Thank you Alton Brown

Cafe Society
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I had the best day last week. For some reason, I was perusing Alton Browns recipes on foodtv.com and decided to try a couple recipes for things I am pathologically incapable of cooking. Now, I make bread, cakes, yummy yummy food and am generally considered a good cook by my friends. I did have one hurdle I was unable to overcome (making biscuits) until I moved to Georgia. Now? My biscuits are perfect. The recipe? From Alton Brown.

I have never successfully made cookies. I have never gotten fried chicken right. I checked my pantry and put on my big girl panties and decided to make both items. Both recipes are from Alton. The cookie recipe was “The Chewy.”

First, the cookies. Turns out my daughter or husband had been pilfering my chocolate chip stash, so I didn’t have the required 2 cups, so I substituted some peanut butter chips.

The cookies came out like a picture from a magazine. They were perfect. I mean, absolutely, melt in your mouth, perfectly textured, flavored wonderfully. This was the kind of cookie you dream of. And dream I have. I typically don’t buy cookies because I like 'em soft and chewy and the ones for sale like that taste far to chemically. This was the finest cookie I have ever had. And I made it! I love you Alton! I am protecting the last cookie from the 2nd batch I made until I am certain I can procure more supplies. I informed my husband that these cookies were worth getting fat for. I’m trying to figure out if I can burn off enough calories to justify making a batch every day.

The Fried Chicken.

Recipe called for bone-in chicken, all I had was boneless breasts. No problem. I followed the directions. He puts the spices on the chicken THEN dredges them in flour. By gosh golly, that chicken was tasty. Juicy, crisp, flavorful. And since the true test of fried chicken is how good is it cold, I polished it off the next day by sneaking little bites all day. That night, my husband heated it up for dinner. I was disappointed. It was so darn tasty cold!

Fried Chicken for dinner and cookies for dessert. What a yummy, yummy day. Thanks Alton. You made my belly smile.

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Line of the day. :stuck_out_tongue:

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While I watch AB and bought his book, I gave it to some foody friends. The book that I use, prefer and recommend is Shirley Corriher’s book, Cookwise. She was on many of the GEs episodes as the food scientist. It is essentially the WHY about different food types and then recipes. I have not read bakewise, but I am sure that it is nearly as good.

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The Chewy is everything I want from a chocolate chip cookie. My wife and I have made many batches of them. Upon looking at the batter, my mom expressed disbelief that this was even a cookie recipe. Must’ve been all that brown sugar. Anyhow, now I never have to each another flat cracker chocolate chip cookie again.

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My biscuit recipe comes from the back of a can of Clabber Girl baking powder. Except for one time when I used stale flour, they’ve always turned out just right.

For cookies I use the recipe on the back of the Nestle’s Chocolate Chip Morsels bag.

Good Eats is great. I like Alton Brown’s geeky presentation. But I have trouble pronouncing his name as he does. I say ‘Alton’ like ‘alt’ (‘old’) in German: ‘all-toe’.

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If I had an easy, fool-proof recipe for making perfect biscuits, I’d gain ten pounds.

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Move to Georgia. :slight_smile: I swear, I could never make them come out. However, I excelled at parallel parking. I move to GA, can’t park for shit, but my biscuits are perfect.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t recall any recipe of Alton’s that I’ve tried that I didn’t like.

I’ve heard him mention Cookwise, it’s on my list. What do you like best about it?

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I’ll just bet some of it’s the flour, not to suggest that you aren’t a good cook. :slight_smile:

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I brought my flour with me. :slight_smile:

However, the humidity here is much different. I’m also at a much higher altitude (3652 ft).

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His Baked Bean recipe was the only disappointment for me. I still trust him an awful lot though.

I bought cookwise and it helped me understand the reasons why some of my recipes weren’t working and how to correct them. I never used to play around with baking recipes, what it said was what I did, but now I can modify them with more confidence knowing what ingredient is there for. Definitely worth the cost to buy that book.

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Ooh, can I share how Alton has recently made my belly smile?

I had rendered myself unable to chew anything more demanding than a Ritz and the dentist couldn’t fix me for another two weeks. Stretched ahead of me was a vast landscape of smoothies and other things that don’t require chewing.

Fortunately, the day of the dental appointment I saw the oyster episode (Shell Game). One of the recipes involved chucking everything in the blender and setting to puree. I found the finished product to be a little too rich for my taste, but it was like Alton himself was trying to cheer me up.:slight_smile:

Oh, and Good Eats has what is probably my favorite TV moment ever. It’s the Santa/cookie episode (The Cookie Clause) and Alton is trying to get Santa to pay attention to cutting out the cookies, and Santa responds thusly:
“Don’t worry. I’ll keep my mind on my cookies. And my cookies on my mind.”