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The thing with food is that you can give 20 people the same recipe and the same ingredients, and somebody's going to make it better than somebody else, and that's the creativity of it. It's like music. You could have a bunch of people playing the same piece, and somebody's gonna play it better.

But out of limitations comes creativity.

I think people are more savvy about cooking, food and dining. I notice they are looking for more value for their money - not in larger portions but more in terms of healthier, fresh, farm-to-table dishes with a nice presentation.

I think in the end there are only 20 or 30 tenets of basic cooking. It's going at perhaps the same issue from different angles, from different points of view, from different presentation styles, that really makes things sink in and become embedded.

The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.

Cooking is an art form, a creative thing.

I love to cook, and I've just gotten more and more into it over the years, just because it's the best way to stay creative.

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

In the U.S. and Europe, there has been a lot of creative hobby innovation, and that's great.

After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference.