Alton Brown
Alton Brown
Alton Crawford Brownis an American television personality, food show presenter, author, actor, and cinematographer. He is the creator and host of the Food Network television show Good Eats, host of the mini-series Feasting on Asphalt and Feasting on Waves, and host and main commentator on Iron Chef America, Cutthroat Kitchen and Camp Cutthroat. Brown is also the author of several books on food and cooking...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChef
Date of Birth30 July 1962
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
It ain't what you got, it's what you know and do with what you got, ... The difference between a cook and a chef is understanding what's going on.
I started cooking in college to get girls, ... I was pathetic. Girls didn't want to go out with me. But I found that if I offered to cook for a girl, there was more of a chance that she'd say yes.
I became a cook so I could cook and tell stories in wacky ways.
I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better. It's a simple as that.
Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.
'Outlaw Cook' was a revelation. Folks like Jeff Smith and Marcella Hazan got me interested in cooking, but John Thorne pushed me into the path that I follow to this day. This is the only cookbook I've ever read that understands how men really eat: over the sink, in the dark, greasy to the elbows.
Very good cooks who are employed as 'chefs' rarely refer to themselves as 'chefs.' They refer to themselves as 'cooks.'
Stuffing is evil. Stuffing adds mass, so it slows the cooking. That's evil because the longer the bird cooks, the drier it will be.
Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.
My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.
Well, Food Network has complete control, since they own everything. But the way I like to put it is this: If you don't like Good Eats, it's my fault.
For me, it was kind of like going into the military or something. And anybody - any male - who has ever worked in a French kitchen knows what I am talking about when I say that.
My feeling has always been that Good Eats would have never happened had it been left to a committee.
The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.