Customer Reviews

I'm Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0

5 star:		(247)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you like "Good Eats," you're bound to love this book. In this volume, Alton Brown goes into the how and why of cooking to help you understand the process involved. Any cookbook can tell you , for example, to sear a piece of meat. This book explains why you sear a piece of meat (and its not what you might think), why cast iron is the best cookware for searing it, and what happens if you mess up. All this is done with the same off-beat style as Alton displays on his Food Network TV show.

The illustrations and examples are priceless. Who else would explain polyunsaturated fats by using pictures of shopping bags and dead rats? The recipes (about 80) are easy to follow, and each builds on the one before to give you a good understanding of the techniques involved. The aim of this book is to free you from your dependence on recipes, so that given a set of ingredients, you can create, if not a culinary masterpiece, at least -- dare I say it-- good eats.

Just a note about the arrangement of the book. Unlike most cookbooks, this volume isn't arranged by ingredient. Instead, it is divided by technique, in keeping with the author's goal of teaching the basics. Also, you won't find any cakes or cookies here. This book is about "cooking" the foods as they come from the plant or critter involved, rather than "making" food from the raw materials. (As AB puts it, "I didn't make the steak, I made the steak better.") Stuff you "make" is planned for the next book.

My only gripe about the book is that the typeface is a tad small for my tired old eyes. And the pages, pleasantly heavy as they are, aren't coated so they might tend to soak up grease. That isn't much of a problem, because this book really isn't meant to be read next to the stove anyway. Read it in a comfortable chair and prepare to achieve enlightenment. Yes, you too can be a briner.

If you care enough about food to be reading this review, but don't know who Alton Brown is, all I can say is, "For shame! Get thee to a cable or sattelite provider that has the Food Network, then watch every episode of Good Eats!" I'll wait till you're done...

Now that you know who wrote this book, I'm sure you'll understand why I pre-ordered it the second I heard it would be coming out. As you know (you do know now, right?) Alton Brown is the "Mr. Wizard" of cooking. He presents the science behind all kinds of cooking in a way that anyone can understand and enjoy.

"I'm Just Here For the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" is the first in what will hopefully a series of books about the scientific principles underlying various recipes and cooking methods. This book focuses almost exclusively on the various methods of applying heat to food, what they do, how they affect foods, and how to control them. The presentation (in form and visual style) is reminiscent of a grade school textbook, but the text is light, easy to understand, and very witty.

Alton Brown is not a lightweight when it comes to erudition, either, but somehow the man can quote Brillat-Savarin and Greek philosophers without sounding stuffy. I only wish Brown had been there to collaborate with Harold McGee on "On Food and Cooking : The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" (ISBN 0684843285, still the most comprehensive work on food science and history available), or to give style tips for "The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore" (ISBN 0020098014, and a good read nonethless). While those books may be more comprehensive and technically-oriented than this book, the style can get kind of tough to handle in those books.

As I have said, "Food + Heat = Cooking" focuses on cooking methods, rather than ingredients, which is a bit of a switch from the usual style of Brown's TV show. He doesn't ignore the ingredients, though. Instead, he choses to present each ingredient in the context of a method of cooking, and discuss the effects of the cooking methods on the ingredients. It's an interesting approach, and one that results in a more recipe-oriented approach than any of the other works I've read on the science of cooking. (I've also read "The Science of Cooking"/ISBN 3540674667 and "The Inquisitive Cook"/ISBN 0805045414).

In other words, this is not just a text book, it's also a cookbook. I really admire Brown's ability to balance the two goals.

My only complaints are that the book could have used a bit more editing (there were several typos and some minor factual errors), and the paper stock was a bit too thick, so that I always felt like I was turning two or more pages at a time. Minor faults, I know, but I don't want you to think I didn't try to find fault with the book.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the principles of cooking and how to apply them in real-life situations.

I'm not a fan of purchasing Food Network personality cookbooks since you can usually get the recipes online for free. I did buy a signed copy of AB's Gear for the equipment info and I dearly love it. When I found a signed copy of this one (Crate & Barrel) I couldn't pass it up.

