Alton Brown Quotes

If you taste something, you're not at the maximum of your ability. What I think about in competition is temperature and texture. It has nothing to do with taste or emotion.

The physics of water is central to cooking, because food is mostly water. All steak that you cook is actually boiled on the inside.

It's easy to discount water's importance in the kitchen. After all, it has no flavor, and more often than not, it's left off ingredient lists, making it seem like an afterthought. Yet water is an essential element of almost everything we cook and eat, and it affects the flavor and texture of all our food.

The reason bubbles are spherical is that a sphere is the smallest, most economical form possible to contain a given volume.

You need a blueprint to build a house because you need to know how far the concrete is going to be poured and you need to know how think the walls have to be.

Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.

In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

We (the Chinese) eat food for its texture, the elastic or crisp effect it has on our teeth, as well as for fragrance, flavor and color.

You can't blame a match for a house made of straw, Alek.

The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.

Every tub sits on its bottom.

Portal Bridge is based on a design from the 1840s and was already obsolete shortly after it was completed in 1910. It's a swing bridge that needs to be opened several times a week so barges can pass up and down the river. It takes about a half an hour. The problem is it fails to lock back into place on a regular basis.

Form is never more than an extension of content.

Any structure must have a strong foundation. The cornerstones anchor the foundation. For some reason the cornerstones that I chose to begin with I never changed.

So many of the chemical reactions occurring in living systems have been shown to be catalytic processes occurring isothermally on the surface of specific proteins, referred to as enzymes, that it seems fairly safe to assume that all are of this nature and that the proteins are the necessary basis for carrying out the processes that we call life.

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.

All of her bones seemed more purposeful than other people’s. Like they weren’t just there to hold her up, they were there to make a point.

Omelets are about technique. Now, different people make it different ways, but, if you're a chef in Europe, an omelet has to be cooked on the outside, with just a simmer of color, and the inside has to be soft. It should be cooked like a steak - medium rare.

In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenceless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a part.

When the forces that hold it together go away, the body must fall.

Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

An amino acid residue (other than glycine) has no symmetry elements. The general operation of conversion of one residue of a single chain into a second residue equivalent to the first is accordingly a rotation about an axis accompanied by translation along the axis. Hence the only configurations for a chain compatible with our postulate of equivalence of the residues are helical configurations.