Original Link: http://www.buffalonews.com/185/story/291892.html
May 05, 2008
 

Celebrity chef Alton Brown is the crown prince of food TV

By Andrew Z.Galarneau - News Staff Reporter
Updated: 03/05/08

    Call Alton Brown the crown prince of food television, and he politely insists you're mistaken. That is, after all, how true nobility handles these gauche questions of status. It matters not, Brown says, that "Good Eats," his smart- yet- slapstick creation, has replaced the Food Network's former flagship, Emeril Lagasse's "Emeril Live," in the prime- time 8 p. m. slot. "That is in no way, fashion or form a move up any kind of ladder," he avers.

    Also not important: In January, the Network signed Brown through 2011, a longer contract than superstar Rachael Ray's. Locally, he's set to appear at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Seneca Niagara Casino for a cooking demonstration.

    He'll continue anchoring "Iron Chef America," add new shows like "Feasting on Waves." And "Good Eats," which has redefined the boundaries of the how-to-cook genre since its first broadcast in 1998, has also been picked up for three more years.

    Surely now Brown can admit that his bespectacled visage, with its characteristic tousled blond hairdo, is one of the most recognizable faces in food television?

   "Oh good Lord, no," he says immediately. "Gosh no. Where are you getting your numbers?"

    From industry bible Broadcasting & Cable, actually. Good Eats "performed better with younger audiences and drew higher ratings" than "Emeril Live," it reported in January. Brown, it said, "is in many ways the face of the network."

    The face of the network is having none of it. "I'm still pretty much under the radar, I think."

    So here's a brief sketch, for those remaining in the dark.

    Brown, 45, was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Georgia. He got a drama degree from the University of Georgia, and also studied film writing and editing. He was notably bad at science.

    While working for a television commercial production firm, Brown met DeAnna Collins, a production manager. She not only agreed to marry him, but backed his notion that he could come up with a better cooking show than the ones he soaked up religiously on television.

They quit their jobs and moved to Vermont so Brown could enroll in the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier. She supported them while he learned that he'd better succeed at television, because he'd never make it as a chef.

    In 1998, the first "Good Eats" episodes aired on Chicago public television, and the show caught the attention of Food Network.

    Every episode contains enough science and history to support a graduate seminar, folded into a frothy cocktail of sight gags and riffs on classic movies. So a show on icing, called "The Icing Man Cometh," uses a food scientist, Tinkertoys and puppets to teach viewers how cooking changes sugar.

   Instead of dumping ingredients into a pan and proclaiming them yummy, "Good Eats" tries to explain what yumminess is made of, and how you can create yumminess without simply relying on picking the right recipe. The bad science student is now winning awards for the innovative ways he translates complicated science into easy-to-swallow bites.

    The formula has been a hit, and Be Square Productions, Brown's company, now has seven full-time employees and its own studio in Atlanta. The payroll swells to about 30 with free-lance film talent when the company is shooting "Good Eats."

    DeAnna Brown, while being a full-time mother to their 8-year-old daughter Zoey, runs the whole shebang. "She likes to say that I'm the brains and she's the reins," he says. "I think that's not giving her enough credit."

    He still gets to cook dinner for the family about half the time. "My home cooking is extraordinarily simple, and very fast," he says. "We come up with methods to do things even faster than the average household."

    The years passing has meant changes for Brown.

    "Watching myself get old and fat on television is really difficult," he says. "I don't watch my show any more because I don't want to watch the old ones."

    But he's not going to go Hollywood. "I refuse to wear makeup, and I refuse to bow down and say, ‘Oh gee I need to look glamorous, and skinny,' " he says. "I'm just a guy, and this is how guys look."

    Healing comes slower, too. On Christmas Eve he smashed his left wrist while hurrying to get in a shower before services at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church. Repairs required eight screws and a titanium plate.

    "There's nothing like lying there wet, naked, with your arm bent around at the wrong angle," he says. "That really has affected me. These last months have been really hard, trying to get it rehabilitated enough to where I could even shoot."

    But television schedules wait for no man, and by February Brown was shooting "Good Eats" again. Up ahead are "Feasting on Waves," a sequel of sorts to Brown's "Feasting on Asphalt," which combined culinary discoveries, history and digressions with a cross-country motorcycle ride.

    There's also a "Feasting on Rails" coming (to be shot mostly outside the U.S.) and even a "Feasting in Air and Space," which, Brown deadpans, "I'm looking forward to."

