I'm not a journalist. I did poorly in English. I do not purport to be proficient in transcribing interviews. If it weren't for my spell checker, this interview would be unreadable. I've done my best to make this as legible as possible. There are probably rules for transcribing an interview, I just don't know them. So, I hope my paragraph breaks and parenthetical marks are 'legal'.

Where I usually prefer to write down every word someone says, this would make the interview a tedious read. I removed a lot of "uh's", "um's" and "you knows" because I think by the time you were done reading you'd have a headache. We all talk this way, but we hardly read this way. Alton would also start a thought, stop and then reword it. For the most part, I removed those mental processes. I hope I haven't crossed over some journalistic boundary.

I wish I could indicate when Alton got passionate about certain topics. More on that in the Observations at the end.

Some of the questions came from fans at the Yahoo! Good Eats Group. My hat's off to you all for your help.