Those who follow Alton Brown on social media have known for a while that he was going to make a sequel to Good Eats. Many may also be aware of Good Eats: Reloaded, where he updates some older episodes on the Cooking Channel.
But the day has arrived, and we know where and when the new show will debut. While we didn’t get the title “Good Eats: Another Show,” we did get “Good Eats: the Return.” And it will debut on Food Network (rather than just online) on August 25, 2019.
I am very excited. I need to catch the reloaded episodes now.
Good Eats: Reloaded is pretty good, but there are only eight or ten episodes. Just enough to whet your appetite, not enough to satisfy the craving for more Alton.
I get Food Network! It was either Cooking Channel for a shocking amount for Basic Cable Plus with no other channels I wanted–not one!–or faster internet. You can guess which won.
This time around, will he correctly pronounce plantain, astaxanthin, arthropod, and oligosaccharide? Has he learned that 2% milk has NOT had 98% of its fat removed?
I love Alton and give him full credit for igniting in me a love of cooking. Unfortunately, we no longer have cable and I haven’t seen an episode of GE in several years. I’ve pretty much lost my love of cooking by now (mostly due to the combo of having picky teenagers and trying to finish my MA degree) and would love to watch another season of Good Eats. I’m dying to catch the new series.
Unfortunately we don’t have cable, satellite, and or Hulu Live. I’ve been tempted to give Hulu Live a chance, but at ~$45 per month that a bit rich for my blood. This, however, may be the deciding factor.
When it was originally conceived, Brown allegedly wrote down three names: Julia Child, Mr. Wizard, and Monty Python. That’s probably as accurate an encapsulation as you’ll find.
I loved the original run for a number of reasons, but mostly because it was the first cooking show I had seen that explained the whys of cooking. It wasn’t a chef standing in a demo kitchen making a dish and narrating while he or she did it. It was this slightly goofy guy that had recurring characters, puppets, and a visual style unlike any other cooking show on the air. Brown isn’t a professional chef. He was a cameraman/DP who went to New England Culinary Institute so he could get the grounding he needed to make this show.
Each half-hour show would usually cover one ingredient or one cooking technique, and feature just a couple of recipes. Most importantly, Brown would explain why you do certain things with the ingredient, or how yeast do their thing, or why buttermilk is so important to good biscuits. I was an OK home cook before that show, but I was a slavish recipe-follower. After Good Eats, I started deviating. I was able to look at a recipe and have a better idea of how it was going to turn out, where I could make ingredient substitutions, or how to improve on it.
His sense of humor doesn’t always land with everyone, and there are times he can seem a little up his own ass, but I will be forever grateful to him for creating this program and providing actual educational television in the food arena.
Perhaps there can be no higher praise than that Anthony Bourdain actually liked Good Eats. He wrote an essay once, wherein he watched a day’s worth of Food Network TV, commenting on each program. As you might expect, he savaged the likes of Samantha Brown and Rachel Ray. When it came time to watch Good Eats, he said something like, “wait - why is this guy on TV? He’s actually informational and entertaining.” I paraphrase, but you get the idea.
And with Bourdain’s “The Layover” show came to Atlanta, he actually had Alton Brown on it as one of his hosts to the city (quite an endorsement for a Food Network person).
I loved the original run of Good Eats but have sadly found “old, skinny Alton” to be much more of a grump and less entertaining and wizardly than his earlier, more jovial self.
I’ll still watch, though, and reserve further judgment for after I have seen a few episodes.