    Nearly 10 years into "Good Eats," Brown has plenty more to say about food.

    "I feel that the subject is such a switchboard — the more I look at it, the more I see everything connecting through it," he says. "If I honestly thought the subject was beginning to run itself dry, I would immediately interpret that as a lack of depth of my own imagination."

    Amid his dream job, Brown confessed to one unscratched itch: to share his opinions on food issues of the day. "As I get older and my daughter gets older I find myself having leanings that are more political, meaning I want to draw lines in the sand on certain things and say, this is right and this is wrong," he says.

    But there's no place in "Good Eats" for that stuff, he says

    "I would rather just illuminate and inform, so I've got to get the political part out of me," he says. "I need to become more neutral, which is hard for me. I don't feel very neutral these days."

    Oh, do tell.

   "No, no, no," he replies. "My own personal politics are my business. I'm just a TV cook. I got no right to air that stuff, yet."

    So is Brown struggling to stay bland?

    "I don't think bland, simply neutral" says Brown. "I'd like to remain Switzerland."

A few more bites from Alton Brown

By Andrew Galarneau
Updated: 03/05/08 12:05 PM

Here are some excerpts from our interview with Alton Brown, who will stage a cooking demonstration Saturday at the Seneca Niagara Casino:

What "Good Eats" episode are you working on right now?

All I can tell you is that it's a show about freezing food. That's all I can tell you.

Aww. Is liquid nitrogen involved?

I am forbidden, in fact, from disclosing any of the details.

I read that you were picked up by Food Network for another three years.

Pick up is such a cheap term. It's kind of tawdry, as if I was looking for a ride or something. Let's just say the Food Network and I are continuing our allegiance to one another for three more years.

They still own the show itself.

They own Good Eats. Absolutely they own it. But, we kind of own it together. I mean … no, that's not true. I can't take it somewhere else, and I wouldn't take it someplace else.

But what you get from it is …

I get regular employment.

You also become one of the most recognizable faces on food television.

Oh good lord no. Gosh no. Where are you getting your numbers?

It wasn't me who replaced Emeril with Alton Brown.

I didn't replace Emeril by any stretch of the imagination. I think that it was simply that Emeril's show was going to kind of morph into something else, he's got other things to do, and Good Eats was close in its time frame already. We were already on at 7.

That is in no way, fashion or form a move up of any kind of ladder, by any means.

If there was one cooking technique you could teach average Americans, what would it be?

I've got a real thing about heat application. I think if there was going to be one thing that would really change a lot of people's cooking, it would be learning how to saute properly. Because not only is saute a manufacturing process in itself, it's a step in a lot of recipes. I see it done incorrectly more than I see mistakes made as much in other areas.

That's one thing I would bestow on everyone. Once you've got that down, it's a pretty powerful tool.

The number one mistake people make while trying to saute is?

Heat management. We are afraid of getting things hot enough in this country. We will choose a tool for the job based on its name instead of its characteristics. I hate that there's something called a saute pan. Because that tells people that's the pan for the job.

We don't often choose the correct vessel, and we often apply incorrect dosages of heat. That's not because we're bad people, it's just tricky. And if you're not taught how to do it, it's a very difficult thing to get.

How do you square your high-powered media career with catering to the tastes of your daughter? Who actually cooks at your house?

My wife and I split it almost 50-50. There was a time, before my daughter was born, that I think I probably did 80 percent of the cooking. But because my daughter really needs to be in bed by a certain time and needs to be fed by a certain time, there are a lot of days when I just don't get there soon enough. If I do, I cook. If not, my wife definitely cooks.

There are some things my wife does that are far better than things that I do. She's an extraordinary good baker, for instance. So she does all the baking in the house.

My home cooking is extraordinarily simple, and usually really, really fast. We come up with methods to do things even faster than the average household.

But my daughter's coming along OK. She was a real food terrorist for a while. She's 8 now, so her palate is maturing, and opening up and becoming more accepting of certain things. She's working on it.

I'm asking because I have an 8-year-old daughter named Zoe who refuses, for instance, to eat anything on her pasta but oil and salt.

She still doesn't really like things touching. She wants everything separate. She likes to eat everything of one thing on her plate and then go to the next thing. Of course, she always manages to get to her vegetables last, so she's too full, supposedly, to eat them in toto.

She's getting better with the mixture of things. She will eat, for instance, spaghetti and meat sauce with the two of them actually integrated. But it's tough.

Give me one example of a cooking technique you use to get dinner on the table fast.

