Abstract
The purpose of this project was to explore the ways in which culinary creativity fits a modified version of Wallas's classic Citation1926 model of the creative process. In order to analyze the process through which chefs create a specific culinary work (specific dish), the researchers used a qualitative research method. Seventeen award-winning culinary artists from around the world were interviewed, and it was shown how the interview data fit the general categories of Wallas's 4-phase culinary creativity model—preparing the idea, idea incubation, idea development, and evaluation of the product—which the researchers refined via Finke, Ward, and Smith's Citation1992 Geneplore model, with its cyclic cognitive subprocesses. What is presumably the most original part of this contribution, then, are not the conceptual categories themselves but the actual interview-based data—the feelings, thoughts, and reflections of top-level international chefs—and the ways in which they seem to fit the categories of a modified 4-phase creative-process model.