Quotes from John Torode

I absolutely love jumping on a plane. I find it to be one of the most wonderful, releasing experiences in the world. Nobody can call me and I have my own space where I can do whatever I want. For some people a long-haul flight is an ordeal, but I love every bit of it.

I never use organic vegetables. Why would you want to? The idea of taking a courgette grown in a third-world country in an organic field, packed into a polystyrene box, flown across the oceans, washed in chlorinated water, packed into a foam box, driven halfway across the country, wrapped in plastic and stamped 'organic,' what's the point?

I got quite into Spam once, in Korea. On their Thanksgiving, they give boxes of it to their friends. I fry it in batter with herbs wrapped around.

What I'm trying to do as an Australian is to say to people, 'You've got to go back out to Australia,' because there are rural communities that really rely upon tourism to continue to go.

As an Aussie, my favourite holidays are skiing ones.

My second marriage to Jessica just fell apart. It was nothing to do with restaurants.

Under-mature beef with no fat through the meat will be a dry and tasteless disappointment and you will get little yield from it.

I want people to throw on a hat, head out into the outback and see the real Australia. You can do it how you want - independently in a 4WD, camping under the stars, or being treated like a king in a luxury homestead or on a cruise.

As I'd travelled, I'd seen more and more people drinking rose. Given the amount of grapes we grow in Australia, I just said, 'Why wouldn't we be making rose?'

When you grow up in a family where you have lost a parent, everybody joins together to instil the correct values in you, to give you guidance and and show you the moral ways of the world. Most important to my father and grandmother was the idea of treating people as you would like to be treated.

In our family a whole ham on the bone would be bought three days before Christmas, and then stored in a pillow case and left in the fridge so anyone can take the huge thing out and slice it.

I do think about how different my life might have been had my mother not died so young, but I try not to delve into it too deeply, as it's like 'Sliding Doors,' isn't it? You just don't know.

I'm not someone who jumps in a car to make for the country, I'm an urbanite. I love living in London and there's always something going on.

Restaurant kitchens are highly pressurised environments, with lots of young men, and that means one thing: testosterone. It's not brutal - it's military. It is regimented, tough. People are put into compartments and have to do exactly what they're told or the whole thing falls apart.

Those who know me well will tell you that I love a market, and when I say market, I mean food market. No matter where in the world, they allow me to soak up the culture, to hear the rhythmic chattering of the local people and traders, and take in the all-important smells, pungent and intoxicating.

Men and women are not the same in the kitchen. Women tend to be uninhibited and instinctive. Men are inconsistent, egotistical show-offs.

There are three types of palate. There's the palate that can't taste anything, there's the normal palate, and there's the Super Palate. I don't think I've got a Super Palate, but it's pretty good.

My food hero would be someone like Elizabeth David, because I think what she did for Britain was amazing. Also David Thompson, an Australian chef who does Thai food and really understands the basis of it, has always been very inspiring.

I'm definitely not a nerd, not a nerd at all.

I like to introduce people to new things without scaring them.

People sometimes forget that Sydney is a harbour and it's the ferries that make it unique.

I think that most things, if you want to use them properly, take quite a lot of time and I don't necessarily have the patience to sit down and read the instructions and follow the first bits to actually get the starting point.

Yes, I am a judge on 'MasterChef,' where I taste thousands of dishes, and yes I am a trained chef which has had me commanding some of the biggest brigands a kitchen has ever seen. Yes, I have travelled the world and cooked on television and at food shows up and down the country, but in my heart I am a home cook.

There's nothing worse than a sterile house.