The only way to know whether someone is a great cook is to eat their food. Furthermore, more than one person’s opinion is required to determine if someone can generally be said to be a great cook or even a good one. So, is renowned food educator and TV cook Alton Brown a great cook? We have no way of knowing. He has not cooked for enough people, often enough, to be deemed a great cook. People assume he is a great cook. But, he’s never owned a restaurant, which is the only way a cook (or chef if you prefer) can prove that he or she is indeed great at cooking, according to a preponderance of people.
Alton Brown’s Knowledge is Extraordinary
Alton Brown is an extraordinarily knowledgeable cook, although he claims to prefer the term ‘foodist.’ However, other than portraying a cook on television, he has never really shared his cooking with the world. I don’t mean his recipes, but his actual cooking. It is often claimed that he “has some experience in the restaurant world.” However, according to TastingTable.com, that experience is in the form pizza delivery. While attending college, Brown delivered pizzas for a pizza restaurant called Sons Of Italy in Athens, Georgia.
I too, delivered pizzas for a while after leaving the military and trying to make a go with my own rock band (familiar story, I know). I worked for Dominos. So, I’m certainly not denigrating Brown’s first job. However, it does not count as the type of ‘restaurant experience’ that credentials you as a cook, chef, or foodist. He also got a taste of the television industry by working as a cameraman, which led him to become a cinematographer and video editor.
Attended New England Culinary Institute
Alton Brown is formally trained in cooking, though! He attended the New England Culinary Institute. He did so with the specific goal of making food shows for television, not to become a restaurant chef.
There is certainly a lot more to being a restaurant chef than being a fantastic cook, but the point is that displaying knowledge of food science does not mean you can cook. If you believe that then you will assume I am a great cook, with no evidence. Demonstrating dishes on television does not really tell us anything about the food’s taste, texture, etc. So, given his knowledge and formal training, Alton Brown probably is a good cook. I doubt he is a great cook. This is, of course, only my opinion.
Alton Brown’s Cooking Skills
My opinion is based on some observations, though. For example, some of the skills that a restaurant cook needs are relevant to home cooks. Most of us cook for more than one person, for instance. Alton Brown occasionally would prepare food for many people. I remember him making a boatload of donuts. Most of the time, he cooked for one person on his famous TV show, Good Eats.
He himself has said that the reason he never wanted to be a restaurant chef is that he never wanted to work that hard. 1https://www.foodrepublic.com/1392226/why-alton-brown-never-owned-restaurant/ Well, Mr. Brown, cooking every day for a family is hard work. It requires a modicum of planning, efficiency, and, as I’ll get to, a sense of practicality.
His Questionable Taste
Despite all this, my biggest reason for thinking Alton Brown is not a great cook is that I question not his cooking ability but his basic taste. That is, his recipes often use ingredients and methods that will lead to a less-than-pleasurable experience, although he seems to believe the dish is great. A chef must perfect his recipes. Alton Brown can tell you anything he wants and can declare all his recipes perfect based on his own subjective opinion and experience.
The same can be said of any TV cook but before Alton Brown came along, most other famous television chefs, despite some notable exceptions, had honed their chops through successful restaurant careers. They have satisfied customers to prove that they can, and have, perfected a recipe or two. Today, food television is about passive entertainment rather than cooking, so it is much more common to find non-professionals with cooking shows.
I’ll give you an example of Brown’s questionable taste. Alton Brown’s recipe of Spinach and Artichoke Dip. To make it easier, he forgoes that pesky bechamel sauce and uses mayonnaise as a base. Mayonnaise based recipes proliferate on the web as food bloggers seek to give home cooks what they most want: shortcuts. What do you think Spinach and Artichoke Dip tastes like when you use mayonnaise instead of bechamel or cream base, and, of course, cheese? It tastes like mayonnaise.
And there is not much you can do to make it not taste like mayonnaise, lest you end up with a dish that is no longer Spinach and Artichoke Dip but some heavily spiced and adulterated mayonnaise with a bunch of spinach and artichoke hearts. I guess you could call it aioli with spinach and artichoke to sell it. The mayonnaise overpowers the star ingredients. This is a question of taste, purely speaking. If you really like mayonnaise that much, you’ll love it.
