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Alton Brown Answers, At Last
1) My question
by mofolotopo
Something I've found as a newbie chef is that a good 75.32% of good cooking is good shopping. What tips do you have for finding good, fresh ingredients? Where the heck do you get fresh herbs etc. in a smallish town?
Alton: First off, you need to decentralize your shopping. Don't try to get everything in one place. Even if you don't have a farmers market in the area, I'm willing to bet there's a co-op or health food store that will open up your options. Ditto a butcher. As for fresh herbs, if they're really a problem to find in your area, try growing your own when and where climate allows. The rest of the time, buy dry herbs and spices over the internet from someone like Penzeys or The Spice House. Above all, do not drive yourself crazy. Learn to work with what you have. Oh, and don't forget ethnic markets; they often have the best produce as well as meat.
2) Why are some people better Cooks?
by kallistiblue
I've noticed that some people seem to be naturally better cooks than others. I've know several people that follow a recipe very exactly. The food they create just doesn't turn out very good. Personally, I'll use a recipe as a guideline and use rough estimates. Most of the time, my meals turn out pretty well. It's as if an intuitive sense is needed.
How does someone learn/teach this skill?
Alton: First, you need to become a good recipe follower. Most people who think they can't cook aren't really taking time to properly read the recipes they're working from or they don't really understand what they're being asked to do. For instance, there are plenty of recipes out there that call for "searing" a piece of meat. If you don't know what "searing" really is, you're doomed. Unfortunately most recipes are written for people that already know how to cook. So start by really paying attention to a recipe and make sure you understand it. Then cook it a few times keeping detailed notes about the process and your feelings about the final dish. Keep notebooks?write down as much as you can and slowly you'll begin to learn what you're doing. As long as you're willing to think and taste as you go, you can become a cook?I promise.
3) Vegetarians
by sammy.lost-angel.com
As a vegetarian, I'm compelled to ask this: Have you seen a trend in recent years of more vegetarians, or more dishes made without meat? Time magazine had a recent cover story about this, and my feeling is it's becoming a more important part of everyone's lives, yet whenever I catch a cooking show on TV it lacks making many vegetarian dishes.
Alton: Americans don't eat near enough vegetables. I'm not a vegetarian, though I do respect anyone who makes a hard and fast decision about what he or she is going to live on. All you have to do is look at the health statistics from countries whose cuisines are lighter on meat and heavy on veggies and fish?They live, longer. It's as simple as that. What I would hate to see is a radical swing away from meat. I think we evolved as omnivores for a reason. And that's all I have to say about that.
4) Lower Fat and Cholesterol?
by cporter
Mr. Brown, I love your recipes. In the last few weeks, I've prepared
Chocolate Mousse, Party Mayonnaise, Chimney Tuna, and Baba Ganoush from
"Good Eats" and Chicken Piccata from "I'm Just Here for the Food." Not all at one meal, of course.
I applaud episodes like "Good Milk Gone Bad" and "The Other Red Meat" that focus on lower fat and cholesterol foods. But many of your recipes call for butter, oil, cream, and other less than healthful foods (even bacon grease!). What do you think about some of the substitutes out there, or using ingredients like applesauce to replace butter?
Alton: There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time. I use these things when they are needed in recipes and leave them out when they're not needed. As for substitutes, I only agree with them if they really don't change a person's response to a dish. Take mashed potatoes for instance. I recently saw a recipe that suggested that the fat we all know that mashers need could be replaced with vegetable broth. Hogwash. All that does is lead to dissatisfaction and I think that dissatisfaction results in overeating. We like fats because fats satisfy. They break down in the digestive track very slowly so they keep us fuller longer. Now if I find a way to replace a fatty ingredient without missing it (I do this a lot with yogurt) then you bet I'm going to do it. But I repeat: there are no bad foods
5) Art vs. Science
by Susskins
A lot of your show is dedicated to the Science of cooking, and to the underlying physics of food. Your Grandmother (in a really cool episode about biscuits) demonstrated a wicked amount of Artistic Skill, the "look and feel" of food preparation. Do you have any thoughts about the balance of Art and Science in cooking?
Alton: No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art?or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here?cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering (the wing of a Boeing 777, a suspension bridge) but they are not works of art, they are works of science. To my mind art is a matter of personal expression and the exchange of ideas; food is in the end, fuel?a means to an end. Sorry for rambling.
