Top 845 Pastry Chef Quotes & Sayings - Page 13

...The very word 'fiction' implies another world, literally a different place, whereas no one claims that a dedicated sportsman is escaping his life, or a chef or a nurse. But the poor writer - the sci-fi one especially - is seen as running away. Bollocks. This is real, for me, and it's tough, it's fun, it's practical, and it's very, very important.

'Top Chef' is always entertaining - it's hard to stop watching, like a good hockey fight, but no one gets hurt. It's great that the format is so inherently dramatic and can make cooking so entertaining to people who might not ordinarily be interested in a cooking show. Good for the industry all round.

We're in a world where every single movie, if it has a woman in it, is usually wrapped around the woman wanting to be liked in some way, either in her life, or she's young, she's an ingenue, she's a hero, she's the lover of somebody, she's the grandmother, she's a chef.

I have a pet lizard named Puff, five goldfish - named Pinky, Brain, Jowels, Pearl and Sandy, an oscar fish named Chef, two pacus, an albino African frog named Whitey, a bonsai tree, four Venus flytraps, a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys.

The night before Tilbury, the Cordon Bleu gourmet dinner turned out Cordon Brown. Six out of ten to the chef for trying and ten out of ten to us for eating it.

Taking dishes straight off the restaurant's menu and putting them into a cookbook doesn't work, because as a chef you have your own vision of what your food is, but you can't always explain it. Or you can't pick recipes that best illustrate who and where you are and what you're doing. And if the recipes don't work, you don't have a book.

I am a terrible chef; I'm not a good cook. I don't have the talent, the patience, the desire even to cook the way these great artists that I meet around the world cook, and I'm very, very happy to support them. I invest in restaurants because I love them so much.

I have spent more time in my life working and being in restaurants than being at home. I immediately feel comfortable entering a restaurant, and I feel even more comfortable in the back with the chef and cooks.

My husband and I have always incorporated things into our life that reduce stress. We're very careful with our health. We go to bed early. In this job, fatigue would be very detrimental! We've always eaten very healthily; now it's really particularly easy because we have a chef.

The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'

My new shorty got a gymnastic back, '87 emerald green on a classic Jag. She had the cleft palate, I ordered chef's salad; She had the club foot, with that little arm, I couldn't help but laugh...she ordered Chicken Parm.

The level of competition on 'Iron Chef' was very intense. In fact, I feel like the show provides chefs with a stamp of approval and in many ways lets them know that 'they've arrived.' It was a tough journey, to say the least, but in the end, it provided me with an example how hard work and persistence pays off.

How do I speak Spanish? Not too well. Paz taught me a few words that, if people weren't nice to me, I could tell them a few things. I got to study with [chef] Thomas Keller, who we all love as a guy and Jim had a relationship with him at [his restaurant] the French Laundry.

My love for cooking began when I was young. Because my parents were in the army, they were both really busy. A lot of times I'd have to cook for the family; I'd rotate with my siblings. It started out as a chore, but as I got older, my mom started to see that I was really good at it. I became her sous chef.

Of all the restaurants I visited in my childhood and adolescence, it was Michel Bras that I remembered most vividly and it was the chef himself to whom, early on in my cooking, I would make the most references. I don't mean that I tried to cook like him. Rather, that I tried to think like him.

It depends as there's many different types of chefs, some who cook for awards and others who cook to make their restaurant a great business. There are those who cook for a lifestyle, they'll have come through pubs and they like to have the connection to the farmers and the chickens and the natural produce. So for each chef it'll be slightly different.

I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.

You don't go to school to become the best chef in the world right after you graduate. School is always a starting point so what people forget is that you go to school to build a foundation, and you want to build a foundation that's not going to crumble.

It is great to add some glamour to the food industry, like television shows have done for the food world and inspiring people to work in the industry. The flip side of that is unfortunately people think that after they get their qualifications, they get their invitation to compete on 'Top Chef.'

But understanding the complexities of the ramen menu is an equally tricky feat for a foreigner. Both regional and stylistic variations apply to each menu. Add to that the spin that each particular ramen chef puts on his dish, and you rarely know what you are going to get.

When you make the film, it's like a chef who works on the meal. After you're working all day in the kitchen and dicing and cutting and putting the sauces on, you don't want to eat it. That's how I always feel about the films. I work on it for a year. I've written it, I've worked with the actors, I've edited, put the music in. I just never want to see it again.

I became a manager very young. My first sous chef job I was, maybe, 25. It was a bit too early for me. But it's on-the-job training. You really just get stuck in there and it's trial and error. You learn by your mistakes, and hopefully you don't keep making them. And if you do, you just keep trying to fix it.

My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.

If a chef says to you that he sits down and eats dinner before service, then it's bulls***. And if they do, then I'd tell them that they are a fat f***! You shouldn't indulge, because you need to keep your palate on edge, and keeping it on edge is all about small attention to detail and tweaking along the way.

Even if the chef has a good business head, his focus should be behind kitchen doors. A business partner should take care of everything in front of the kitchen doors.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

I've been fascinated by the world ever since I read 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain. I've watched 'Top Chef' and watched interviews with chefs on 'Charlie Rose'... I thought they're really intriguing characters, and they really encapsulate that tension between vision and commerce, art and commerce.

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

My late wife Olympia was Goan and I've been to India many times. I love the food there. We used to do our shopping in Southall, where you can find cheap but wonderful fruit like mangoes, vegetables and spices. I didn't do much of the cooking, as Olympia did a lot - I was the under-chef and did some of the chopping.

Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.

I got killed against Morimoto. I brought out white plates with food; I thought that was really nice. He brings out sculptures of ice, Noah's ark made of balsa wood that he carved at his restaurant downstairs, smoking trees ... When I saw that, I looked at my sous chef and I'm like, we're toast.

From the sexual, or amatorial, generation of plants new varieties, or improvements, are frequently obtained; as many of the young plants from seeds are dissimilar to the parent, and some of them superior to the parent in the qualities we wish to possess... Sexual reproduction is the chef d'oeuvre, the master-piece of nature.

Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.

In 'A Bone in the Throat,' he describes his protagonist and alter ego, the cook Tommy Pagano, as 'darker, and not as tall as the chef, his hair stood up straight and spiky like a young Trotsky's.' He describes Little Italy with such verve, such flavor, that it is impossible not to smell the streets or taste the food.

I'm speaking of the pursuit of excellence in all things. All things! Presence of mind and devotion to craft. A great artist has these. A great chef. A great master of tea. There's powerful kung fu in a well-built house or an eloquent letter, but the limit of your imagination is bones breaking and bullets flying.

Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be.

Stephanie Izard. She is extremely talented but super-humble at the same time. And she was the first female Top Chef. I remember cheering her on when she competed. At that time I just started in my culinary career. Watching her cook was very inspiring.

I was chef to the French Presidents between '56 and '59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn't even see them.

I was working for a chef a long time ago who told me to not skip steps or be in a hurry. Success in a kitchen is more like a marathon and less like a sprint. Rising up the ranks too quickly isn't necessarily a good thing. This advice was from a guy who was sorry he had done that and didn't want me to do the same.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same. We've obviously made some changes. When we started, it was all about food, clothing and shelter. Now we watch 'Top Chef', 'Project Runway', and 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.'

I worked on the line, I've been an executive chef, I've worked for the Mets, I've worked for various steakhouses, vegetarian restaurants, a lot of Middle Eastern stuff. I've worked my fair share of a lot of different things. I've worked at festivals and street fairs, you know? I've been through it all.

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."

It is great to add some glamour to the food industry, like television shows have done for the food world and inspiring people to work in the industry. The flip side of that is unfortunately people think that after they get their qualifications, they get their invitation to compete on 'Top Chef.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

I want to talk to the bullied kids of the world. Tell them to hang on, it will get better. Know that an 'Iron Chef,' actors, musicians, artists and all successful people have probably been bullied in their life. And the best part of your life is yet to come. Whatever it takes to live, do it!

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

My husband cooks fancier food for himself than I've ever cooked on-air. I call him from the road, and he's making champagne-vanilla salmon or black-cherry pork chop. Half of me is feeling unworthy. Not only am I not a chef, I'm not a better cook than my own husband!

With more exposure comes more recognition. I can honestly say I wouldn't have gotten a lot of things had no one seen me on "Top Chef", win or not. It cast a very wide net for me. And fortunately in a great way. I love that I have been able to cook side by side with so many of my idols.

Gastronomy is the French Foreign Legion. You don't need any qualifications. Just walk through the door and keep your head down. Be respectful - "Yes chef!" - and you'll be given a trade. One day you'll be in a position where you can put a roof over your children's heads, you can put food on their table, create security for them.

At the end of the day, it seems like there's a critic archetype for food movies, like with 'Ratatouille' or anything. You know, if you were doing a puppet show about chefs, one puppet would be the chef, one would be the critic.

I went to a hotel to become a chef and then tried becoming a flight attendant, but no one took me. I then worked in a travel agency and got into advertising and modelling after someone spotted me. So I started doing ads. I did 'Charminar' ad, because of which I got two films.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same. We've obviously made some changes. When we started, it was all about food, clothing and shelter. Now we watch 'Top Chef', 'Project Runway', and 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Whenever a chef cooks for his own ego rather than his guests, he/she set themselves up for ridicule and failure. In the end, it's the service industry. Our goal is to make our guests happy through our cooking.

The type of cuisine I do, especially after being on 'Iron Chef' for several years, is a lot of global cuisine. My strength has always been Mediterranean cuisine across the board from Morocco, Spain, Italy, Greece, France, but I think now I'm doing a lot of very different cuisines all the time.

I became a vegetarian in 1995. I had some fried chicken, and my teeth hit the bone. My mind said, 'Dead bird, dead bird.' It didn't feel right, so I stopped. I kept eating fish until one day, in 1997, the chef brought my ginger-fried snapper with the head still on it.

Having realised that in cooking there was a vast field of study and development, I said to myself, 'Although I had not originally intended to enter this profession, since I am in it, I will work in such a fashion that I will rise above the ordinary, and I will do my best to raise again the prestige of the chef de cuisine.'

When we're coming up to the race, the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I always have the same lunch. So that's before the second practice, before qualifying and before the race, I always have a tuna vegetable risotto. The chef makes it slightly spicy, so there's a bit of a kick.

As a chef, I could not wash my hands - nor clean pots, pans, utensils, meats or produce, nor make soups and sauces - if I did not have clean water. Were this to happen, of course, these would be the least of my concerns. Because water is the linchpin of survival: without it, not much else matters.

Many of them have accomplished a lot before they ever get to 'Top Chef' although they're not well known. The show just provides them with a platform. There's just one winner and on some seasons you can get numerous chefs that are really good. Even if they don't win, they're all talented.

I'd rather go with someone who wasn't a great speaker, but was a great chef, rather than someone who was a great performer, but maybe not a great cook.