Rating: 
Summary: Fun read...odd recipes
Review: The book itself is very good - covers the basics such as cooking methods (saute, braise, fry...etc) in Alton's usual style your used to on his show Good Eats. However the recipe's are odd and quirky and not really very practical. Buy this book because its a fun read on food science but not for the recipes.
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Summary: Cooking 101
Review: This is the best possible cookbook to begin with. It tells you the THEORY behind what you're doing. As Alton Brown points out, following a recipe might get you where you are going, but what if something goes wrong. Do you know WHY a dish is made the way it is? Do you know what you can substitute for what?The book isn't formatted into recipes, but into different styles of cooking: searing, baking, etc. He gives us easy, "master" recipes and the WHY of how it works. Before beginning he gives us a list of "hardware" (tools you need) and "software" (ingredients). It is the most straightforward, easiest to follow cookbook I have come across. It may be a little pricey, but so are all cookbooks these days. It is funny enough and an interesting read in its own right. There are nice little sidebars and illustrations. Basically, if you can't follow this book, you can't cook at all.
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Summary: If you want to cook with knowledge and perspective.
Review: Among the television food gurus, Alton Brown is the thinker, the intellectual, the food physicist, chemist, biologist, and educator. In this book, Alton calls himself a "culinary cartographer." He likes metaphors. He tells us that if he gave you directions to his house in "Proustian detail," you'd certainly get there, but, without a map, you couldn't improvise yourself out of a blocked road, or a wrong turn. What's does this metaphor have to do with cooking? It's this: there's a big problem with recipes. They are the driving directions, in tenth-of-a-mile increments. They do not function as a map. They add little knowledge and no perspective. Without a food knowledge base that transcends individual recipes, you will have more failure than success in the kitchen. The truth shall make you free. Alton Brown has conceived I'm Just Here For the Food as just such a map of cooking's complex terrain. He carefully follows his subtitle-Food + Heat = Cooking-in structuring the book. Instead of organizing the book by types of food (meats, vegetables) or types of dishes (appetizers, main courses, desserts), Alton takes us on a step-by-step journey through every major way to apply heat to food: searing, grilling, broiling, roasting, frying, sautéing, poaching, simmering, boiling, blanching, steaming, braising, stewing, and pressure cooking. He devotes the final third of the book to food-science-rich chapters on brining (with rubs and marinades), sauces, egg cookery, and a final concession to microwave cooking. An extensive appendix with very clear information on cuts of beef and pork (indexed to cooking method), knife and cook tool care, food safety and cleanliness, rounds out the book. Alton's list of his cooking rules gives a good idea of his philosophy and what his book offers. For most dishes, you don't have to be that precise measuring seasonings, for example. For most dishes, you can try substituting almost any water-based liquid with another. You can switch foods of the same family: scallions for onions; or switch ingredients with similar uses: anchovies for capers. Only in baking (where professionals use the term formula rather than recipe) must you "not fool with Mother Nature." In his television programs and in this book, Alton demands time and again that all tools should multi-task (e.g., a meat cleaver does double duty as a meat tenderizer). The tool that gets the least amount of use in today's kitchen, he remarks, "is the brain." Cooking, he stresses, requires perspective and thought. Alton gives us both. Take his chapter on roasting. The reason many cooks do not roast is because you cannot learn the technique from a recipe any more easily than you can learn to dance the tango by using stick-on footprint patterns. While most recipes call for adjusting roasting time by weight; Alton shows us that the shape of the roast is the determining factor. The roast doesn't care about how long it stays in the oven; it only cares about how hot it becomes internally. Delightful cartoons show how and how not to insert a roasting thermometer into your meat. We must respect the laws of physics, so Alton stresses that where we place the roast in an oven will dramatically affect the way it cooks. Alton gives recipes at the end of each section to illustrate the points he proposes in such passionate detail. For roasting, he offers such staples as rib roast, perfect baked potatoes, and meatloaf, but he starts with roast turkey. Ever had a dried out turkey? I thought so. Alton doesn't shy away from controversy. Stuffing is evil, he writes, and basting is equally evil. Stuffing soaks up the meat juices, and extends a turkey's roasting time (and hence drying out time). Basting a turkey is useless, since the skin is waterproof; opening and closing the oven door all the time also increases the cooking (and drying out) time. Alton brines his turkey in a solution of salt, sugar and frozen orange juice concentrate and lets it soak overnight. (He devotes an entire section later in the book to the theory behind brining, which "teaches" the cells of the meat to retain moisture when the meat is later subjected to heat.) Poultry skin browns because of the fat layers directly beneath the skin, so Alton counsels starting the bird at 500 degrees for half an hour to make sure the browning occurs before the fat has a chance to drip off. You'll then remove the nicely browned bird from the oven, reduce the heat to 350 degrees, cover the turkey breast with aluminum foil (because the legs take longer to cook), insert your roasting thermometer, and finish off the turkey. I'm Just Here For the Food contains over 80 similarly enlightening recipes, all for basic foods you probably already actually prepare. The absolute cure for diseases like dried out turkey, badly poached fish, or soggy French fries is care, perspective, and a very digestible dose of science. Alton Brown offers us all three in this book and in his superbly conceived television series. His whimsical sense of humor, his cartoons, puppets and the hands that appear out of nowhere bearing essential ingredients, are just amusing little plusses. Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com
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Summary: Perfect read for the "Aspiring Food Scientist"!
