Peek Into European Patent Examining Cancelled

We were going to run European Patent Examiner John Savage's answers to 10 Slashdot questions today, but he emailed us this morning and asked us to pull them back because he was was in trouble over the interview. What he had to say was informative, non-controversial, and would not have hurt his employer's reputation at all, but we don't want John to lose his job or face disciplinary action on our account. Anyway, get ready for a slightly unusual Slashdot interview guest next week: Celeb chef and self-described "culinary cartographer" Alton Brown.

Comments

What were the questions????

[xjimhb]

It might be interesting to publish a list of the questions chosen for this. It would give us more insight into what they're trying to hide, even if we don't get to see the answers.

Re:More power to Alton!

[autechre]

He probably hasn't been on Iron Chef because the show hasn't been filmed for years; it's just that it's slowly making its way over here. Most anime takes 2 years to get here, and the dubbing on Iron Chef is (generally) higher quality (not that I think need it at all, but...)

He has said in an interview that he doesn't consider himself a chef, and holds master chefs in high regard as artists, but is annoyed that they publish cookbooks, because "ordinary" people will never be able to duplicate their efforts. He likens it to Picasso publishing a "Paint like Picasso" book. Check out www.goodeatsfanpage.com for that interview, as well as transcripts to every show, and all sorts of good stuff.

What I'd really like to ask Alton is how much control he has over the recipes that appear on foodtv.com. His herb spread recipe from "Good Milk Gone Bad" seems to have been altered quite a bit, and in fact, the spices he used are listed as an alternative! Also, two of the recipes from "Deep Purple" (eggplant) seem to have suffered similar fates. In the episode, he made a big deal about combining all the other ingredients for baba ghannouj first, and then adding the parsley last, because, "You don't want to pulverise that parsely" (or it will turn bitter). But the foodtv recipe listing just tosses it all in at once. It also shortenes the draining time (for removing bitter alkaloids) from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. And though it's nice that they doubled the Eggplant Pasta recipe to serve more people, they seem to have quadrupled the olive oil, tomatoes, and basil; and again, the prep time is reduced (purging time given in the show was 15 minutes + 1-3 hours; here, it's 30 minutes). As picky as AB is about methods, I find this very strange.