious.
If your version of pub food is microwaving a pie and some baked beans, then yeah, it's really complicated cooking. But if it's just about getting the best out of simple ingredients, then it's not.
If you don't use good ingredients, the outcome is never going to be excellent. But if you buy the freshest ingredients that are in season, at their peak, and you cook with them, you can't really go wrong.
A lot of old Australian bakeries used a lot of trans-fats but I just wanted to use quality ingredients - butter, cream, custard - to produce a high-quality product.
Cooking involves a deadline and hungry people and ingredients that expire in a week. It's stressful. Cooking happens on the stove and on the clock. Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking is slow and leisurely.
Keep it simple in the kitchen. If you use quality ingredients, you don't need anything fancy to make food delicious: just a knife, a cutting board, and some good nonstick cookware, and you're set.