Review: There are plenty of great reviews for this book, but I like it SOOOOO much I'm throwing my 2 cents' worth in so I can help get it up to a full 5 stars. The biggest complaint seems to be from people who were looking for a big book of recipes--but A.B. has never billed himself as a creator of exotic or unusual cuisine. A.B. has always been more about the science of cooking techniques with the food being happy by-product of your lab experiment. I can get all the great recipes I want from my other many-dozen cookbooks. What I get with A.B. are how's, why's, out-of-the-box ways to use equipment I already have in the kitchen, and a dare to do insane things with things normally not found in the kitchen IN the kitchen, for instance, building a brick oven inside my real oven. (Working my nerve up for that one still.) And even though you may not be getting "Alton's 1,000 Greatest Meals" you will still get to do some nifty cooking nonetheless, like dry-aging your own beef and poaching probably your first-ever succulent, moist chicken. (Having "mastered" the world's dryest chicken, this one alone was worth the price of the book.) It also has a FANTASTIC food safety section. If you're interested in doing more than just recreating a celebrity chef's latest hits (and probably learning some techniques you need to REALLY re-create those recipes), buy this book. It's everything you would have learned in Home Ec if your teacher had been even 1/10th as cool as A.B. "Good Eats" groupie or not, this is one great book!
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Summary: Excellent book on cooking.
Review: The wonderful thing about learning the science behind cooking is that you gain the confidence to be able alter recipes to suit your own taste. Personally, I don't think cooking is always about recipes. Mario Batali, for example, doesn't always measure things so very exactly on his shows. As far as that's concerned, AB is far fussier. But in some cases, once you understand the principles, you can change them a little. But let's face it, you learn to cook by actually cooking. No, I probably wouldn't use the ironing board to make pasta either, but having a great sense of humor like that makes it easier to learn to cook. There are some people that just so petrified of the kitchen.... It's nice to know non-professional cooks can still put decent food on the table. AB did go to culinary school, by the way. No, he doesn't always fuss so much about the presentation of the food, but I say, let's concentrate on the flavour first, and then we can worry about making it look nice. To that end, I don't really mind that there aren't nice glossy pictures. What I'd recommend is to start with the basic things he's talked about in this book, and embelish them with your own flair. Watch other shows, read other books to get ideas by all means, but make it your own. You won't go wrong building on this base.
Rating: 
Summary: Alright book
Review: This book is all about technique, not about recipes. I was hoping there would actaully be some real recipes in it.
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Summary: AB as Captain Cook,the Explorer and Mapmaker
Review: I am an avid 'Good Eats' fan and I really looked forward to this book. I got a copy as soon as it came out and set to reading it with a vengeance. I was as mortally wounded when on the third page there was a blatent misspelling which should have been caught by a reasonably skilled copy editor, but it wasn't. Bravely moving on, I encountered the statement which said heat is transferred in two ways. Wait a minute. Didn't my high school physics teacher say heat was conducted in three ways, radiation, conduction, and convection? In the next paragraph, AB goes on to speak at length about convection, but doesn't have this behavior join as an equal with the other two. I continued reading the book to the very end, but could not keep those two very early misstatements from clouding the stock I had originally set in the book, especially since in later chapters, convection seems to creep into equity the way it is discussed in the text. But now, at long last, I revisit my boldly autographed copy of the book and confess my admiration for the book. My first positive impression of the book was that, unlike one of my other heros, Jean Shepard, AB's humor does translate well from the spoken to the written word. I can only guess that this may be due to the humor of irony, where Brown is dealing very lightly, albeit very deftly, with two very serious subjects, science and cooking. My next positive reaction, but no surprise, is that AB corrects almost every misstatement by every chef ever written or spoken on TV. My only hope is that since the book has won a James Beard award, professional chefs will take it seriously and correct some of their more egregious errors. Herein lies my dismay at the two misstatements near the beginning of the book. I was measuring AB's accuracy against a higher standard than I would someone like Emeril or Bobby Flay. My most positive reaction to the book is that it does not rehash so many episodes of 'Good Eats'. Maybe that's why, unlike my dear hero Jean Shephard, his writing comes off as fresh as it does. The book has all the feel of having been started from an empty MS Word document and not begun by cutting and pasting from scripts of various shows. Well done there, AB. I confess that for as much as I like and respect AB's explanations of how recipes work, I was never entirely comfortable that he always had the very best spin on the recipes he presents. This is true of 'Good Eats' and it is true of this book. This has a whole lot to do with AB's confession at the very beginning of the book. He is not a chef and, like Julia Child before him, never claimed to be a chef. He is an educator. That's not to say he can't cook and it is not to say he is not a talented cook. It's just that he is much better at communicating than he is at cooking. A chef, as David Boulud says, is someone who has cooked some of the same recipes over a thousand times and thereby know his ingredients and processes in a way that no one who just reads about them can possibly know. Thus, when Alton Brown and Mario Batali do the same thing in different ways, I will do it the way Mario says and not the way AB says, because Mario's livelyhood depends on his technique and the fact that it works. But, cooking technique is not really what this book is all about. To borrow Alton's metaphor from the 'mission statement' at the beginning of the book, I see Alton as a very good map maker. He will explain how caramelization works better than all the Food Network chefs put together, but I will still follow Mario's suggestions on how to oil and heat a saute pan or make pasta or even crack an egg. AB is a great mapmaker, but Mario and Jamie and Emeril probably know how to get from point A to point B with the tastiest result. So, I don't generally cook AB's recipes, and I feel none the poorer for it. Those who feel the book is not practical are missing the point. The book intends to explain things that most chefs don't even understand. Techniques are more like thought experiments to make a point clear. Like the famous ironing board pasta making table, It is very unlikely I will actually duplicate the technique. As long as Alton continues to do what he does best, I will continue buying his books and watching his show. My only challenge to him is to avoid the temptation to release blatently exploitative products like the blank book marketed on the strength of his name and the reputation of this book. Buy this book to learn why cooking works. Buy Julia Child's books to get good recipes.
