Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.

The thing that helped me get into the film business was that I went to school in Athens, Georgia and managed to get on, um, working on music videos for a band called R.E.M. and that kind of opened up a lot of doors for me.

A home cook who relies too much on a recipe is sort of like a pilot who reads the plane's instruction manual while flying.

The turkey - my number one thing that people don't get is take that sucker out of the refrigerator about three hours before you plan on cooking it.

I think in the end there are only 20 or 30 tenets of basic cooking. It's going at perhaps the same issue from different angles, from different points of view, from different presentation styles, that really makes things sink in and become embedded.

I'm an absolute connoisseur of cheeseburgers and like to think that I can detect even mere percentages of shift in fat content in ground meat in a burger and can actually name the temperature to which it was actually cooked to the degree if I'm, you know, really on my game.

Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it's based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.