Alton Brown Books In Order

Publication Order of Good Eats Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Alton Brown is an American actor, food personality, author, and cinematographer. He is also an “Iron Chef America” commentator and the host and creator of the miniseries “Feasting on Asphalt” and “Good Eats” the Food Network television show.

Brown was born in Los Angeles but his parents were originally from Cornelia, Georgia who went on their honeymoon in L.A. and never left. His father moved the family to Cleveland in the 1960s after buying a radio station and this was quite a culture shock to the young Brown.

Looking back, he had one of the worst public education and thinks it remarkable that he did not become a drug dealer. Perhaps it was the fact that he got into jazz music rather than laze about driving a Camaro and smoking joints.

He graduated high school at 16 and had to spend two years doing nothing before he joined LaGrange College. It was at the college that he discovered that he loved theater and began dreaming of becoming a filmmaker.

He transferred to the University of Georgia where he studied film and graduated to work in cinematography and film production.

Alton Brown is now known as the food philosopher as he takes a very philosophical approach to his work.

He first got interested in cooking while living in Atlanta where he was a director of TV commercials. He loved to watch food shows but soon found most of these were boring as he did not learn anything not even technique.

The turning point was when he one day started thinking and wrote down Monty Python / Mr. Wizard / Julia Child. He was thinking that if he could combine those things into one show, it would be a great show.

The old science show “Mr. Wizard” could explain how things worked, Julia Child could help people feel that they could do it and he could inject humor with “Monty Python.”

Brown had always believed that you can entertain people while educating them. Moreover, he also knew that it can be particularly difficult to engage people, especially on screen without entertaining them.

Alton Brown thus set out to come up with a show that was visually engaging and funny. He wanted to be able to write recipes as well as teach people what was going on behind the food combinations.

To achieve his ambition, Alton Brown had to go to culinary school which meant quitting his job. He enrolled at the Montpelier, Vermont-based New England Culinary Institute. It was a madhouse where the students cooked seven days a week which was quite a change for someone that was in his mid-thirties.

As a person that had also been brought up in Los Angeles, dealing with the snow in New England was quite a humbling experience. He did his first internship at a ski resort in Vermont that had a French restaurant.

He would come home each night and still remembers how much of a pain to have to remove the battery from the car each night. The car would not start if the battery was left in it overnight as it was too cold.

He ultimately graduated in 1997 and started working on the very popular “Good Eats” show.

“I’m Just Here for the Food” has been referred to as a mad science exploration of cooking rather than a cookbook.

In this work, Alton Brown explains the physics, chemistry, and processes that inform the different cooking methods as he breaks them down with consistent precision and hilarious commentary.

Brown explains how home equipment can be inaccurate and how to deal with that in a frankly ridiculous but very entertaining way.

It is a laugh-out-loud, hilarious, and sometimes disturbing work for anyone that may get a bit lackadaisical about sanitation in the kitchen. He breaks down hazards in many kitchen actions that many people usually take for granted.

While it does come with recipes, this is not your ordinary cookbook. The author tends to provide iconic and fairly standard blueprints as opposed to the specialty products of Brown’s cookery and kitchen.

This is best described as work that one needs to sit down and read rather than flip through the pages.

Alton Brown’s novel “Good Eats” is another book in which Alton Brown does a great job combining great advice and humor with solid facts. It comes with a wide variety of dishes and foods to prepare that range from the complex such as Burger of the Gods to simple biscuits that will keep readers wondering what will come next.

It also comes with pictures so that you can look at the way the food looks and should look at different stages. It includes more than 1000 illustrations and photographs and 140 recipes. This is in addition to food trivia, explanations of techniques, food jokes, food science information, and food puns.

One little annoyance is that the organization is all over the place. Alton prefers to have each food in its own section rather than have particular food together like it is done in other cookbooks.

Still, it comes with a table of contents at the beginning so one should not have any trouble locating the recipes. With some great tips and recipes, it makes for an interesting and witty work that will make a great addition to any kitchen.

Alton Brown’s “I’m Just Here for More Food” may best be described as a somehow informal instruction on how to make baked goods. The author sets out to show the nitty gritty the bolts and nuts on how to combine ingredients right up to when they are served.

It makes for a great work for anyone that needs to understand how the best dishes are made and how to improve their skills, particularly if they are not an advanced chef or food scientist.

He explores elements such as carbohydrates and proteins to give some practical tips and a basic understanding of how to combine elements to get the most out of your cooking. Brown also looks into core ingredients such as flour and eggs and helps to remove misapprehensions about the different types of flour and how to use them.

He concentrates his recipes and his techniques on several standard methodologies. Every technique and strategy whether it is for egg foam, muffins, custards, biscuits, straight dough, creaming, or pie variants comes with plain language of the whys and what in addition to being heavy on science.