Here is another example. I recently noticed that, back in 2016, he offered some corrections or clarifications for his book EveryDayCook on the book’s website. These were presumably addressed in upcoming editions. One of the clarifications concerned his recipe for ‘Perfect’ oatmeal. Buyers had complained that it called for too much salt. His response was that he kind of liked it that way, but you could reduce the salt. What makes his oatmeal perfect if the salt is not adjusted to suit the tastes of most people or at least more than one person? Food is subjective, and Brown, subjectively, seems to like too much salt in his oatmeal. It’s a matter of taste, not ability.
Making Stuff Up
When someone prepares a dish on television and tells you how delicious it is, you have only their word for it. This means that, in reality, a TV cook can do and say anything, especially since they know very few people will try to duplicate the recipe. One occasion in which Brown just ‘made stuff up’ is when he told his viewers they could roast peanuts in the shell and make the peanuts salty by coating the shells with salt and oil. This would not, in any way, cause the salt to penetrate the shells. It would only result in a salty coating on the outside of the shells themselves. Yet, he pretended as if this method worked.
I could go on and lampoon his recipes but I’m not trying to convince you that you should not buy Alton Brown’s cookbooks. You’d probably be missing out on a lot of good recipes, and also some bad ones. The same holds true of the cookbooks of any author. The question we are grappling with is whether Alton Brown is a great cook. As I’ve said, I think he’s probably a good cook. But, I cannot declare him a great cook based on objective evidence.
If food is subjective, what do I mean by objective evidence? Well, Gordon Ramsay, whom I also question, is a phenomenal chef. I do not have to eat his food to know that. I have objective evidence of his prowess. Not only his awards but his success. When a large enough sample of the public says you are a great cook, then we can say, objectively, in a general sense, that you are a great cook. This leaves room for any one individual to differ. In other words, we decide whether we think someone is a good cook the same way we decide whether anything is good. Ice cream is good.
We have no similar evidence of Alton Brown’s prowess as a cook. We have copious evidence of his knowledge of cooking, including cooking techniques. We also know that he understands food science better than most professional chefs and has an amazing knowledge of food stuffs in general. But, as for his cooking, we have to take his word for it. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone attest to having eaten Brown’s food and declaring it extraordinary.
His skills as a cook are also questionable. Part of being a skilled cook is being able to task manage. A great cook doesn’t cook only for one person… themselves! I think we can agree that you can never be called a great cook when you have never cooked a meal for multiple people to experience. Again, we have little to no evidence of Brown’s ability to do this. This brings to the forefront his sense of practicality.
Alton Brown and the Unitasker – Is He Practical
Brown is famous for his dislike of what he calls unitaskers..those kitchen gadgets that only do one thing in the kitchen, and nothing else. With some minor exceptions, he advocates that home cooks should only supply their kitchen with tools that can do many tasks. I agree, wholeheartedly. Brown has a sense of the practical. Yet, his practicality can be called into question.
I recently saw a video on his YouTube channel where he talked about and demonstrated his preferred method for grilling a steak. He prepared one large porterhouse steak on a charcoal grill using whole lump charcoal instead of charcoal briquettes. His method was a curious one. He used the chimney starter as a cooker.
After getting the charcoal ready inside the chimney starter, he didn’t put the coals into the grill. He left them inside the starter. He placed the steak on the grill and put the coal-filled chimney starter on top of the steak.
To make the steak fit, he had to remove the bone from the steak and then tie both of the resulting pieces together. Score zero for practicality. He then cooked the steak underneath the chimney starter. I never cooked a steak quite that close to burning coals but to each his own. The result was a bit more of a char than I would want on a steak, but Brown seemed to get the result he wanted, and deemed them superior.
To cook more than one steak this way you’d need more than one chimney starter, a very, very large grill surface, and a whole lot more coal than you would normally use. In other words, score a negative 10 for practicality. Why would a person trying to help people learn to cook well advocate a method that nobody could use to cook for a family or even two people? Alton Brown, in this case, seems to be unclear about his audience.
In truth, Brown has never had any true need to develop more practical and efficient methods in his cooking. As well, he has never had any need to become a truly great cook. He went to cooking school for the express purpose of trying to start a cooking show. America got to know his cooking through this show, Good Eats, and it was a foregone conclusion that he was a great cook. After all, he had his own cooking show. I was a big fan of Good Eats, although I admit that I have not enjoyed what he has done since.
From what I’ve experienced of his recipes, and from what I can see from some of his methods, Alton Brown is a good cook, but not a great one. His taste is questionable and the flavors he prefers may not necessarily appeal to a wide audience. While there is a great deal of cooking knowledge to be gained from viewing his TV shows, to follow his recipes is hit or miss (as with most published recipes).
