Alton Brown Quotes

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.

There will never be a right or wrong way to cook something, but there will always be a more informed way.

If you can't think like an onion or a carrot or a tomato, you may be a technician, but you won't understand what you're doing, and your dish will be flat.

Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

Cooking is not a craft to get into for money. The money may come, or it may not. But you must get into it for the craft and the culture.

Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for a painter, or the cap of Fortunatus for a conjurer.

Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.

It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge.

I love Alton Brown's show 'Good Eats,' about the chemistry of food. It's really thoughtful.

It's my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown.

Food is art and science. So, you take something out, you have to work with the recipe to make sure that you're providing delicious food with cleaner labels.

I remember loving food tech because of the precision and the creativity, the weights and measures, the tiny glimpses of flavour.

Food has always been at the frontier of creativity.

As a chef, I got into this because I love the creative energy and I love the science, but I also love to feed people and make them happy.

I like that talented chefs are able to keep coming up with new ways of preparing food - it really is an art form.

Being a chef never seems like a job, it becomes a true passion.

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.

Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.

Cooking is work that is traditionally done by working-class people. The work itself is not glamorous. It's repetitive, and it's a lot closer to factory work than art, whatever level you're doing it at. Certainly chefs are used to living like rock 'n' rollers to some extent, inasmuch as we get a lot of those fringe benefits without having to learn how to play guitar.

As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing.

The art of cookery is the art of poisoning mankind, by rendering the appetite still importunate, when the wants of nature are supplied.

When I first started cooking, I was very much an intuitive cook when it came to taste, but that didn't mean I didn't want to know why some things worked and why others did not. My interest took me to culinary school.

At culinary school, none of the things we use to define ourselves outside that world - actor, producer, student - none of that matters. It's a magical art form.