One of our favorites, just because of the size of the family, is Cornish hens. What we do is butterfly the Cornish hens, we cut out the breastbone and lay them out flay, and cook them in a Panini press. I think it's made by Krups.

It's such a great method because it perfectly browns … almost fries, in fact … both sides of the flattened bird. The bird's done in 12 minutes.

Crispy.

Crispy as all get out. Potato chip crispy. And done perfect through and through, because it's getting the heat from both sides, compressed. Since it's got the bar thing, you even get the little ridges. It's a fantastic way of cooking meat.

Can you share any Good Eats ideas that were too crazy for the show?

Things are rarely too crazy for me. Thing are usually too expensive for me. There have been a couple shows where musical numbers disappeared, because they're just too gosh darned expensive.

There was a recent scene that involved people being put into suspended animation on a spaceship … that was going to be kind of pricy. There was a roller coaster scene that got cut, for logistics problems. The aforementioned musical number, which involved about 20 dancing Girl Scouts, so that went down the hill as well.

Has becoming a rockstar of food put a crimp on your personal life? Can you go out to dinner without people bugging you?

Nobody bugs me. There's no rock star thing that I've noticed. I don't live in a gated community. I go to the grocery store. I don't seem to have any of that.

People don't come up to your table in restaurants?

Very, very rarely. No. I'm still pretty much under the radar, I think. Certainly, with Food Network, and a lot of other media homes, there are really big fish, and then really little fish, and medium fish, and the medium fish still move about unencumbered.

I don't live the life that a Rachael Ray or a Bobby Flay or a Tyler Florence or a Paula Deen lives, where I think their lives really have become different because of recognition. When they go out on the street, it's different. I've been on the network 10 years and that just hasn't happened. That's fine. I don't need superstardom. I don't need any of that kind of stuff. I just prefer being left to be normal.

I hate to disappoint you, but if you're looking for a conversation with one of them rockstar cooks, you better find yourself another.

I think you're selling yourself a little bit short.

There really hasn't been any lifestyle shift at all. In an average week of going about my life, I bet I get stopped once every other week.

It's probably different in New York, though.

The only times I've ever been stopped by people in New York, it wasn't New Yorkers. They wouldn't do that. They live with real celebrities, the place is packed with them. It'll be people from, like, Ohio. Schoolkids in from New Jersey for the day.

Any signs this whole food media craze might be peaking?

I feel that the subject is such a switchboard … the more I look at it, the more I see everything connecting through it. If I honestly though the subject was beginning to run itself dry, I would immediately interpret that as a lack of depth of my own imagination.

The only thing you can run out of is easy approaches. The thoughtful ones, there's still plenty.

There's always more stories to tell. There's more going on. Such a rich depth of material. We're just really now starting to understand certainly in the global world we live in, the effect has. Now that we know how to make our risotto Milanese, let's talk about the effect of eating that risotto Milanese, or where the food comes from. It's all so connected on the planet, I think we're just starting to really look at food as a serious subject.

I saw that your contract calls for some specials. Are you going to go a little Edward R. Murrow on us there?

If given the opportunity, yeah. I have said for a few years that I would like to do more serious … I don't mean serious, as in boring … things that really look at things.

Sustainability, and some of those other food issues.

If it is a concern about food, if it is an issue pertaining to food, it is suitable and appropriate for the Food Network to deal with it. Whether it's sustainability, or green this or green that, whatever it is. I'd love to see Food Network as being the place where people who have any question about food can go. Whether it's current events, or making a wedding cake. Or political ramifications of different things.

But the thing that we have to do is that we also have to make it entertaining. That's the challenge. And I think it's a good challenge. It's one of the things I'm most looking forward to, the next decade of my career.

If there's anybody who can make heads or tails out of the new farm subsidies bill, and make it interesting, why not you?

I'd certainly like to. The problem is that it's going to mean moving into the realm of critic.

As I get older and my daughter gets older I find myself having leanings that are more political, meaning I want to draw lines in the sand on certain things and say, this is right and this is wrong. That's one way of going. The other is simply to illuminate and inform.

I would rather just illuminate and inform, so I've got to kind of get the political part out of me. I need to become more neutral, which is hard for me these days. I don't feel very neutral these days.

What do you mean?

It means I have really strong feelings about things, certainly about food. The effect of the way we eat. How we're affecting the planet, how we're affecting each other. I've got some ideas that I think some people would find relatively, um, unattractive. Not unattractive. Just not, um, neutral. Let's put it that way.