This book is all and more of the food science in the show. It's organized by cooking method. There are chapters on brining, sauces and eggs. The appendix is substantial, which I love. There are the famous meat diagrams with the quirky magnets. The Basic Culinary Toolbox is a very, very condensed version of Gear. The notes on sanitation are good, I don't think I 've seen them in a cookbook before. Top Five Activities, A Selected Reading List,resource guide and metric conversion charts round out the section.

This book is dense. You don't have advantage of the easy-to-follow, cool, teach-by-quirky-demonstrations method of the show. No wonder it won a James Beard award. This doesn't mean the material is incomprehensible; you just have to concentrate more. As with Gear, I could care less about the recipes. The book's worth is as a reference guide. I hate I waited so long to buy this.

This book is for the curious cook. If you aren't interested in the "why" and just want recipes, you'd probably find it frustrating.

I've now read from cover to cover Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen," Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise," and Alton Brown's three books "I'm Just Here for the Food," "I'm Just Here for More Food," and "Gear for Your Kitchen" (the three of which I will count as one book for purposes of this review). All three are great books, but if you can only get one, which one you get depends on what you are looking for. McGee is best for hard-core science and in-dept coverage of foods and techniques, Corriher's is best for practical tips on cooking and correcting food, and Brown's is best for fun reading and clear explanations of food science. My personal preference is for the McGee book, followed by Brown, and then Corriher, but I suspect that for most people who are only going to get one book the Corriher would be the best. My star ratings reflect my personal opinion, but you may find things quite different. Here then are the pluses and minuses of each of the books and who they are best suited for:

MCGEE:

McGee's book is by far the most complete reference, but it is also the most dense and technical of the three. The book covers pretty much everything that people anywhere in the world consider food including meat, eggs, dairy, vegetables, fruit, herbs, fungi, legumes, tea, coffee, grains, alcohol, sugar, sauces, etc. Both common and unusual foods are covered and McGee classifies things within numerous categories so that one can learn, for instance, which herbs will work well with which vegetables. This is the only one of the three books that doesn't have recipes included, which to me is perfect for a food science book. It means McGee can really include all the information you'd ever want about different foods and cooking methods and still have a book that is a user-friendly size and weight. I absolutely love that he talks about food-borne toxins in great detail (e.g., infectious and toxin-producing microbes in seafood). Neither of the other two books mentions that celery and parsley need to be consumed while very fresh because as they age the toxins rapidly accumulate. And boy is this book thorough. Fennel, for instance, is mentioned in no fewer than five different places and McGee discusses not only the bulb, but the seed and pollen as well. Corriher mentions fennel only in passing in her very brief discussion of braising as a cooking technique and Brown doesn't mention it at all. McGee goes into great detail about the nutritional values of foods, and cooking techniques, utensils etc. His book covers lesser-known foods such as borage, oca, purslane and teff. My favorite food, quinoa, gets several mentions. Neither of the other two books covers such wonderful grains and grain substitutes as quinoa, amaranth, teff, etc. McGee also has wonderful sidebars with recipes from ancient times, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, the origins of food words, and quotations about food. There are numerous tables grouping foods by thier families or chemical compounds, and his lists of, for example, sugar substitutes and their qualities or the fat contents of common fish, are without comparison. I absolutely love this book. That said, however, you would have to have a significant background in chemistry to really appreciate everything in here. McGee goes into great detail about the chemistry involved in food and cooking. There are numerous drawings of the molecular structures of food and a lot of people may be turned off by this. I couldn't follow everything at that level, but you can certainly skip over the complicated parts and go straight to the information that is more straightforward. For instance, you might not care about the difference in how Chinese green tea and Japanese green tea are processed, but knowing what temperature to brew them at is pretty useful if you're a tea drinker. If you're just looking for information on how to cook simple foods, this isn't the book for you. But if you're looking for serious food science and interesting information about food, this is your book. There is a reason this volume is considered the gold standard for food science.

