Quotes from Wylie Dufresne

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.

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

Hollandaise, I would like to pour over my head and just rub all over myself. Eggs Benedict is genius. It's eggs covered in eggs.

I would like to, at some point, do a cookbook.

American cheese is the perfect soft taco.

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.

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.

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.

It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge.

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

Whites cook at a lower temperature, set at a lower temperature than yolks. That, to me, is very interesting. That has opened up - as an egg lover, that has opened up sort of a world of possibilities, of applications.

Eggs are one of my all-time favorite foods, and making the over-easy egg is a test of skill.

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.

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

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.

My job has changed over the years, 22 years roughly I've been cooking professionally. When I was younger, I aspired to be the star player. Now, it's more I like to sit in the dugout and make sure the team wins the game.

I find it much more compelling to make a four-biter that leaves you wishing that you had a fifth. I think 'the tyranny of the entree' is the right way to put it. I don't want to build this giant plate of food.

It's been a struggle to get people to come eat for fun. You know, the way they listen to music. You can do all kinds of things with music. But food - it's something people need, and that changes everything. You start playing with it, people have all sorts of reactions.

I don't like the term 'dinner as theater,' because that implies something thespian that I don't want to tie into this, but there are plenty of times that people go out to dinner because they want to have an experience. There are, however, probably many more times that people go out to eat because it's 7 o'clock and it's time to eat.

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

We have fried things in cubes, historically. We tried bars of Hollandaise, we tried different shapes, but it ultimately seemed like the cube was the right shape.

I think it's important for anyone who is artistic to look back on their body of work and be critical. Maybe the Beatles can look back and say everything was perfect, but we've come up with hundreds and hundreds of dishes, and anyone who is honest with themselves has to realize that every single one wasn't an absolute, unequivocal home run.

'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.