Alton Crawford Brown Quotes

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.

You don’t want flame to hit your food. Flame is bad. Flame does nasty things to food. It makes soot and it makes deposits of various chemicals that are not too good for us. The last thing you really want to see licking at your food while it’s on a grill is an actual flame.

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.

We’re getting dumbed down, taste-wise.

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

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.

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

The thing that helped me get into the film business was that I went to school in Athens, Georgia and managed to get on, um, working on music videos for a band called R.E.M. and that kind of opened up a lot of doors for me.

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

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

The kitchen’s a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It’s biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there’s history. Yes, there’s artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.

That’s the ultimate goal of most turkey recipes: to create a great skin and stuffing to hide the fact that turkey meat, in its cooked state, is dry and flavorless. Does it have to be that way? No. We just have to focus on what the turkey is and what the turkey needs.

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

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.

So I quit my job and went to the New England Culinary Institute for the full two years and worked in the restaurant industry after that until finally I thought I had a grasp on what I needed to do what I do.

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.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren’t proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

‘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.

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.

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.