Do not allow watching food to replace making food.
A pie dough comes together exactly like a biscuit only there is very, very little liquid and no leavening involved. Other than that, the same rules apply. My best advice: handle the dough as little as possible.
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.
Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.
I'm going from doing all of the work to having to delegate the work - which is almost harder for me than doing the work myself. I'm a lousy delegator, but I'm learning.
If my wife made childhood obesity her mission and I signed a law making 1/8 cup of tomato paste a vegetable, I'd be sleeping on the sofa.
I'm a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn't understand what was going on with every single ingredient, I could be qualifying for, like, the lunch food job at my daughter's school.
You need to either create a slurry in a cold liquid, which also works with cornstarch, or you've got to do your gravy in a very wide pan and kind of scatter the flour over the top and then very quickly whisk it in.
A lot of food shows need only to tempt. Some food shows only need to inspire, to empower. And there are a lot of shows that do that.
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.
Seriously. I'm not very bright, and it takes a lot for me to get a concept - to really get a concept. To get it enough that it becomes part of me. But when it happens I get real excited about it
Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful.
My advice: write down everything you eat. It's amazing what that "self honesty" can do for you. (Do you really want to have to confess that doughnut? I thought not.)
All that [replacing of fat] does is lead to dissatisfaction and I think that dissatisfaction results in overeating.
The worst food you'll ever eat will probably be prepared by a 'cook' who calls himself a 'chef.' Mark my words.
My feeling has always been that 'Good Eats' would have never happened had it been left to a committee.
I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better. It's a simple as that.
A balanced diet may be the best medicine. I was eating too much good eats. But people consider that part of your job, you know? Eat. And I do!
Butter typically melts around, you know, 90 Fahrenheit, as opposed to about 20 degrees higher for lard. So what that means is that when you're working with it, the lard is going to stay more solid, which is great for flakiness.
I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.
I had kicked around the idea for Good Eats when I was directing commercials.
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.
If you really love stuffing, wait until the turkey comes out of the oven, add some of the pan drippings to the stuffing, and bake it in a dish. That's called dressing, and that's not evil - stuffing is, though.
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.
My mantra was to educate people - to actually give them the know-how they could use - and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.