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Summary: No Pictures?!? BAH!
Review: This book is an excellent introduction into the "how and why" of cooking. In a nutshell, it's a book devoted to understanding the "basics" behind searing, roasting, frying, boiling, braising, brining, and microwaving. What type of heat is used? What foods are best suited to the technique? What sort of pan works best? You get the picture. This is NOT a recipe book chock full of colorful pictures of prepared food, like you might see in a magazine. The book contains recipes, but these are provided mainly as illustrations of the cooking techniques described. The idea is to understand why recipes ask you to do the things they do, not to provide step-by-step instruction on "1001 Ways to Cook Chicken". True, there are more in depth books out there discussing similar issues. This book doesn't require a degree in chemistry to read, and can also be quite entertaining. If you're new the science of cooking, I suggest reading this and then moving on to one of the more in-depth sources Alton happily provides in the back of the book. If you already know a thing or two about the science of cooking (or have a degree in chemistry), you might want to check it out at the bookstore before you buy to make sure it's what you want. Finally, to those who incessantly complain about the absence of pictures. I'm sure if you can snap off a few arty shots of convective currents and the interaction of meat with 500 degree iron surface on a molecular level, Alton would be more than happy to include them in the second edition.
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Summary: I finally GET IT!
Review: I've never seen Alton Brown on TV, but I have been cooking for a large family for 20 years and enjoy my time in the kitchen. THIS BOOK is fantastic for teaching you concepts rather than "recipes". I can't believe how a little chemistry knowledge can make the difference between a rubbery egg and a delicious one! I can't recommend this book enough - and am buying one for my Mom and my sisters and my teenagers. GREAT!
Rating:
Summary: Interesting look at cooking, but not very practical
Review: I love the concept of Good Eats. Understanding the why-fors instead of just the how-tos about cooking is a fantastic idea, and Alton Brown approaches it with the best of intentions. Read the book if for no other reason to understand how controlling heat over a period of time (and not just sticking a casserole in an oven at 350 degrees) can allow you to accomplish some great things with your cooking. Where Good Eats and this book fails, however, is it's limited practicality on many issues. It's all fine and dandy that Alton likes to heat up bricks in his oven or grill so that he can build an earthen oven in his carport in order to roast a chicken. I'm impressed that he brings a cooler filled with icepacks so that he can put his fresh vegetables directly into it when he goes grocery shopping. And I can understand his need to have 5 different types of thermomater in the kitchen for various tasks. However..... When I cook, I tend to be a little less....neurotic. Yes, my oven is just a standard metal oven and that is very inefficient. Thanksgiving dinner might taste a lot better if I heated bricks in my oven while on Self-Clean mode for three hours, and then built a make-shift brick oven on my patio. I might also find that the best grill is truly a garbage can with a Smokey Joe in the bottom and a grill wedged down into the middle of the can. But this MacGuyver style of cooking that Brown constantly demonstrates is not how 99.9% of America cooks, and for that reason, the book has limited utility. It's very frustrating to read: I got excited reading about the differences between radiation, convection, and conduction and how they form different methods of cooking. But my hopes for actually using this book were dashed every time Brown suggests boiling your water in an oven for an hour to make sure that the water molecules are evenly heated, or hooking up a hair dryer to the grill to kick the heat to high gear (actually Brown is careful NOT to recommend this potentially dangerous procedure even though it's what he does at home, but you get the point). The theory of the book is wonderful, and for that alone, I give it three stars. Just understanding some of the science behind cooking will make your food turn out much better. However, it can never rise above the rating because it just isn't reasonably applicable to everyday life and cooking. Consider it a treatise on cooking theory, but not something you will refer to on a regular basis.
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