More Food from Alton Brown

By JULIETTE ROSSANT It's a cold, wintery day, and my mind is "riffing" on baking (to borrow a musical term that rockstar-wannabe Rocco DiSpirito has been using on his radio talkshow Food Talk lately). Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food, subtitled "food x mixing + heat = baking," stirred my fancy the minute it hit my desk. I quickly flipped through looking for photos: there aren't any, I discovered. There is plenty more mold-breaking where that comes from. Take fold-out sections at the beginning of each chapter with good baking tips. How about the fun language like hardware, the dry goods, the liquids, and the fats or the demystifying with good drawing illustrations, or the list of mistakes and how to correct them in "The Creaming Method" chapter. Who ever heard of naming a chapter after a method not a fruit or a flavor? And here's the big surprise for branding mavens: take the dust jacket off and no Alton Brown, nada, nobody, nuffin. Here is a Media success story who stands so strongly behind his work that his face is not plastered all over his books (I'm not thinking of anyone in particular -- not Emeril, for instance). Alton's More Food follows his first, I'm Just Hear For the Food (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, October 2004) which won a 2003 James Beard award as reference book (click here to see Alton's acceptance speech), and I suspect this one will too. He is the producer, writer and host of the Food Network's Good Eats, which I happened to have caught recently on oatmeal, the same day The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and it seems every other paper was hawking the benefits of this noble grain. Alton made oatmeal seem so wonderful I regretted it was an afternoon flight and I wouldn't be able to get any until the next morning. For me, Alton is Bill Nye the Science Guy meets Celebrity Chef, part-nerd, part-improv, part-foodie enthusiast. I checked out Alton's recipe for oatmeal cookies (pp.198-199). It isn't a very sophisticated recipe, but that isn't the point. All the ingredients are measured in both weight (grams and ounces) and volume (cups) which makes a lot of sense to me since weight is much more accurate than volume. He explains the creaming method and why it is used in cookies. I love to read about the whys and what-fors behind what I am doing -- explanation with instruction. In fact, I recommend the book purely based on the excellence of Alton's explanations, since the recipes themselves are fairly everyday. This is a wonderful book for a starting cook, or a high school student who wants to apply science in the real world, or a great home cook who finally wants to know why she has been doing something just so all these years. Previous articles: Manju Malhi's India With Passion SOS: Baking from the Heart Madhur Jaffrey: Our Lady of India, CBE All Hail Alfred Portale Agassi's Star Palate: Celebrity Chefs Book Links: Publisher Amazon.com Technorati Tags: chefs restaurants food cookbooks biography branding reality tv -> back to superchefblog