Words matter. These are the best Andrew Zimmern Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Even as a kid, I ventured out to ethnic restaurants all the time.
Everyone seems to ask me the same 10 questions, and high on the list is, ‘What pans should I be cooking with and why?’
Be aware of what you cook tomatoes with. The high acid content of the tomato slows down the cooking process of some other foods. Dried beans cooked with tomatoes added to the pot can take up to 20 percent more cooking time than beans without tomatoes added.
Too many children and adults go hungry every day.
Don’t ripen picked tomatoes in the sun. Put underripe tomatoes and stone fruits in a paper bag in cool, dark place, and magic happens. And never, ever store them in the fridge: they turn mushy and flavorless.
The biggest thing that I learned is when you’re building something – especially a project that requires partners – you have to make sure that there is a lot of overlapping desire and a lot of overlapping alignment with the people that you’re doing work with.
Don’t pile your tomatoes in a container that doesn’t breathe. I like my baskets or grass mesh plates, and I layer them single deep, stem end down to prevent bruises and premature rotting.
Way back in the day, I used to cook for Thomas Keller at Rakel in New York City. Keller is a down to earth, kind, supportive person. I wish people could see that.
For most people, carp isn’t just garbage fish – it’s an invasive species.
Everyone knows about hot dogs and the Big Apple. But for me, New York City street food is all about the Biryani Cart.
When I go into a steakhouse and order a steak, I’ll order the cut of my choice, and I’ll order it black and blue. And I’ll ask them to bring it with my first course, and I’ll just let it sit there.
I log 250 days a year on the road. I need pants that are versatile, easy to clean, and dry in my hotel room if necessary.
The summer after college, I got a job as a chef at Conscience Point Inn in Southampton. I spent the summer on the water and cemented my expertise with seafood. I’ve always gravitated toward places that do seafood.
As a young boy growing up in New York City, we would spend our summers on the South Fork of Long Island. My dad would take me down to the beach at low tide. We would walk a mile down to the jetties, and he would lower me by my ankles into the crevices between the massive boulders to grab at huge ropes of mussels.
The restaurant industry in New York in the ’80s was a good place to hide out if you had issues.
I will tell you flat out that I continually find Yelp and products like it to be increasingly worthless to me as a consumer.
I find that most home cooks don’t get vinegars. They’re misunderstood, mostly due to the factory-made red wine vinegar that everyone commonly cooks with… that, and the giant gallon of white distilled vinegar that we all use, mostly to clean and disinfect things!
For wok cooking, use oils with a high smoke point and low polyunsaturated-fat content: grapeseed oil, peanut oil, etc. Sesame oil and olive oil will burn and taste bitter. Oils with high polyunsaturated-fat contents like soybean oil will also make your food texturally unpleasant.
I’ve never been a mainstream kind of guy.
I’m an advocate for alternative proteins, and I believe we can eat many.
Thanks to my parents, who had me traveling around the world mouth-first, I knew from a young age I wanted a career in food.
I serve on a lot of charitable boards – the areas of mental health parity, services for those that are underserved, and certainly children’s rights are things that I believe in very, very strongly.
I love the Mexican chapulines. These little crickets are beautifully roasted with salt and lime.
It might seem strange to feast on Guinea pig, but Ecuadorians love to eat cuy. Personally, I think it’s a phenomenal alternative to pork or chicken. High in protein, low in fat, cheap and easy to raise. Oh, and cuy tastes great, much like roast pig. You might call it a pet, but I prefer to call it dinner.
You can tell the history of people on a plate.
The big mistake people make is eating their grilled beef hot. I prefer room temperature or cool. When the meat rests and starts to get cool, all of that fat goes back into the muscles and becomes much more tender.
The jambalaya of the American South owes a lot to the cuisines of the islands and western Africa, and it’s my favorite of this type of one-pot cookery.
When I was 13, I came back from summer camp – summer of ’74 – and my mother had had an accident during surgery and was in an oxygen tent in a coma. It was so traumatic. My parents had been divorced for six or seven years at that point, and it was sort of the seminal event of my life.
Wok cooking is intimidating, but it’s the most versatile and handy tool in your kitchen.
I consider a perfect hot dog on the street to be as valid a food experience as dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
Sometimes I have to shake my head at how much work it can take to track down a handful of food. Perfect example: I spent a whole day in the Amazon rainforest, in Ecuador, scouring the trunks of dead palm trees for grubs.
In tribal Botswana, I received some woven necklaces and a handmade bow with three poison arrows. It’s framed and hanging on the wall in my living room and is, without a doubt, one of my favorite possessions.
I’ve spent time in the coastal Carolinas and have seen what small business development has done to maintain the wetlands and reestablish the fisheries and secure jobs for the people that make their living off the water.
As I famously said before, I don’t like to waste meals. I’m no one’s food snob.
As a teenager, I spent my days at the beach and nights cooking in Long Island restaurants.
Sardinia has to have some of the best seafood on the planet. I’m a sea urchin freak, and Sardinia’s are some of the best I’ve had.
The greatest food city in the world is New York City, just in terms of depth and breadth, variety, size, infrastructure.
I lost an apartment. l became homeless for 11 months and squatted in a building on Sullivan Street in lower Manhattan.
My parents divorced when I was six but stayed close.
Having been in the restaurant business, our job in the restaurant business is to be responsible for our customers’ happiness. It’s the nature of the hospitality business. You need to take care of people. You take care of customers above all others. Customers are your lifeblood.
The people who are afraid of talking to press are people who have something to hide.
After attending The Dalton School and then Vassar College, I began cooking in New York City restaurants helmed by Anne Rosenzweig, Joachim Splichal and Thomas Keller.
We will, as Americans, inhale another culture on a fork before we try their music or their art or even, God forbid, hang out with the actual people.
If you’re not out testing what’s complementary to your brand, you’re not making the most of your income potential.
Like many other chef-entrepreneurs, I am convinced that fast food does not mean bad food.
I love eating in San Francisco, Chiang Dao, China, Tokyo, Hanoi.
Any decision that I make, anything that I do, every single consideration of my day goes through the prism of what my former experience has been.
Copper is a superb cooking metal, conducting heat so evenly it has unparalleled control, especially at low temperatures.
There’s fresh fish, and then there’s fresh fish. Samoa is ranked as one of the best places for game fishing in all the world, and runs thick in the waters off the island chain. In fact, it’s used as an edible currency in local markets. The day I fished there, we caught loads of yellowfin.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned after a lifetime of dining on delicacies like blood pudding, sea squirts, and camel kidneys, even folks who wouldn’t come within 100 yards of a Cambodian tarantula want to hear what it’s like to chomp on one!
