Alton Brown Quotes

No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art. Or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here. Cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering.

So I quit my job and went to the New England Culinary Institute for the full two years and worked in the restaurant industry after that until finally I thought I had a grasp on what I needed to do what I do.

You don't want flame to hit your food. Flame is bad. Flame does nasty things to food. It makes soot and it makes deposits of various chemicals that are not too good for us. The last thing you really want to see licking at your food while it's on a grill is an actual flame.

I looked for a very long time, knowing that it had to happen, but it took me a long time to find someone with the same background and whatnot and I finally found him.

A home cook who relies too much on a recipe is sort of like a pilot who reads the plane's instruction manual while flying.

Enough people have now mentioned Bill Nye the Science Guy to me that I now desperately avoid it all costs.

I became a cook so I could cook and tell stories in wacky ways.

I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don't want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don't know what I'm talking about.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

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.

Laughing brains are more absorbent.

Very good cooks who are employed as 'chefs' rarely refer to themselves as 'chefs.' They refer to themselves as 'cooks.'

A meringue is really nothing but a foam. And what is a foam after all, but a big collection of bubbles? And what's a bubble? It's basically a very flimsy little latticework of proteins draped with water. We add sugar to this structure, which strengthens it. But things can, and do, go wrong.

I think a lot of food shows, especially when we started 'Good Eats' back in the late '90s, they were still really about food. 'Good Eats' isn't about food, it's about entertainment. If, however, we can virally infect you with knowledge or interest, then all the better.

I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do.

A balanced diet may be the best medicine. I was eating too much good eats. But people consider that part of your job, you know? Eat. And I do!

My mantra was to educate people - to actually give them the know-how they could use - and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.

The way to any woman's heart, be she witch or Wonderwoman, princess or Pocahontas, is through her stomach.

Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful.

Wine is like women. It tempts you; it comforts you; it confuses you and can even turn on you when you least expect it. It can be your friend one day and your enemy the next.

A lot of food shows need only to tempt. Some food shows only need to inspire, to empower. And there are a lot of shows that do that.

Well, you know, when you go into a restaurant, one of the scariest things is the wine list, so whenever I'm really feeling intimidated, I'll just pick a wine type, like a Chianti or Brunello or a Burgundy, and I'll pick a year that's missing and ask for that one.

The problem is I am both a procrastinator and a power junkie, so I am very frustrating to work with.

My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera.

I kept thinking, 'Somebody has to make a food show that is actually educational and entertaining at the same time ... a show that got down to the 'why things happen.' Plus, I hated my job - I didn't think it was very worthwhile.

I'm going from doing all of the work to having to delegate the work - which is almost harder for me than doing the work myself. I'm a lousy delegator, but I'm learning.

The only unitasker allowed in my kitchen is a fire extinguisher.

If my wife made childhood obesity her mission and I signed a law making 1/8 cup of tomato paste a vegetable, I'd be sleeping on the sofa.

I spent a college semester in a small town in Italy - and that is where I truly tasted food for the first time.

If you really love stuffing, wait until the turkey comes out of the oven, add some of the pan drippings to the stuffing, and bake it in a dish. That's called dressing, and that's not evil - stuffing is, though.

A pie dough comes together exactly like a biscuit only there is very, very little liquid and no leavening involved. Other than that, the same rules apply. My best advice: handle the dough as little as possible.

I'm like a really goofy home ec teacher.

Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.

Racism. It's ugly. Even in tubers.

Unless your kid is Pele Jr., they're not going to be able to feed themselves from soccer. If your kid knows how to play soccer, but not make dinner, you have done them a disservice.

I am a filmmaker. That is all I've ever been. You know, Martin Scorsese makes films about the mob. And I make movies about food.

I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.

Seriously. I'm not very bright, and it takes a lot for me to get a concept - to really get a concept. To get it enough that it becomes part of me. But when it happens I get real excited about it.

I say grace. I'm a big believer in grace. I happen to believe in a God that made all the food and so I'm pretty grateful for that and I thank him for that. But I'm also thankful for the people that put the food on the table.

I had kicked around the idea for Good Eats when I was directing commercials.

Remember, America: organization will set you free.

Slicing a warm slab of bacon is a lot like giving a ferret a shave. No matter how careful you are, somebody's going to get hurt.

You know we fixate on the food so much itself: "Oh, the ultimate brownie or the ultimate this or that"
well, let me tell you something: It's all poop in about 12 hours, okay? The real power that food has is its ability to connect human beings to each other
that's the stuff right there and, to me, everything else is secondary to that.

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.

The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.

That's the ultimate goal of most turkey recipes: to create a great skin and stuffing to hide the fact that turkey meat, in its cooked state, is dry and flavorless. Does it have to be that way? No. We just have to focus on what the turkey is and what the turkey needs.

Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it's based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.

The worst food you'll ever eat will probably be prepared by a 'cook' who calls himself a 'chef.' Mark my words.

You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.

There are no bad foods, only bad food habits.

Believe me, a grain is a terrible thing to waste.

All [replacing of fat] does is lead to dissatisfaction and I think that dissatisfaction results in overeating.

So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand, it's bee backwash.

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. This is insanity. Feed yourselves. Feed your loved ones. And for God's sake feed your children.

I love poking fun at myself. I have a rather mean sense of humor.

I can't talk about anything or write about anything if I don't understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.

Although I don't take myself very seriously, I do take my work extraordinarily seriously.

The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.