Quotes By Alton Brown

'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.

The worst food you'll ever eat will probably be prepared by a 'cook' who calls himself a 'chef.' Mark my words.

Very good cooks who are employed as 'chefs' rarely refer to themselves as 'chefs.' They refer to themselves as 'cooks.'

Stuffing is evil. Stuffing adds mass, so it slows the cooking. That's evil because the longer the bird cooks, the drier it will be.

Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful.

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.

Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.

Unless your kid is Pele Jr., they're not going to be able to feed themselves from soccer. If your kid knows how to play soccer, but not make dinner, you have done them a disservice.

I'm like a really goofy home ec teacher.

I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don't want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don't know what I'm talking about.

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.

I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.

A balanced diet may be the best medicine. I was eating too much good eats. But people consider that part of your job, you know? Eat. And I do!

I can't talk about anything or write about anything if I don't understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.

My feeling has always been that 'Good Eats' would have never happened had it been left to a committee.

I looked for a very long time, knowing that it had to happen, but it took me a long time to find someone with the same background and whatnot and I finally found him.

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

I say grace. I'm a big believer in grace. I happen to believe in a God that made all the food and so I'm pretty grateful for that and I thank him for that. But I'm also thankful for the people that put the food on the table.

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.

I grill, therefore I am.

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

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.

Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.

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.

I think in the end there are only 20 or 30 tenets of basic cooking. It's going at perhaps the same issue from different angles, from different points of view, from different presentation styles, that really makes things sink in and become embedded.

I love poking fun at myself. I have a rather mean sense of humor.

I grill almost all of my fish with the skin on because that gives you real protection at least on one side. It's a nice barrier against super high heat which tends to make a lot of fish to turn really flaky. It's very easy to overcook fish on the grill. But I still brush it with oil before I start.

Do not allow watching food to replace making food.

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.

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.