Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.
Stuffing is evil. Stuffing adds mass, so it slows the cooking. That's evil because the longer the bird cooks, the drier it will be.
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.
Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.
'Outlaw Cook' was a revelation. Folks like Jeff Smith and Marcella Hazan got me interested in cooking, but John Thorne pushed me into the path that I follow to this day. This is the only cookbook I've ever read that understands how men really eat: over the sink, in the dark, greasy to the elbows.
I became a cook so I could cook and tell stories in wacky ways.
My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.
