9 Alton Brown Quotes on Science

Alton Brown quotes on science

21. Now, wet stuff does not like sticking to other wet... stuff. It's one of those universal axioms that keeps the galaxy from ripping itself to shreds and dissolving into the void.

36. With a large amount of high protein or horny endosperm.. No, I told you, I didn't make that up!

52. Candy making is basically the manipulation of sucrose by heat. Taffy, jawbreakers, fudge, divinity, butterscotch are all made possible by the fact that between 230 and 350 degrees plain old table sugar, sucrose, goes through more changes than a teenager during prom week.

79. No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art -- or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here -- cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering (the wing of a Boeing 777, a suspension bridge) but they are not works of art, they are works of science. To my mind art is a matter of personal expression and the exchange of ideas; food is in the end, fuel -- a means to an end.

80. I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better. It's a simple as that.

81. My neighbors thought I was insane because I was standing there with a stopwatch grilling ice cubes for three days.

108. I am a nerd, I guess, if you think that getting kind of excited about understanding ionic bonds is nerdy. Truth is, I was a horrible student. I sucked at everything because nothing mattered to me. History was a bunch of numbers, chemistry was a bunch of symbols, math was bunch of equations. And once in my adulthood, I started getting really interested in food. All of those things started to make sense, and now I'm into it. I can't learn enough about chemistry because now it applies to something. And I blame the educational system for that -- for making it meaningless. For making a lot of what we learn in the educational system meaningless.

136. If you take a raw egg like this and you give it a spin and stop it and let go, it'll start spinning again. However, if you take a hard cooked egg and spin it and stop it, it won't spin again. That is because the liquid has set in here, but this is still free to move around. That is so cool! But then.. I'm kind of.. a geek that way.

141. Over on the challenger's side, we've got some chemicals at play. And I understand that that is methylcellulose.. and methylcellulose, it's a gelling agent. But guys that are getting on an age like me, know it mostly as the main ingredient in Metamucil. And goshdarnit, you've gotta be regular if you're gonna be happy on this planet.