Sakura of DOOM

I keep mentioning Good Eats and Alton Brown over and over again, so I figured it was probably about time that I actually dedicated an entire entry to them.

Good Eats is a half-hour show on Food Network hosted by Alton Brown. I think I first saw it rather randomly -- I didn't have TV channels for the first six months or so when I moved to California because I was too stingy. But every so often, I'd head over to my then boyfriend's place and veg out while he did assorted homework stuff and obsessively watch Food Network in hopes of catching Iron Chef or Emeril. And there was this program with this totally geeky guy who thought he was cool, and he'd talk about things like proteins and gluten and why the treatment of butter makes a huge difference in how a pie crust turns out.

He also used Ken and Barbie dolls to illustrate why one should salt oatmeal after the oats have soaked up water, not before.

"Look!" I called the boy over. "Look what this crazy guy on TV is doing! He's using dolls in his cooking show!"

Soon, I was heading over to the boy's place and turning on the TV specifically for Good Eats and even (*gasp*) ignoring Iron Chef in its favor. I watched other Food Network shows as well, but nothing was quite as entertaining. Also, I found that as I watched, I got irritated with other food shows because they never explained things like he did. Sure, there were occasional reminders as to why one should chill such and such before such and such, but they were random tidbits being tossed in, instead of being the core of the show.

Good Eats isn't so much a demonstration of different recipes as it is an explanation of how to cook; I didn't realize that there was a difference between the two before I watched the show. But Alton Brown goes into specifically why a recipe is constructed the way it is, what each step does to the food and why he chooses one cooking method over another. He even goes into how to pick equipment and why. And then there are the occasional forays into food anthropology. And of course, there's the science. I now know things about the two different types of starches in rice and why short grain rice is stickier than long grain rice, why long grain rice hardens when it gets cold, what happens to the gluten in flour when mixed when water and stirred.

I'm making this sound all educational. It is, but it's also one of my favorite TV shows because it is the goofiest thing ever. I love it because Alton Brown is the biggest geek ever, and he knows this and has centered his show around the geekiness. There are even recurring characters! (W is the equipment specialist who is constantly irritated by Alton Brown, then there's the mad French Chef and Lever-Man and Paul the Hapless Assistant, and etc.) Mostly, there are crazy props and totally weird ways to illustrate the science behind the cooking.

Alton Brown's also got a very specific philosophy of cooking that I like. There are no unitaskers in his kitchen (except the fire extinguisher), so he takes the things he has and improvises to get what he needs. And while he talks about the nutritional value of certain foods, he generally goes with what tastes good and works back from there to figure out what you get from it, instead of the other way around (I approve). But the thing that I love the most about the show is that you can tell that he adores what he does; he loves figuring out how everything works and he loves coming up with goofy analogies for things like sugar crystallization (high school dances).

I love this show and Alton Brown because next to Scrubs, it's one of the funniest things I watch and always makes me laugh, because it makes me think about the whys of cooking instead of just the hows, because it makes me feel less intimidated by complicated recipes and more confident of my own abilities for improvisation and adaptation (um, possibly completely over-ambitious abilities, given that I've only been cooking for two weeks!). Go watch! I'd watch even if I didn't cook -- well, I did watch for two whole years before I started to cook just for pure entertainment value.