Wylie Dufresne

“People have been manipulating food ever since they realized cooking a whole animal was difficult. Cows don't come in hot dog form.”

“I like all cheese, but my guiltiest pleasure is definitely American cheese.”

“There will never be a right or wrong way to cook something, but there will always be a more informed way.”

“I have strong feelings about cookbooks because I am a lover of them and student of them and devourer of them and collect them. I find them to be a great source of inspiration. When I was a cook and not making much money, I always used to spend most of what I had on cookbooks.”

“I think things like 'farm to table' are misleading. I think sometimes that becomes a pedestal or a soap box to get people into your restaurant but is not... it's almost empty in a way. I mean, my food comes from a farm, and I serve it on a table.”

“Being a chef isn't the ideal career to intersect with parenting, but I try to be in my kids' lives as much as possible.”

“Extremely ripe things are not ideal for pickling. If you pour a hot liquid over super ripe strawberries, you're going to have strawberry soup.”

“Fish butchering means a lot to me as a chef; I take pride in it and get a lot of joy from filleting fish, working with fish, breaking down fish, trying to understand fish.”

“Typically, you learn how to cook, but you don't know why. We were looking for a deeper understanding of what was happening to our food as we roasted it, boiled it, grilled it, chopped it, etc. And it turned out, as we began to really say what is cooking, what does it mean to cook, there's a lot of science involved.”

“'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.”

“I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.”

“There will never be a universal way of cooking, but information will always be universally useful.”

“I really don't do much on the night of Thanksgiving other than bring the wine and carve the turkey. My contribution comes the day after, in the form of breakfast. I usually just forage through the leftovers for things that will go well with eggs.”

“Green vegetables are something that fascinate chefs; the ability to keep vegetables green. How do we keep them green? What makes them green? Why are they green? And then that sort of army green. Why do they go from bright vibrant electric green to army green, and how can we avoid that?”

“Every dish doesn't have to be showy, and every dish doesn't have to slap you in the face with technique.”

“We have a funny sort of love/hate relationship with critics because, unfortunately, in the art/commerce dance that we do, they drive people to the restaurant. Regardless of sometimes how well we prepare the food, if people don't know that we're out there, if someone isn't talking about us, you guys aren't coming.”

“I don't think of eggs as being fundamental to the flavor of mayonnaise, but they are to Hollandaise.”

“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.”

“I think I can poach a pretty mean egg the old-fashioned way.”

“There's nobody you can call and say, 'So, can you maybe send me your formula for frying Hollandaise?' because to the best of my knowledge, it didn't exist before we did it.”