6) Iron Chef
by FortKnox
Seeing that all geeks love Iron Chef, I have to ask, would you be willing to go against an Iron Chef? If so, which would you pick??
Alton: I don't care about the chefs I want a shot at the goofball in the Palomino Jacket. He needs to be taken down. And the judges, oh please let me at them!
7) Elements of cooking
by SWroclawski
Mr. Brown,
I think that the most interesting part of your show to this audience is your emphasis on the science of cooking, from discussion of protein (such as in your angel food cake episode and your recent soufflé episode).
But the other difference in Good Eats is the great emphasis you place on the parts of cooking, that is the elements at a more abstract level, such as use of heat, individual ingredients (which is the topic of many of the shows) and methods of cooking (such as the right way to mix and fold). This all makes Good Eats interesting for us geeks out there who want to understand the science, but also helps us non-cooking geeks become literate in the supermarket and kitchen.
What gave you the idea to present cooking in this way and do you have any suggestions for other resources that present food and food preparation in the same way?
Alton: I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better?it's a simple as that. There are some great food science texts out there?well, a few. Check out the bibliography in my book. (If you don't want to buy it you can just copy stuff out at the bookstore.)
8) Technical questions
by TheJerkstoreCalled
Hello! I actually watched your very first show about steak here on PBS; it was the first thing in my life that made me interested in cooking. Every time I watch an episode of Good Eats, I always end it wanting to go cook something.
I had a technical question; we always see these shots coming out of refrigerators and ovens. Do you actually have little windows in the back of your appliances or are those props built up for the shows? I always assumed they were props but you never know. Also, is that really your house you shoot in? I love the Magritte hat with chicken painting.
Alton: No windows... We actually have cameras now that are small enough to rig inside appliances. It's not easy mind you, but it's doable. That is not my house, but it is a real house. The Magritte rip was commissioned especially for Good Eats.
9) Cooking In Lava
by MrIcee
Mr. Brown. First, thank you for a wonderful television show and an excellent book. I enjoy both continually and look forward to all your new work.
Now... on to, perhaps, one of the more unusual questions you might receive. This question deals directly with how heat affects food.
Specifically... I live on the slopes of an active volcano. One of the things we like to do for fun is cook game hen and pork loins in the hot lava itself. First, let me describe our process, and then our question.
To cook a game hen we first season and then wrap the hen in about 10 Ti (or banana) leaves. These protect the hen from actually burning.
Next we find an active surface breakout of lava. We use a shovel (we also are wearing kevlar gloves that can withstand 2000 degrees of heat) and get a good shovel full of red lava. We place this on the ground a distance from the flow. We then position the Ti-wrapped hen in the middle of the blob of lava and cover it with another shovel full of lava. We try to leave a small opening to the Ti leaves, for steam to escape (or we can potentially have a steam explosion).
Now, the question. The lava is initially at 2000 degrees when we start cooking. After about 15 minutes it has cooled to around 850 degrees (outside of the rock - we read this using an infrared pyrometer). After about 45 minutes the outside is about 450 degrees. At that point we hit the rock with the shovel to open it. Only a few of the Ti leaves will remain uncharred. We remove those and the hen is then very moist and delicious.
How is it possible, using a heat source at 2000 degrees (that granted, gets cooler over time) that it still takes 45 minutes to cook the game hen? We would have thought that the cooking would have been near instantaneous - but repeated experiments at various lengths of time reveal that it takes exactly as long in the lava, as in an oven.
Alton: It's not possible. I can cook a game hen under a broiler in 15 minutes. Tell me, are there any small brown mushrooms growing around your property, and if so have you been using them in salads or pasta dishes?
10) Safe Cooking Temps
by dmaxwell
The wife and I are huge fans of your show but there is one thing we notice from time to time that we've always wondered about. For instance, your country ham recipe specifies that the ham is done when the interior temp hits 140 degrees.
Alton: I do not always agree with the government and in this case I think they're way off base. For one thing, Trichinella spiralis die at 137 degrees. Of course in this case they would have had to survive the curing process which is highly doubtful. The water activity level of a country ham is simply too low to support that kind of life. Also, T spriralis have been nearly eradicated from the American hog population through the use of better feeds. As far as I know, the only instances of trichinosis in recent years involved wild game such as bear and puma.
Maybe it was the questions, but I was really looking forward to a good, long read....
I'm being selfish, but damnit, I wanted PAGES of answers!!!! =)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I thought this guy's claim to cooking fame was that he used a scientific approach? What's wrong with this picture?
