Not looking up the recipe online but from info given strictly in the show (the old-school way by watching the Frug or Yan on PBS without the internet available). Have you ever seen something made on TV when you made it tasted horrible or completely did not cook right?
My first one: Alton Brown - Raspberry Pudding (English style pudding I guess which should have been my first clue. English & good recipe? :dubious: )
I don’t even see it online anymore. It was brioche and raspberries. Butter the brioche and layer it with raspberries in a springform pan. Be sure it is higher than the pan. Weight it down so the raspberry juice soaks into the bread. I was wary but it is Alton so how bad could it be? Go take a bite of soggy bread then following that up with a bite of a butter stick. I’ll wait. Back? Now you have a feeling of what this monstrocity was like. No joke, I was banned from cooking at my mom’s for 3 years after they tasted this.
My second one: Laura Calder - This one
Something bugs me about her. I think it is the vibe that makes me want to tell her, “You’re not French! You’re American! You may know the language and the cooking and Hell you may be an expatriate living on the Ile de France but you are not French.” This was potatoes made by the bakers wife (I guess while the bread is baking) with stock brought over by the butchers wife* when she came over for some hot French on French lesbian action while one husband is out front working.** The stock never absorbed! After 6 hours in the over, there was maybe half the stock left and I had roasted potato and chicken soup made. And that was with the foil off.
Her cute story.
** My addition to her cute story make it more entertaining. And yes I did picture her as one of the wives.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alton Brown, and most of his stuff is very good. His pot roast, though? The one with olives and raisins? Uh…yeah…won’t be making that again. Definitely one time where the story (ignorant 20something with nothing in the house craves pot roast, what can AB throw together?) got in the way of a good recipe.
I’m not alone. He mentioned it in at least one interview as the recipe his fans complain about most when they meet him.
None of Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals are quite right. I think he takes the wrong shortcuts, and his estimates of cooking times are off. I’ve made two or three of them, and while they were edible, there were always a couple of obvious tweaks that would have made them much better.
I tried an Alton Brown recipe for brined and slow-cooked pork chops that turned out absolutely shit-awful. It looked delicious on TV, but in reality: nope.
Funny how all these are Alton Brown recipes. On TV, his crock-pot steel-cut oatmeal full of dried berries and nuts is beautiful creamy goodness. In practice, it’s sour curdled purple soup.
Paula Deen’s oven fried potato wedges, encrusted with cornbread dressing. Looked absolutely delicious on the show, but when I tried making them, I couldn’t get the cornbread to stick, and I just ended up with a bunch of soggy potatoes.
Oh, lord. I tried it with dried cherries. By morning they’d leached all their color & flavor and gotten soft and wrinkled… like someone had thrown bits of discarded skin into the pot. Uuurrggghhhhh.
I’ll just say this, it was my mom who agreed to the experiment. She’s the one that stated, “Well, it’s Alton” meaning that I don’t think this will end well but a miracle may fly out of the oven.
I watched Alton make corn dogs one time, and I didn’t even need to try it to know it was going to be an abortion. I mean, come on; onions, jalapenos and creamed corn in the batter? They looked like a lumpy mess, and that was the Good Eats edit!
Ew, pot roast with olives and raisins? Even coming from Alton, I wouldn’t try that. I’m all for trying new foods, but when I think ‘pot roast’ I think onions and carrots and potatoes. Not raisins and olives. I guess it doesn’t help that I hate olives, though.
I’ll stick with my grandmother’s tried and true recipe. A beef roast, some chopped onions, a couple of potatoes and some carrots.
As for mine? Martha Stewart’s lemon squares. Not only did I dirty every mixing bowl, measuring spoon and measuring cup in the kitchen, they were incredibly bland. The crust was dry and the lemon filling was sticky and gooey (not in a good way) and pretty much tasteless.
The boxed lemon square mixes (Krusteaz or Duncan Hines) are much better, and I don’t have a disaster in the kitchen after.
Well, he probably *is *the most popular tv cook of the last decade, and since he’s so good at explaining stuff, viewers think, “hey! I could actually do that!” I watch lots of cooking shows, but his is the only one I actually try out the recipes on a regular basis. I’m sure I’m not alone, and that’s going to skew his numbers high.
More home cooks trying them + long running show = lots of opportunities for utter failure.
I sort of took the pot roast idea as one of those deconstructed recipes that you see in avant garde cooking. My normal pot roast has onions, has broth, has salt, which provide a salty savory flavor and it has carrots and red wine, which provide a deep sweet flavor. His version tries to provide the salty savory with olives and the deep sweet with raisins. Looks good in culinary theory, but it didn’t really work out all that well. I mean, we ATE it, it wasn’t inedible, but I wouldn’t make it again.
The pudding - you barely scrape butter onto the brioche. I cheat and do the rub butter onto the springform pan. You do not need to smear butter on every single slice, it is mainly to keep the bread from sticking to the springform and the lid you use to press the bread and berries. You also do not want uber juicy berries. Alton slathers everything with butter. You can even do without the butter if you totally line the pan with waxed paper that is put in like a muffin cup amd put a sheet of waxed paper between the lid and the top layer of bread before you weight it down.
And with the hot lesbian potato dish, it makes a difference on the type of potatoes. There are waxy potatoes that do not absorb liquid and there are mealy potatoes that do absorb. You can also start with part of the liquid and add later when the level goes down and you need to top off the liquid.
Honestly, Alton Brown’s famous macaroni and cheese recipe that I see posted and shared all over the place was pretty gross to me, too. I don’t want onions in my mac & cheese to begin with, and the way his recipe swings it, the onions don’t get cooked long enough and are crunchy in the finished product. Or at least that’s what happened when I made it. Yuck.
I’ll be the 4th person to chime in and say this was a disappointment, though I can’t understand how one poster ended up with something soupy. It was overcooked when I made it.
To continue the Alton pile-on, you could carve his chocolate mousse with a knife. Gelatin is not needed in chocolate mousse.
