Alton Brown Quotes

I love to have battles of the wits with people that can dish fast and dirty - and it leads to problems occasionally, 'cause I can sound mean without attempting to be mean.

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.

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.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.

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'm an absolute connoisseur of cheeseburgers and like to think that I can detect even mere percentages of shift in fat content in ground meat in a burger and can actually name the temperature to which it was actually cooked to the degree if I'm, you know, really on my game.

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

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.

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

Laughing brains are more absorbent.

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

In the end, all journeys are spiritual. So go off the main road. Be givers of hospitality and gracious takers of it too. Accept the serendipitous moments of life because, when all is said and done, you may find out that they were not serendipitous at all. And know that faith is as real as bread broken among friends. What you believe will take you far on your journey. If you search carefully, you will find good food all along the way.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Basting is evil. Basting does nothing for the meat. Why? Skin. Skin is designed to keep stuff out of the bird, so basting just lets heat out of the oven. That means the turkey will take longer to cook... so don't touch that door!

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.

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

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.

Good service can save a bad meal, but there is no level of food that can save bad service.

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.

Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think in the end there are only 20 or 30 tenets of basic cooking. It's going at perhaps the same issue from different angles, from different points of view, from different presentation styles, that really makes things sink in and become embedded.

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.

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

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

Last year, I made a refrigerator in my basement. And I needed to because I needed to figure how - you know there is no such thing as 'cold.' There is only less heat.

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 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.

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 feeling has always been that 'Good Eats' would have never happened had it been left to a committee.

I would have bacteria and, yeah, it would grow in what we call the danger zone, which is typically between 40 and 140. But if I'm getting something out of my refrigerator where it's been basically pretty clean and I'm putting it on my counter, what exactly is going to happen in that amount of time that going into a hot oven isn't going to kill? Nothing.

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

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

Now my wife may think she's locked me out of the kitchen but MacGyver's not my patron saint for nothing.

I do like artfully breaking rules.

There are no bad foods, only bad food habits.

I'm like a really goofy home ec teacher.