/.'ers respect this guy, but I'm not too impressed with this answer.
Scientist 1: I have a phenomenon I don't understand and I want your opinion on it.
Scientist 2: Your data doesn't match up with mine. Therefore I will discredit you by suggesting you take drugs.
Scientist 1: But I have reproducible results!
Scientist 2: Nope, sorry. Talk to the hand, crack smoker.
I understand a lot of
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
Very wise words. I remember hearing Julia Child saying that the reason obesity is becoming such a problem is because of fat has become taboo in cooking. It's the fat in foods that make us feel full and keep us full longer. Generally, people who eat excusively low fat foods at their main meals are those who have the most trouble keeping from snacking between meals.
I've gone from eating low fat meals and snacks to eating "sensibly", and I really am a lot less hungry, even though I'm eating less.
My rules to live by... if you're hungry, drink a glass of water, avoid eating after dinner, and never, ever eat before bed.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
"Unfortunately most recipes are written for people that already know how to cook."
A good resource to deal with this is to keep a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" handy. I think the recipes in there are just okay, but it's the Rosetta Stone for cooking recipes.
Unfortunately, his statement is true of a lot of computer "recipes" as well. I always try to identify a "Rosetta Stone" book for every technology I dive into. For example, I was lost in the Linux Documentation Project until after I read Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Either way, I doubt the poster actually did what he said, rather he copied it from a website and claimed to have done it. I hate it when people take stories from other people and claim to have done it themselves. That's why so many urban legends keep getting circulated.
From Alton's response, I think that he thought the poster was completely immersing the chicken in the Lava. Pouring hot lava over a leaf-coated chicken should work since:
;-) The original poster explained that it cooled to 850degF, still too hot for chicken.
a) The lava cools off fairly quickly, meaning that the bird isn't exposed to 2000degF for 45 minutes
b) All those leaves release a lot of steam which both moderates the temperature and steams the chicken. Boiling water to make steam, as any high-school chemist knows, takes a lot of extra heat energy.
The above link also explains that the lava cools to 450degF within a reasonable amount of time, which is a great temperature for cooking chicken.
So, in short, the poster presented an impossible situation, and Alton, like any good literalist, told them so. What he could have done was ask some counter-questions to get a better idea of what was going on before answering.
I am really surprised at Alton's response to this question. Although IANAP I would think this is really a simple matter of the thermodynamics of state changes of matter.
An example might be in order here to explain for those who never took chemistry. Take an ice cube with a thermometer frozen within. The temperature of the ice cube will rise 0 degrees C is reached. At this point the state of the ice changes to water. However the temperature of both the water and ice remains at 0 degrees C untils ALL the ice is melted. The same holds true at the boiling point, only if the steam is allowed to maintain constant pressure. When the water boils it remains at 100 degrees C until all the water has turned to steam. If the steam had been collected at constant pressure, once the water is all gone the temperature of the steam will begin to rise.
Now how does this apply to cooking chincken in lava?
"...wrap the hen in about 10 Ti (or banana) leaves. These protect the hen from actually burning" The banana leaves im sure are rather large and contain signicant amounts of water.
"...wrapped hen in the middle of the blob of lava and cover it with another shovel full of lava. We try to leave a small opening to the Ti leaves, for steam to escape..." The water in the leaves is boiling off. The opening maintains constant pressure which results in a fairly constant temperature. As long as the steam is escaping the temperature of the hen is being regulated at a level way below the lava temperature.
If Alton would wrap his hen in banana leaves ( or even wet paper towels ) before placing it under that broiler I will gaurentee it will take longer than 15 minutes to cook.
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No. These folks are more likely OD'ing on simple carbs late in the day or at night. Plus, they probably have to break out mutliplication tables to figure out how many calories/serving sizes their shoveling down their craws.
There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time.
This kind of thinking gets people in loads of trouble. Sure, a sip a cream or a pat of butter or a piece of bacon once a month wouldn't do anybody any harm. But once these foods are included in the diet, it's easy for them to become habits. When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking.
No, this kind of thinking mixed with stupidity gets people in loads of trouble. I've lived by that philosophy for a long time without becoming obese. I cook using butter, I just don't use pounds of it. Trust me, you really can taste the difference. The people who abuse this theory are that same wingnuts who order double-cheeseburgers with a diet cola. If you have an over-eating problem, it really doesn't matter what you eat, you're going to be obese.