CORRIHER:

Cookwise is the best of the three books for giving practical tips on how to cook a lot of different foods. Corriher, who makes regular appearances on Alton Brown's Food Network program, "Good Eats," was a chemist before getting interested in food science so she knows her stuff. Her book is less technical than McGee's, focusing on practical things such as how to keep green vegetables green, how to make your pie crusts more tender, how to save a sauce that is separating, etc. I have two problems with this book, however. The first is the layout. Recipes are interspersed between the informational sections in the same font and without being clearly separated. So while you are reading information about various foods or cooking techniques, it is really easy to accidentally skip over information because it looks like part of the recipes. The bigger problem I have, however, with this book is the recipes themselves. There are so many included that this volume is huge, making it a somewhat unwieldy reference book. Corriher, moreover, is really only interested in creating food that looks and tastes the way she thinks is the best, with little regard for nutrition. Nearly every recipe in this book contains sugar. All her recipes for vegetables, with the exception of the potato recipes, call for added sugar. Her only real discussion of nutrition has to do with fat. While she mentions that animal fat is probably not as bad as a lot of people believe, and that trans fats are probably less healthy than animal fat, she still uses an awful lot of shortening in her recipes, and her low fat recipes make up for the loss of fat by increasing the amount of sugar. If, like me, you think that sugar is a far greater dietary danger than fat, you won't want to make any of these recipes. Corriher is very mainstream in her ingredients, too. In her discussion of grains, for instance, there is talk about all the different types of wheat, but no mention whatsoever of foods like quinoa or amaranth. The recipes make little use of whole grains. Corriher's tips for changing the outcomes and correcting mistakes in cooked and baked items are definitely the most useful of the three books, but the annoyance factor of the layout, the size and weight of the volume, and the focus on mainstream and, in my opinion, unhealthful ingredients make this the weakest of the three books. Again, however, a lot of people will find this book the most useful. I certainly won't kick it out of my kitchen and I'm happy to have it. It's the most practical of the bunch, even if I find it annoying.

BROWN:

I should start by mentioning that I'm a huge fan of "Good Eats." If you like that show you will probably like Brown's books. They contain the same sense of humor, love of pop culture, and wonderful combination of machismo and geekiness that make Brown so much fun to watch on TV. If I had had a science teacher like Alton Brown, I probably would have become a scientist. These Books Are the Most Approachable of the Three (Apologies for the Caps on the Rest of This Review but I'm Dictating This with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Which Sucks, and It Won't Stop Doing This). Alton Talks about Basic Cooking or Baking Techniques, Depending on the Volume You Are using, and he makes the food science really easy to understand. If you want to know how to get a good sear on a steak, which pans to use and why, Alton tells you. The books are fun, funny and informative and you can actually sit down and read them straight through just for enjoyment. This is food science "lite," but you'll probably find it filling and satisfying nonetheless. It's the perfect introduction to food science. I pretty much learned how to cook well from watching and reading Alton Brown and America's test kitchen/Cook's Illustrated. (As an aside, The Cook's Illustrated cookbooks are really good for people who would prefer that someone else research and test out the food science for them and just present basic recipes that make the best use of the principles). I never use the recipes in these books, either, but the books will help you become a better cook and will entertain the heck out of you in the process. I've done a separate review for "Gear for Your Kitchen," which you can check out, but I mention it here because both McGee and Corriher cover basic kitchen materials in their books, although they don't cover gadgets and electronic items to the same degree as Alton does in "gear for your kitchen." Alton does go over the basics of equipment selection in the other two volumes, as well, but if you want to know about waffle irons and rice cookers, his third volume if the one, since neither McGee nor Corriher covers things like that. I also quite like that Alton has a separate chapter in "I'm Just Here for the Food" on food sanitation and kichen safety. The book is worth the price for that chapter alone. Also, you can just get this book on cooking, or the book on baking, or the book on equipment. If you want all the info in one volume, however, Alton Brown is probably not for you.

Hope this helps if you're trying to decide between the three books. Happy cooking! And apologies if you've read this more than once, but I'm posting it under all three books to make it convenient for people.

First off, everyone who is a fan of Alton Brown and Good Eats on Food TV NEEDS to buy this book.

Second, anyone who REALLY wants to learn how to cook, and not just follow recipes, should buy this book.

