Jose Andres Puerta Quotations

When you use a simple gelatin like collagen, you can get flavor that is 100 percent pure, maybe event 150 percent.

When we are trying to come up with new health laws, you bring doctors, you bring experts in medicine. In urban planning, you bring the best architects. How it is possible that when we are talking about the way we are going to feed America, no chef shows up in the room?

With their bright color and fantastic balance of acidity and sweetness, tomatoes are a natural refresher and the perfect element for meals on warm and sultry days.

Women's cooking has always had a big influence on me personally.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

When I came to El Bulli, right away I knew I was becoming part of something incredible. It was like watching the Big Bang happening right in front of me.

When you cook a sausage, the skin sometimes breaks and the ground meat comes apart.

When you become an American, they give you an injection so your accent changes.

Let me ask you: Who do you prefer, a clown organizing your menu - with all due respect to Mr. McDonald - or a chef? I do believe it's a very simple answer.

Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.

Simple ingredients, treated with respect... put them together and you will always have a great dish.

Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way - that's the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.

Most people only use their griddles for pancakes, but you can sear vegetables like sliced zucchini or mushrooms, thinly sliced meats like chicken or pork, or thinly sliced fish or squid.

Meat, to me, it's slightly boring. Hold on, I love meat too, but only once in a while. You get a piece of meat, and you put it in your mouth, you chew, the first five seconds, all the juices flow around your mouth, they're gone, and then you are 20 more seconds chewing something that is tasteless at this point.

My love for artichokes comes from when I was very young. My mother and father would slice the hearts and fry them, and they would be crispy around the leaves and tender at the base.

One thing that makes me very happy is to see the growing activism among chefs in America. Chefs like Tom Colicchio, Bill Telepan, and Rachel Ray and food writers like Michael Pollan have gone to Congress, indeed sometimes even have testified before Congress, have lent this support to Mrs. Obama's effort to combat childhood obesity.

Music is always on. Not at work. But at home, everything always has to have a soundtrack.

My family and I cook at home almost every day together. The kitchen is the central and most important room in the house; it's a great way for us to connect. We love going to the farmer's market on Sundays as a family and choosing the ingredients together.

I don't know any group of professionals that mobilize as fast and as often as chefs do when there are people who are in need.

I don't believe in traditional company structures because the best ideas do not always come from the top.

I am from Spain, but my family and I have made America our home. For the last 17 years, I have been cooking Spanish food in Washington, D.C.

IBM has research and development; so do Microsoft and Nike and even Jose Andres. But there hasn't been enough R&D on feeding people in the Third World. This has to be part of the process; if not, we'll keep throwing money at the problem instead of investing in true solutions.

Iberico de Bellota is best when cooked medium rare with a nice, pink center to allow the delicious acorn-infused flavor to come through.

I believe the future is vegetables and fruits. They are so much more sexier than a piece of chicken.

I'm always looking to the future and what will next be on the horizon.

I love cooking for the sake of understanding how people before me used to feed themselves, used to feed their families.

I have an amazing wife and three daughters that always keep me motivated.

For me, summer hasn't really started until tomatoes reappear in local farmers' markets.

For me, Romesco is one of the greatest sauces in the world.

I don't think anybody can claim success at any part of our lives, private or professional, if there are others that don't enjoy the same opportunities.

I don't understand how it's cheaper to buy a whole steak at the Price Club than spinach. How did that happen?

I eventually settled in Washington, where my partners and I have been fortunate to build a restaurant business that now employs thousands of Americans across the country.

For me, there is no better tapa than a really good stuffed olive.

I get very upset when people start adding weird things to romesco.

If what I have to do is share a sandwich to lift someone's spirits, put a smile on their face - the worst thing that happens is I go broke!

I always say that I don't believe I'm a chef. I try to be a storyteller.

I think when dishes have a certain amount of acidity, really they are very alive. And I love things that are alive.

Our brain, our body, craves fat. We cannot help it. That's why a kid will eat a hot dog quicker than a piece of broccoli.

Pimenton gets its intense flavor because it is dried over wood smoke. You can try hot, sweet or bittersweet, though sweet is probably the most commonly used.

Steakhouses serve these big steaks. The first piece is hot, and the last piece is cold. The way I like to eat is to try three or four cuts of meat. People should actually be eating less meat, and the meat they eat should be special.

Standing around the grill is fine, but I like to have my friends come in and out of the house. Movement makes the party more exciting.

My whole life, I have been trying to cook an egg in the right way.

Look at our farmers' markets today, bursting with heritage breeds and heirloom varieties, foods that were once abundant when we were an agricultural nation, but that we have lost touch with. Bringing all these back helps us connect to our roots, our communities and helps us feed America the proper way.

Let me tell you a story about when I was growing up in Spain. Many Sundays, we would invite 30, 40, 50 people to the countryside, and my father would make a big paella. He put me in charge of the fire and the 'stove' - the rocks that hold the pan. But he wouldn't let me cook. I got so unbelievably upset.

Like many parents after a long family holiday, I usually welcome the moment when my kids head back to school.

Listen to me: Leek is a vegetable. It can be the center of a dish.

My mother and I were born in Mieres, Asturias, the most beautiful region you'll ever see in Europe and the home of Cabrales, a great blue cheese made in the Asturian mountains. When I was young, we moved to Barcelona. Whenever my mother was homesick for Asturias, she'd eat a little piece of Cabrales to bring her closer to Mieres.

