Curtis Stone Reveals the Dish That Got Him Into Cooking as a Young Kid

As host of the new series Top Chef Jr., Curtis Stone has become an unofficial mentor to a group of young talents hoping to become the first to take this coveted new title home.

Curtis himself started cooking at age (wait for it) four... under the guidance of his mother Lorraine and his late grandmother Maude (after whom he named his first Los Angeles restaurant, which opened in 2014). And he started with dessert first.

"My favorite thing to cook when I was a kid was this beautiful chocolate caramel bar," he tells The Feast (clip above). "I got it from the Woman's Weekly Cookbook that my mom had kept. She had all the magazines lined up at home and I can remember pulling it out and flipping through it thinking, 'Oh, that looks good.' And then I got a recipe out of one issue and then I got another recipe for the same sort of thing. I combined the two recipes somehow and I was like, 'I developed my own recipe!' I cooked it all the time, it was delicious!"

He loved watching his mother bake, and he made note of her technique.

"I can remember watching her in the kitchen and actually going in and trying to get the beaters and the bowl to be able to get the rest of the cookie dough when she'd finished making something yummy," he recalls. "I'd watched her enough and eventually I got to helping her and here I am. I think I love cooking because I love to eat."

To hear him tell it, he never grew up, and that's just fine with him.

"I've always been a greedy little kid and I still am," he admits. "I always have my spoon in something because I love the flavor of food and I think once you become obsessed in that way with food the natural extension of that is to figure out how to make it."

Curtis Stone is the host of the new series Top Chef Jr. Watch it only on the NEW Universal Kids. And tune in for Top Chef's Season 15 premiere on Thursday, December 7 at 10 pm PT/ET!