I do know I’m a control freak.

I am publicly apolitical.

I want to bring things up to room temperature, especially poultry, before I cook it because I want it to cook faster so that there’s less moisture loss.

If I took my turkey out of the refrigerator and, like, threw it in a dumpster or drug it down the street in New York for a while [it will make people sick].

Cranberries contain a massive amount of natural pectins. They will gel all on their own, which is why you can basically make cranberry sauce out of filling.

It’s funny, when you look back in history books or American cookery books, one of the reasons that the quinces and cranberries are used so often is because of their natural jelling properties.

Lumps are caused by one thing and one thing alone – the improper addition of a starch.

What tends to happen is that people will go – they’ve got hot broth, you know, they’ve added some liquid to their drippings, they’ve brought that up to heat. And then they try to add in a big clump of just kind of a handful of flour, and of course, it turns into library paste.

What happens is that in each clump you’ve got the gelatinization of starches, which happens very quickly at the surface of the clump and it kind of forms a protective skin around this dry hunk of flour.

The skin is forming because of proteins, just like if you cook milk or anything else that’s got a coagulant protein in it.