I’ve done the brined turkey for a couple of years now, and it’s the best way to roast a turkey, ever. I’ve even labeled my brining bucket so my husband won’t use it for anything else (like motor oil or drywall stuff).
You should try his Broiled Butterflied Chicken, too. It was the first Alton recipe I ever made. It sounds complicated, but if you understand how to cut the bird apart (or watch the show), it’s quite easy.
The result is a yummy tasty chicken!
Flipping through that page, and seeing his new motorcycle only confirms what I have been suspecting for some time: Alton Brown is my Quantum self from a parallel universe where I went into TV cooking instead of TV news.
We look alike, we have the same hair and glasses, we have the same number of letters and syllables in our names, we both like knowing how things work, we’re both in TV, we both cook, we both write, we both ride motorcycles…
I’m just waiting for Alton to be assassinated, and mystery Chefs In Black will show up at my door saying : We need a replacement for Alton, and you’ll do.
Exactly. First comes Adam, then comes Eve. 
The Alton rant and rave that forever sealed my love for him was:
I laughed until I got dizzy.
Wha-?
you’re crazy, his meatloaf is great. i’m not a meatloaf fan but i tried his recipe and i liked it quite a bit. but i do like my cumin.
every recipe of his i’ve tried (and i’ve tried quite a few) has been uniformally good, and some dowright great.
sometimes his props bother me, though. he spends a lot of time on some really obvious scientific principles. and i don’t like him on iron chef america. it’s not really suited to him. he’s becoming part of the machine.
he seems to be quite the shill these days as well. he’s selling a lot of overpriced gadgets with his name on them on his website.
that salt cellar bothers me. he’s always talking about getting the most bang out of your buck, multitasking, all that stuff, but that allessi cellar (it’s actually a grated cheese holder) costs like 80 bucks. oh, and the one for sale on the website is NOT the one he uses in the show.
now, it’s well within his rights to sell whatever he wants on his website, but i always saw him as sort of a consumer advocate type guy, so it just bothers me. it’s an irrational and unfair feeling, but i can’t shake it.
I have no real beef with Alton, he is almost exactly what he claims to be, not a chef, not even a good cook but a solid, technique based home cook. He has no illusions that he can compete at anywhere near the top levels of the culinary scene and he doesn’t try but he’s very, very good at what he does. However, I do have a number of specific gripes.
He seems to occasionally throw in random and bizarre adaptations into well known, classical dishes without bothering to explain why he does them. Using whole rather than clarified butter for his hollandaise for example.
He seems very weak on non-western cuisine and doesn’t seem to have the bredth of experience neccesary to grasp truely foreign foods. His Tropical Island and Wonton shows in particular irked me because they seemed so disjointed and dogmatic.
His stock show, while commendable for probably being the first TV chef to encourage home-made stocks seems to propogate a raft of misinformation and dogmatism.
I love Alton. His show appeals to me as I am a chemist. I like the food chemistry and don’t really care that you can’t really get the recipes just by watching or that aren’t that many. My parents have a shelf of cookbooks with recipes in them, but you can’t really learn techinque from a book.
OTOH, I hate Rachel Ray. She is annoying and her food looks terrilble. Not at all sure why everyone wanted her books and not his (I work in at Waldens).
It’s subtle, but it’s there. There’s a lot of labeling of foods as “good” and “bad” or “only for special occasions” or with other qualifiers which indicate that she would never actually consider consuming what she’s cooked herself, and has more than a little bit of disdain for those who would. There’s also a distance from food that doesn’t become a chef; if you have no passion for what you’re cooking and don’t think that it’s suitable for people to eat, then bloody well don’t cook it!
Sara’s history of going through Weight Watchers (and being on their maintenance program for more than a decade) is well-documented, and unfortunately, she makes a lot of little comments which indicate that she still does not have a healthy relationship with food and presumes that no one else has, either. It’s sad, but it’s also terribly annoying because it seems that no one at Food or Gourmet notices or is willing to say or do anything about it.
That’s extra virgin olive oil!
Moving this from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Like what, if I may ask? (Not doubting you or anything, just trying to learn.)
Hrmm… it’s a long time since I last saw it so I’ll have to look at it again but a few things that stick out in my mind are:
He implied that somehow the chemical reactions that go on in stock ONLY start happening at a simmer (something about stockpot A not being able to extract juice from a carrot let along a chicken bone) which is false. A low temperature will still produce stock, only at a slower rate. The main reason for a simmer is that excess agitation will emulsify the fat and scum into the stock and cloud the stock making it impossible for use in consomme or other classical restaurant sauces. In practise, home cooks rarely need jewel like stocks but it’s still good practise since emulsified fat and scum don’t taste very good.
He uses whole peppercorns which impart almost no flavour whatsoever to liquids they are cooked in. They should ideally be crushed to release the aromatics.
He added Garlic, Herbs and spices to a stock when, really they should be added to a final sauce both for better flavour development and versatility. Ideally, even the mirepoix should be left out for even more flexibility but almost no-one does this.
He was probably way too wary of contamination and has lead a whole generation of cooks to unneccesarily go to the bother of coolers full of ice and frozen drink bottles just so their stock will cool 3 minutes faster.
