Words matter. These are the best Mario Batali Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I put hibiscus flower in every cup of tea I have. It’s sweet, sexy, and cleansing.
Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that’s the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.
Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it’s just as fast.
Passion is what adds so much value to life. And if you think about the things that you do, there’s so much juice potential for them if you do it.
As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food’s going to taste good. And that – that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.
The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on.
We need to figure out a ‘harvest system’ to collect the produce that stores don’t put out for customers to buy because it’s not perfect looking. Frankly, the stuff left to rot in the storeroom is more beautiful to me than the perfect carrot. I’m a gnarly carrot kind of guy.
The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.
Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.
Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn’t the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it’s the working poor. They don’t look any different, they don’t behave any differently, they’re not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that’s it.
To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it’s actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami.
In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don’t have a bad deli. There’s no mediocrity accepted.
Just because you eat doesn’t mean you eat smart. It’s hard to beat a $1.99 wing pack of three at a fast-food restaurant – it’s so cheap – but that wing pack isn’t feeding anyone, it’s just pushing hunger back an hour.
My kids and I make pasta three days a week now. It’s not even so much about the eating of it; they just like the process. Benno is the stuffer, and Leo is the catcher. They’ve got their jobs down.
When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there’s something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.
Although the skills aren’t hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.
I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.
Keep in mind that in 1975, when you became a cook, it was because you were between two things: you were between getting out of the military and… going to jail. Anybody could be a cook, just like anybody could mow the lawn.
I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.
If you’re going to buy pasta, you should buy dry pasta. If you’re going to make it you can make the real thing, but you shouldn’t buy fresh pasta.
My family makes these vinegars – out of everything from grapes to peaches and cherries. We go through the whole process with the giant vat and drainer, label them, and give them as Christmas presents.
I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can’t teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is.
My last meal? The food would be much less significant than the company.
The hardest part of anything is making a dish consistently great – you order it seven years later, if it’s still on the menu, and it’s still as good as what you remember.
When you taste things in the right order, sometimes they taste so much different than if you taste them out of order. Not that there’s a right order, like by rule, but just like in a thoughtful way that makes sense.
You have to live life to its full chorizo.
The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.
Twelve-piece cookware sets for ninety-nine bucks are routinely hawked on late-night TV – often by friends of mine. But with a mere five pieces, you can do whatever you like – slay the dragon and then cook its tenderloin in the style of the duke of Wellington, if you want to.
I really want to be a rock star.
Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.