Alton Brown Quotes

I feel like being on Broadway will convince my mother that my theater degree was worth it.

Take ice. Ice is fascinating to me. Ice is the one thing in our world that went from an agricultural product to being manufactured.

The problem is I am both a procrastinator and a power junkie, so I am very frustrating to work with.

Slicing a warm slab of bacon is a lot like giving a ferret a shave. No matter how careful you are, somebody's going to get hurt.

There are no bad foods, only bad food habits.

Butter typically melts around, you know, 90 Fahrenheit, as opposed to about 20 degrees higher for lard. So what that means is that when you're working with it, the lard is going to stay more solid, which is great for flakiness.

It's funny, when you look back in history books or American cookery books, one of the reasons that the quinces and cranberries are used so often is because of their natural jelling properties.

All that [replacing of fat] does is lead to dissatisfaction and I think that dissatisfaction results in overeating.

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.

The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.

Good service can save a bad meal, but there is no level of food that can save bad service.

'Outlaw Cook' was a revelation. Folks like Jeff Smith and Marcella Hazan got me interested in cooking, but John Thorne pushed me into the path that I follow to this day. This is the only cookbook I've ever read that understands how men really eat: over the sink, in the dark, greasy to the elbows.

A home cook who relies too much on a recipe is sort of like a pilot who reads the plane's instruction manual while flying.

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.

Believe me, a grain is a terrible thing to waste.

I never rated my cuddle factor, but I expect it's pretty low.

I'm a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn't understand what was going on with every single ingredient, I could be qualifying for, like, the lunch food job at my daughter's school.

What happens is that in each clump you've got the gelatinization of starches, which happens very quickly at the surface of the clump and it kind of forms a protective skin around this dry hunk of flour.

Racism. It's ugly. Even in tubers.

Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it's based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.

So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand, it's bee backwash.