A few other things I’ve thought of:
What he was really doing on the poaching show was sous vide which is a very closely related technique and I was disappointed that he didn’t give it it’s true name as I think it’s one of the more exciting techniques in modern cooking. He also gave a rather glib overview about how to keep a liquid bath at a constant temperature which is really the main obstacle form sous vide taking hold in the home kitchen.
He’s inconsistant when cooking meat whether high heat followed by low is better or vice versa. I believe in his broiling show, he advocated one, while his prime rib advocated the other, both times assuring us that this method was better than the alternative.
He’s inconsistant and ad-hoc in his stance on wine for cooking, veering from “don’t cook what you wouldn’t drink” to “Altons $2 jug o brew” and back again. (My personal perspective is that while “don’t cook what you wouldn’t drink” is a safe albeit expensive prospect, the main thing to look for in a cooking wine is not exceptional flavours but the absence of any glaring flaws since all the subtle notes cook out while all the flaws are intensified.)
What I like about him is that he deflates the pretentiousness that tends to surround chefs and cooking shows. He’s not so concerned with “art” that he loses the fun of cooking. And showing the science behind the food is just great for me. He *is * the Mr. Wizard of the kitchen!
And Tyler Florence? I just love to watch the Food 911 shows where alcohol is involved… and watch his nose get redder throughout the episode.
Has anyone else noticed that the big headed girl (Giada?) never actually eats her food? In the shows I saw recently, she made a big fuss about how wonderful it tasted, took a bite, and stared dreamily at the camera as she chewed. But they cut away every time before she spoke again, like she had to spit out the food. It’s probably just me, but I find it really annoying.
I’m not going to comment on the stock, cause I’m not in any means a trained chef, so I have no idea who is “right” or “wrong” in this situation. But as to some of your other points:
Highg heat first vs. low heat first. They were two different situations. The first was a steak, the second was a roast. Since the roast wuld ebi n the oven a lot longer than the steak, the act of searing it first will cause it to lose juices. However, since the steak got seared for one minute, then was in the oven for less than ten to finish it off, it’s juice loss would be much less drastic. This is just a WAG, though. It’s also possible he jsut learned some new facts and changed his mind.
As to the wine issue, I have only once (maybe twice) seen/heard him say that, and those situations were special. Mnay times you use wine you need it for a few thigns: alcohol to dissolve and relase alcohol-soluble flavors, a bit of acidity, and maybe some “fruitiness.” This applies to pretty much any situation where the wine itself is mixed with several other things, or is part of a larger dish. In situations where the wine is the main source of flavor (say, in a reduced red wine sauce for a rib roast) it is true, since so much of the initial wine’s flavor will be in the final dish.
Searing neither encourages nor discourages juice retention. In the end, my belief is that pre-sear and post-sear have virtually exactly the same effect and you should use whatever is convenient but it just irked me how he presented each one as gospel, blanket truth that could be applied to all meats equally (complete with cheezy army men and tennis balls). I suppose a lot of it is just due to the fact that he only has 22 minutes in which to present his show and so much content to go over but I’ve found books by actual food scientists (Harold McGee, Russ Parsons, Harold Blumenthal etc) to have really helped to clarify and solidify a lot of basic techniques which get a quick gloss over on his show.
Searing neither encourages nor discourages juice retention. In the end, my belief is that pre-sear and post-sear have virtually exactly the same effect and you should use whatever is convenient but it just irked me how he presented each one as gospel, blanket truth that could be applied to all meats equally (complete with cheezy army men and tennis balls). I suppose a lot of it is just due to the fact that he only has 22 minutes in which to present his show and so much content to go over but I’ve found books by actual food scientists (Harold McGee, Russ Parsons, Harold Blumenthal, Robert Wolke etc) to have really helped to clarify and solidify a lot of basic techniques which get a quick gloss over on his show.
Oh, the wine thing also reminded me, Robert Wolke recently demonstrated that adding an alcohol to various sauces does not release various new flavours not soluble in water as commonly thought. His article is here (free reg req)
I honestly don’t think it’s possible to be TOO wary of contamination, and anything he does to encourage the casual cooker to be aware and careful about contamination is a good thing in my book.
His books also go into good science detail as well, though probably not as much as an actual food scientist, as he is just a geek with a love for science, with no formal training in it.
With regards to the alcohol soluble flavor thing: Well, if the demonstration was recent, you clearly can’t fault AB for saying it does affect the dish. Plus, he DOES have his own food scientist on the show that confirmed that yes, alcohol can relase additional flavors, so it’s obviously a topic of debate in the food science world.
I caught him getting his “food science” wrong a couple times but I can only clearly remember one instance. He once said on Good Eats that 2% milk is whole milk that has had 98% of its fat removed. Just thought I’d throw that in. I love Alton too.
The man is funny, cute, has a great sense of humor, wears glasses, and can cook. Not only do I love his show, but I wouldn’t kick him out of bed, either. In fact, bed+Alton Brown+this chocolate pie = my idea of heaven.
Even if the idea of Alton Brown in your bed isn’t appealing, you should try the pie.