Alton Brown Quotes

I always buy the smaller turkeys. On the pre-baste put pats of butter on the meat under the skin, put the skin back on, put a bunch of seasoning on the top, call it a day, put it in the oven. With a 10 - 12 pound turkey you are done in a couple of hours.

Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.

I've roasted a somewhat frozen turkey, and it's come out just fine.

We don't yet call it 'Thxgvng,' because any holiday whose centerpiece sits in an oven for four to six hours, after having sat out for as long to reach room temperature, must be spelled all the way out. Cook a turkey. You'll see. This is to say that you're not just roasting a turkey, obviously.

Repeatedly opening the oven - or worse, taking out the turkey to baste it - slows down the momentum of cooking.

The most important thing with turkey is to let it rest - most people don't let it rest long enough. It will get juicier the longer you let it rest.

Cooking turkey every year doesn't have to be monotonous - I want people to always mix it up using different spices and preparations.

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.

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.

My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods.

A week before Thanksgiving, my mother bought the turkey, frozen. Then she froze it some more. Then she let it thaw and cleaned it - and I mean really cleaned it, because nobody wanted a 'dirty bird.' She salt-and-peppered the turkey, buttered, paprika-ed, and nominally stuffed it.

Always deep fry in a nonreactive, heavy pot with high sides, like an enameled Dutch oven. A heavy pot ensures even heating which means more even cooking.

When you roast a chicken perfectly, there's nothing more delicious.

The turkey - my number one thing that people don't get is take that sucker out of the refrigerator about three hours before you plan on cooking it.

A lot of people who want to cook with less fat are surprised by that. You can cook vegetables in a little water in a covered pan and then throw the fat into the residual liquid to coat them.

With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not.

Short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously.

You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin - the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn't steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it's hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it's cold, the other way around.

I love roasting because you can give it love, get it in the oven and go and play with the kids or whatever you've got to do, and then hours later you've got a lovely dinner.

In certain European cuisines, vegetables are cooked a long time. I take the term 'al dente' and use it for vegetables.

I love to cook a meal for the so-called holidays. You always need the turkey. I like making a good BBQ brisket as well.

You can't make a souffle rise twice.

My sense of humor is a turkey, and I pull it out of the oven and baste it in reality.

Steaming maintains some of the aubergine flesh's texture, which doesn't happen if you cook it in any other way.

I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.