Alton Brown
Alton Brown
Alton Crawford Brownis an American television personality, food show presenter, author, actor, and cinematographer. He is the creator and host of the Food Network television show Good Eats, host of the mini-series Feasting on Asphalt and Feasting on Waves, and host and main commentator on Iron Chef America, Cutthroat Kitchen and Camp Cutthroat. Brown is also the author of several books on food and cooking...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChef
Date of Birth30 July 1962
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
The problem is I am both a procrastinator and a power junkie, so I am very frustrating to work with.
The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.
I started cooking in college to get girls, ... I was pathetic. Girls didn't want to go out with me. But I found that if I offered to cook for a girl, there was more of a chance that she'd say yes.
My feeling has always been that Good Eats would have never happened had it been left to a committee.
It's not perfect by any means, but I do think I wrote a pretty good argument for it being better than shoving your hand over the fire.
I think a lot of food shows, especially when we started 'Good Eats' back in the late '90s, they were still really about food. 'Good Eats' isn't about food, it's about entertainment. If, however, we can virally infect you with knowledge or interest, then all the better.
My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera
Seriously. I'm not very bright, and it takes a lot for me to get a concept - to really get a concept. To get it enough that it becomes part of me. But when it happens I get real excited about it
I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do.
I kept thinking, 'Somebody has to make a food show that is actually educational and entertaining at the same time... a show that got down to the 'why things happen.' Plus, I hated my job - I didn't think it was very worthwhile
My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.
My mantra was to educate people - to actually give them the know-how they could use - and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.
Well, you know, when you go into a restaurant, one of the scariest things is the wine list, so whenever I'm really feeling intimidated, I'll just pick a wine type, like a Chianti or Brunello or a Burgundy, and I'll pick a year that's missing and ask for that one.
You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.