I was very impressed with the street food of Singapore. I was very impressed with the dishes that they did.

I think every chef should have a food truck. It's a good way to test the markets, to invest in meeting the future restaurant goers.

Man, the flavor of a pineapple is 100 times more powerful than the flavor of meat.

Me, I'm an encyclopedia. I'm not a very smart guy, but I'm an encyclopedia. You can ask me about anything you want. Probably I have the book; probably I have a first edition.

I work with companies like Audiostiles to put together mixes for my restaurants. I even created a soundtrack for my television show.

Who needs one more chef in one more building with four walls and a kitchen?

Without a doubt, one of my favorite American ingredients is blue crabs, a true delicacy! And a great value, I think.

We still have to keep betting on markets like America that are full of opportunities to grow, even if we have to work our heads off to do it.

To me, what I'm interested in, in the end, is the meaning of food in our lives.

When you go to watch a baseball game, when you go to watch an NBA game, when you watch an NFL game, when you go to watch movies, the offering that those arenas are doing foodwise is 'all the hot dogs you can eat'; all the French fries you can eat; for $20 you can eat 20 hot dogs.

When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, I was on vacation in the Cayman Islands.

Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist.

There is nothing better than picking up sun-warmed tomatoes and smelling them, feeling them and scrutinizing their shiny skins for imperfections, dreaming of ways to serve them.

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past.

Even today with the public's growing interest in food and diet issues, politicians rarely include food as part of their political platforms.

Everyone should wake up and have a fresh-squeezed orange every day. By having a fresh glass of orange juice with American oranges, you are supporting the local economy, you have all the vitamin C you need in a day, and you support the environment because you don't use any plastic from bottles or bags.

Cotton candy is the most amazing form of caramelization ever invented by man.

Dorado Beach's rich history provided amazing inspiration to put forward a bold menu celebrating the legacy of the people and cuisine that shaped this unique destination and to push me to share some of my own stories.

Don't skimp on the ice. Bags from the grocery store melt so fast and water down your drinks. I prefer beautiful, big squares for my cocktails.

Don't put too many chefs to work. Sometimes they get too involved in the ingredients and are of no help.

As immigrants, we understand better than most that to be an American is a privilege that conveys not just rights but responsibilities.

The time has come to recognize that food, how we produce it, process it, package it, sell it, cook it and eat it, is as important as any other issue.

I started culinary school at a very young age, and really I wanted to be out working, cooking, more than I wanted to be in a classroom. You could say I wasn't a very good student - I wanted to be a student of life and experience.

The right use of food can end hunger.

I've been a cook all my life, but I am still learning to be a good chef. I'm always learning new techniques and improving beyond my own knowledge because there is always something new to learn and new horizons to discover.

I want e by Jose Andres to be a discovery, to be a journey. I want people to find it and be astonished.

Sometimes you need to give dishes a nap.

Puerto Rico is the perfect meeting place between Spain, the country I come from, and America, the country where I now belong. The meeting point of two worlds where magic can happen.

People ask me in Europe, when they do interviews... they ask me, 'Well, how does it feel to be a cook in a country that doesn't know how to eat?' It always touches a nerve, because Europe and the world think that America is no more than bad hot dogs and bad burgers.

After a year, the aromatics in an olive oil are gone. Sometimes the bottles on the shelf in the supermarket are there a lot longer than you are.

Spain is a fascinating mix of people, languages, culture and food, but if there is one thing all Spaniards share, it's a love of food and drink.

Soy sauce and seaweed go really well with potato chips.

One day, we'll have 10, 20 or 50 Jaleos around America or around the world.

Dragon fruit is very subtle, very delicate. So you want to be careful not to kill it with things that have very strong flavor.

A plancha is just a hot flat surface. So if you think about it, anything is a plancha, like a saute pan or a griddle. A la plancha is the perfect way to cook for a crowd.

As chefs, we work with organizations like Oxfam to enrich their projects with culinary tools, recipes and ideas.

As chefs, we cook to please people, to nourish people.

As a chef and father, it kills me that children are fed processed foods, fast food clones, foods loaded with preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup.

As a chef and as a father, I am very upset by what's on the menu at most schools: chicken nuggets and tater tots and ketchup and pizza.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have never been shy about how important Ferran Adria has been in my life; he is a friend, a mentor, an inspiration.

Anyone who knows me knows that I always like to keep moving.

The business of feeding people is the most amazing business in the world.

As legal residents, immigrants would contribute more in taxes, spend more at our businesses, start companies of their own and create more jobs. Immigration is not a problem for us to solve but an opportunity for America to seize.

The modernity of yesterday is the tradition of today, and the modernity of today will be tradition tomorrow.

Your parents would not be happy if you came home and said you wanted to grow up to be a chef or a rock star.

A lot of people prefer to be alone. They would rather be a palm tree on an island. I don't get it.

America gave me the opportunity to open successful restaurants, start a TV show, and write books. I can even fill an auditorium when I give a speech, which in America is rare for a chef.

American cooking is one of the unknown cuisines in America.

All my life, I've had restaurants that were affordable.

A cocktail can be made by the bartender. But the cocktail also can be made by the chef.

For food to be romantic, it should be light. Too many times people plan a romantic meal, and the food is too heavy.

Food is national security. Food is craft. Food is everything, when you think about it.

Food and the way we grow it and produce it are a major cause of environmental degradation.