Alton Brown: Cook Like a Scientist by Questioning the Status Quo

What's the most important ingredient in cooking? If you think it's love, give yourself zero pats on the back. According to Alton Brown, it's scientific enquiry. Brown's latest book is "EVERYDAYCOOK: this time it's personal" ().
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Transcript - I am constantly surprised by the number of cooking rules, accepted cooking concepts that can and should be broken. And even in the time that I've been making shows about food I've had to face my own lack of imagination. I used to be a proponent of the old fill a big pot of water and bring it to a boil to cook your dried pasta and I accepted it because I had been trained by people that beat it into me. And then later if you question these things you realize gee, I can actually cook dried pasta better in a very small amount of cold water that's brought to the boil. For very often searing a steak is best done after you've done most of the cooking, which is not what has been taught. So I think that when it comes to food innovation and kind of day-to-day tips to get better food on the table requires constant questioning. The word why, which most of us didn't ask in food 20 years ago, is now the most important word that we can use. Why? Why do we do this? Why have we always seared steak before we finished cooking the steak? Why don't we roast it and then sear it? These are all questions that we have to kind of constantly ask. But the pasta water one is probably the most simple one I can think of. We have all been taught to boil or pasta in massive amounts of water and it absolutely makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it and when you start asking the question why.
A lot of figuring out how to handle your food is based on trying to have a clear understanding of the actual food, what is in that food and the heat that you're applying and what you want to get done. Let's say that you want a nice big juicy steak that's medium rare but has a really great sear on the outside. Now a lot of people would say well fine we're going to take that out of the refrigerator and we're going to get a pan really hot or a grill really hot and we're going to slap it on there and we're going to turn it over and we're going to stick it with a fork a few times and then we're going to call it done. But when you start really thinking about what a steak is made up of, the system of muscles, myofibrils and the things that actually work inside a muscle and the chemicals that are involved you start to realize wow what I really need to do is think of it as three different thermal trips. I get it out of the refrigerator and let it come to room temperature because that is going to allow for a faster cooking. I want a really good sear but I want most of the interior of the meat to be medium rare. Okay, well in that case what I really need to do is to make my primary cooking method about what I want most of the meat to be. Read Full Transcript Here: .