So I've got to decide whether I can swallow my opinions and be a neutral illuminator, or not.

Of course I must now ask you for examples of these non-neutral opinions.

No, no, no. My own personal politics are my business. I'm just a TV cook. I got no right to air that stuff … yet.

If your contract doesn't allow you …

It's nothing like that. It's kind of like you listen to actresses and actors talk about politics, I just want to say, "My gosh, shut up. Who cares?"

Politics... politics is one thing. But when it comes to matters regarding food, surely you would agree you've established credentials for yourself.

There's a difference between having the credentials that allow you credulity in explaining a subject, or that allow you the aura of expertise. Yes, I have earned that in certain ways. But that has absolutely nothing to do with what my opinions might be.

My opinions come out of a very different place. My opinions don't come out of my knowledge of food. They come out of other factors, the things that make me who I am, and are reflected through my knowledge of food.

I don't think I'm paid or looked to to be opinionated, or to steer food culture. I think I'm paid to illuminate, and hopefully give people tools they can use to make their lives better. And ultimately, just to say, this is hopefully a half hour of television that's worth you and your family sitting down and watching. I'm wary of sowing that with the contamination of my own convictions.

In some ways, it sounds like Alton Brown's struggling to seem bland.

I don't think bland, simply neutral. I'd like to remain Switzerland. I don't think I have the qualifications of being a social editor or social engineer, and I'm a lousy critic.

There's those things that I see going on in the food world that I think reflect on larger issues that are problematic, or that I really wish would change. For just as many other reason, other people would not want them to change.

What's the least favorite part of your career, besides pesky interviewers?

That's definitely at the top.

Watching myself get old and fat on television is really difficult. I really do not watch my show any more because I don't want to watch the old ones. I don't want to see how I've aged in the last five years. My daughter likes to taunt me with that. She'll see a show from 1999 and say, "Hey daddy, who's that? The skinny guy with hair." That's tough.

But I refuse to bow down. I refuse to wear makeup, and I refuse to bow down and say Oh gee I need to look glamorous, and skinny. I'm just a guy, and this is how guys look. Believe it or not.

Lately it's been tough. On Christmas Eve I shattered my left wrist, badly. Had to have a titanium plate put in, I have eight screws in my arm now. It was really debilitating. It made me feel fragile, and old. I don't bounce back the way I used to. It's been a downer.

How'd you do that?

Getting. In. The shower. Hurrying, trying to get to church on Christmas Eve. My wife and daughter had gone ahead, I'd been cooking for people who were coming over.

I was in a hurry, got in, and both feet went out from under me. There's a little transom on the shower stall, and my full weight on my wrist went right down on that transom. It just exploded. Broke my ulna, kind of shattered the radius into several pieces.

You just broke your clavicle in a motorcycle accident last year.

This was a lot worse. There's nothing like lying there wet, naked, with your arm bent around at the wrong angle. That really has affected me. These last months have been really hard, trying to get it rehabilitated enough to where I could even shoot.

How much of your success has had to do with what your wife does behind the scenes?

Gosh. That can't be overestimated. I'm one of the people who will have the ideas, then I'll say, that can't be done, or I can't do it. She and I were working together back in the early '90s, before we were married. I was a hobbyist cook at the time, and she was a production manager for a company where I was a director.

She tells the story very well, the day I came in and said, 'I've got an idea for a food show.' And everything that happened after that was because when I was going to turn around and walk away from pursuing that dream, she was there to say "No, you can do this."

When I decided to quit my job and go off to culinary school to get the background I would need to make the show, she was there and supported me by saying, "Look you can go, but we go together. We both quit our jobs, we both go together, we're not going to split up."

To this day, she's a full-time mom and she runs this company full-time. Lawyers, insurance, accountants, all the money. All of that. She basically has made it her professional mission to give me what I need to do this work. There's absolutely no question it could not be done without her. She's the business.

She likes to say that I'm the brains and she's the reins. But I think that's not giving her enough credit.

I've seen you lamenting the restrictions of a half-hour show. You've also written four books, including "I'm Just Here for the Food." Are books easier because you can pack more into them?

No. Books are even more frustrating. Even though you can fit more in there, you can't swing mistakes. All the mistakes are there for everybody to see all the time. A TV show's an ephemeral experience, it goes by and it's over, it's temporal. Books sit there and stare at you, and say "Look. You could have done this better, dummy." You can't make it go away.