And lets not even mention the fact that a number of our healthy substitutes have turned out to be worse for us than what they were replacing.
The reason the volcano cooking works and takes the time it does can be seen from the question.
Foods burn when they reach excessive temperatures. If you expose the bird to a very high temperature directly to the skin, the outside will quickly get up to over 100 C and the water in the food will boil out. Then the skin will go up over 100 C and char.
When you wrap it in the layers to prevent it from burning, you have insulated it. Also the moisture driven off from the leaves and the bird is kept in a somewhat enclosed area. So the constant adding of heat such as happens in Alton's broiler is not happening here. He does not wrap his birds in leaves before putting them in the oven I bet.
To avoid burning food, cooks reduce the temperature to the point that the interior of the bird gets to a cooked temperature before the outside gets charred.
The volcanic rock may also act as an insulator. If you were to try to cook a water balloon instead of food, I would guess the inside temperature of the lava would be lower than the outside temperature.
Next time you do this try the following two experiments:
After the bird is cooked, when you crack open the lava, measure the temperature of the leaves in contact with the bird and the temperature of the lava on the inside of your oven. It should be less than the outside temperature because the water from the leaves is a much better coolant than the air.
Cook a bird in the normal manner but don't add the leaves. Remove after about 20 minutes, chip through the char and check the inside temperature. Or place it inside a haybox (http://solarcooking.org/ret-heat.htm). The outside may be a charred mess, but the inside done.
Of course, YMMV
The important part of the question was that he let's the steam escape (to prevent explosions).
Water boils at 212F (sea level, but I suspect if he's on a volcano, he may be cooking way above sea level).
Water is also one hell of a coolant. As long as steam is escaping, and the lava doesn't directly come in contact with the bird (conduction), then the chicken is only being steamed. Max temperature (for most any place but the Dead Sea) 212F.
Broiling is a dry heat cooking method. And temperatures GREATLY exceed 212F.
It's the same reason you can put pasta on a red hot stove, and it doesn't burn... untill you run out of water.
Ain't science grand?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Oh, and if you're a vegetarian inviting your non-vegetarian friends to a potluck/buffet, make sure to cook up something with meat in it for us.
"Gross," you say? Not I. My wedding was meatless to appease my poseur vegetarian wife (a poseur vegetarian being someone who looks down a menu past all the delicious meat dishes and orders a boring vegetarian entree, despite not being a vegetarian. Or one who says "Ew, bacon!" and then eats it anyway. Or any "vegetarian" who eats chicken wings / fried catfish / filet mignon because they "miss it sometimes"). I invited four other vegetarians, all of whom really enjoyed themselves on some fantastic cusisine the caterers pulled out (frankly, I think they were excited to to have something to cook besides bland swedish meatballs and little wieners in shells). I thought the food was fantastic, but hardly anybody ate any of it. Of some 100 portions, nearly 60 were left at the end. My dad & some of my friends snuck out to a burger place midway through the reception.
Talk about embarrassing! Furthermore, people ate a lot more cake than they usually do -- meaning that there was only one slice left to save for the aniversary.
Meat satisfies, people, as much as I hate to admit it. If you can't stand cooking it, get somebody else to do it.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking."
I took a quarter off once and bagged groceries. It is not good science, since I didn't record data and the sample was large but all from the same store in the same city. However, it was very clear to me that fat people weren't buying meat and cheese and cream, they were buying soda, chips, and prepared foods. Simple carbs, not fats, were getting them. In contrast, people buying fresh produce with or without dairy and meat, were never fat. Not once did I see a fat person buying fresh vegetables.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Wow! It looks like everyone disagrees with you. Simple carbs, white bread, potatoes, rice, and low-fat ultraprocessed packaged foods make you FAT, increase your triglycerides, LDL, and blood sugar.
Sugar & the carbs I mentioned above are the real evil for people who have developed insulin resistance and the vicious carb cycle. That is a surprisingly large number of people in the states. (I'll betcha 99% of the obese people you see in stores are victims of low-fat diets)
For everyone else, moderation works. Does Alton look unhealthy to you?
Ever been to France? They are some skinny folks. And they eat cheese, butter, bernaise, and bechamel like they're going out of style - in moderation.
Low-fat diets are a scam!
