Top 30 Alton Brown Quotes

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.

Gluttony is wrong. It’s wasteful.

Molecular gastronomy is not bad… but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.

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.

Take ice. Ice is fascinating to me. Ice is the one thing in our world that went from an agricultural product to being manufactured.

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 have nothing but sympathy for the people who are forced to work with me. I’m better now at picking out those that want to play that game with me, and those that don’t.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I grill, therefore I am.

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.

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

‘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.

I’m like a really goofy home ec teacher.

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.

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.

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 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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I grill almost all of my fish with the skin on because that gives you real protection at least on one side. It’s a nice barrier against super high heat which tends to make a lot of fish to turn really flaky. It’s very easy to overcook fish on the grill. But I still brush it with oil before I start.