Quotes from John Torode

My nanna was an extraordinary lady, and a good old-fashioned cook. She'd just be pottering around, cooking dinner for 25 people on a wood-fired stove without a problem.

My earliest memory of cooking is my grandmother showing me how to make chicken gravy on the big combustion stove in her kitchen. I still use Nana's gravy recipe.

My kind of cooking is not a single style - French, Asian, Australasian or British - it's not modern, old-fashioned or classic; it's a mix of all these things. And at its core is a boy who loved to cook with his Nanna.

There is no way in the world that a vacuum cleaner will ever be obsolete - they use them for swimming pools, they use them for houses, they use them for industrial purposes. They're fantastic things.

Cooking is a great leveller. You can be a sports star, an actor, an entrepreneur, anything, but cooking strips it all away.

It seems that the more we travel, the more we want flavour and variation in our food - and the bolder it is, the more addictive those flavours will be.

That's one of the things that concerns me - vegan steak or whatever. It is a hard terminology thing, because what are you eating? With beef you know it's a piece of beef.

Vegetarian' is just another word for 'bad hunter.'

Marriage is a very difficult thing and sometimes everyone can be a bit stubborn; it is what it is.

Australia is an extraordinary country full of people who eat extraordinary food. There are Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Brits. It's so varied.

Sydney has the world's best swimming pool. Walk through the Botanical Gardens and you come to the Andrew 'Boy' Charlton Pool on Mrs Macquaries Road, with incredible views of Finger Wharf and the Harbour.

Fish and chips by nature are greasy, so we put vinegar on it and we like it because it helps our digestive system. The vinegar breaks down the fat.