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
The primary reason it works is that lava has high temperature, but low heat capacity. Steam et. al. would not help if the lava was at 2000 degrees and high heat capacity. Lava walkers (walking across glowing coals) use very specific types of rock, for precisely this reason, their feet would be burnt to a crisp if you substituted a different type of rock. A more common example is aluminum foil in the oven. You can unwrap a baked potato with bare hands, but it is too hot to simply hold the unwrapped potato, even though they were both at 400 degrees.
--- I would prefer a prehensile tail....
b) All those leaves release a lot of steam which both moderates the temperature and steams the chicken.
Ten leaves, even if they are big leaves, contain far less water than the chicken itself does. So they will not moderate the temperature much more than the chicken itself would. Instead they are more useful to keep the outside from getting burnt.
My personal guess is that the lava is a poor conductor of heat, and is probably less than 2000 degrees F when you put it on the chicken.
Last summer, my girlfriend and I noticed that our previously diminuitive appearances were growing a little large for our tastes in mirror appearance. As such, we decided to go on the Plan.
What 'the Plan' was, we had no idea at the time. We figured it would be good the exercise, so we joined a fitness club. We figured it would be good to eat better, so we cut fat out of our diet almost entirely.
We worked out about every day, ate two to four large meals a day, nearly devoid of fat and very high in protein and simple carbs (read: sugar), and generally did everything we could to get healthy. It was a disaster. After about 2 months of zero results, we figured we needed to ask for help.
Fortunately, a friend of mine worked at the club we'd joined and gave us both discounts on training plans. We learned how to exercise (actually, we learned _how_ to learn: the advice that the trainers gave was mediocre, at best, but they did point us toward the best magazines and books and other resources to teach ourselves.). More importantly, however, we learned how to eat.
Easily 80% of being a healthier person is what goes in your mouth. Over the last 14 months or so, I've learned quite a bit about what to eat and how to eat it. Alton's advice is damn good, ("There are no bad foods"), but his execution is a bit off (I'm sure he knows more than he's saying, just pressed for time to answer the question).
Some advice:
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Don't eat what you watch. Take control over your eating habits. Don't be drawn in by colourful pictures or the golden arches. Don't grab a bag of Cheetos just because you're hungry. Impulse eating is easily prevented by a little willpower and forsight, and will prevent that 'Geek Girdle' from forming about your waste.
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Don't wait to eat. Don't let yourself get hungry. Hungry is bad. It means your body's metabolism is slowing down, and when you finally get around to feeding it again, you won't digest your food as effectively. Admitted, this effect is often negligable (evolution has seen to it that our bodies respond rather quickly to New Food), but staying up all night and not eating from dinner to breakfast can be damaging.
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Plan ahead. Eat breakfast, then grab a bagel and put some low-fat cream cheese (it's not really that low in fat, trust me, and don't bother with that crappy tasting fat-free junk) on it for later. That way when Bob brings in donuts, or Fred offers to go to McDonald's to get everyone a Super-Size French Fry at 11:00 am, you won't be tempted, because you won't be hungry (see #1--don't eat what you watch!).
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Balance, balance, balance! The hot item these days is 30-30-40: You should get 30% of you CALORIES from fat, 30% from protein, and 40% from carbohydrates. Note that a gram of fat has about 9 calories, while a gram of protein only has about 4. Watch your fat intake--it's easy to eat 1000 calories from fat in a plates of poorly-fried fish and chips! (Unless they're Alton's fish and chips, in which case eat up!)
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One more thing, which goes right along with what Alton says: Exercise. There are no bad foods, but if you eat anything, you need to give your body a way to burn off extra calories. Now, there are a million more reasons to exercise, but shedding extra pounds is a pretty good reason, IMHO.
There are a million online resources for the this stuff, and the #1 magazine (for guys) is Men's Health. For women, it's Shape. Hands down, these are quality magazines, and I've had a subscription to both (Shape for my g/f) for about a year.Plan ahead for meals as well as snacks. On Monday night, make yourself a huge batch of some of Alton's quality chicken (whatever kind you like) and just freeze it. When you feel like grabbing a bad of Doritos, go dump the chicken in a skillet for 10 minutes instead. More protein, more long-chain carbs, less fat: Better balance. Which of course leads to...
If you're trying to gain muscle through a program of weight lifting, eat more protein and more fat, fewer carbs. If your just trying to lose weight, 30-30-40 and a decrease in total calories should do the trick.
No doubt, taking cooking and shopping tips from Alton is a step toward health--he's a Seriously Intelligent Man!
thaen