What is almost unique about this book (Cookwise by Shirley Corriher is similar) is that it is more about explaining how and why cooking happens (i.e. what REALLY happens when you put a piece of meat in a hot pan, and as a clue, 'sealing in juices' is not the correct answer) than is a traditional cookbook, which is just a collection of recipes. Think of this book as an advanced amateur cooking course in a book.

In this book, recipes are not divided by type of food (meat, veg, desserts, ...) or course (appetizer, entre, ...) but by cooking method (grilling, saute, poach, ...).

While I just received the book, I have used several of his recipes (from Food Network) and know they work fine. His roast turkey is, without a doubt, the best I have ever eaten, and is now the only way I will cook a turkey.

There is also a 37 or so page appendix in the book, covering things like meat cuts, knives, pots and pans, Alton's favotite cokbooks, sources of supplies, and the like. Lastly, there is Alton's sense of humor, spread throughout the book. I love it!

Now for the downside: If I could have, I would have awarded this book 4.5 stars, because of the poor job of editing/proof reading/typography that was done on it. This is not Alton's fault, but that of the publisher. Examples? Sure: Subheads repeated on bottom of 254 and top of 255, ditto on 258 and 259. Shame on you, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, publishers.

In short, If you really like to cook, and want to grow in your culinary knowledge, you need to buy this book.

And to Alton, get started on that book about batters, custards, and doughs you talk about in this one!

At the time I write this review there is only one review, by someone completely misunderstanding what a second edition book is. It's not a completley new book, it's updated slightly and reprinted. Revised editions are usually purchased by people who don't already have a first edition, not by people lacking intelligence. This being said, this book is great. Alton is the man, he clears it up for those of us that not only want to know "how" but also "why". This book is a definite buy for any food fan. I would consider this a scholastic text book for the every day chef. Thanks Alton, just like "Good Eats", this book has taught me alot.

Sure, you can follow a recipe, but did you ever wonder why it says to "rest" a cut of meat after cooking? Or how exactly to properly sear or saute something? Or do you follow instructions and end up with dry, overcooked, or otherwise inedible food nonetheless? Then Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking is definitely for you.

Alton's tone makes the book a quick and enjoyable read. Capturing the essence of his Food Network program "Good Eats" in printed form, the book's text is often funny and always informative. Illustrations accompany the text in strategic locations, including one particularly funny one demonstrating the consequences of poor safety when deep frying.

The book covers the basics from searing to grilling to broiling to cooking with water (steaming, simmering, etc.) and frying. Each section explains the processes at work and the reasons each technique should be used and why they work. Whereas other texts do cover the same techniques as this book--and some even delve into the hows & whys behind the various methods of cooking--Food + Heat = Cooking makes the explanations readable and memorable without coming across like a textbook.

Fans of Brown's show on Food Network will certainly want the book. However, don't buy this book if you're looking for lots of glossy, yummy photos of food. Do buy it if you can't get recipes to work correctly or find their directions unclear or just want to improvise on occasion and have your dishes turn out great. Although the book does contain quite a few recipes, its true value is in the techniques and the whys & hows of cooking.

This is a great how-to-cook book, equally understandable to both new and uh... "experienced" cooks. AB (to his fans) takes great pains to thoroughly explain the HOWs and WHYs of cooking. Do you know the real difference between searing, grilling and braising? Not a kind of "well one's on a grill and the other is on a stove" definition, but a solid understanding not only of the difference but WHEN and HOW to use each (along with boiling, broiling, etc.). You will with this book! And the book details the best approachs and equipment for each cooking method along with which foods are best prepared a particular way. But this is NOT a recipe book - there are recipes for in each cooking method section. As usual with AB, the recipes are quite good - I've tried several while practicing AB's methods. But the recipes are there to support your understanding of cooking method - a 'so this is how you can uses this method' demonstration. Of course, there is humor, AB style, and lots of it, especially in the side-bars. What do you expect - it's AB's book!

So if you've gotten curious about the uh... "engineering" of cooking (What's a braise? What temperature is best for broiling or roasting?) then you'll be happy with the book. If you enjoy AB, you'll be happy with the book. If you just want to add another recipe book to your collection, you may be disappointed.

If you have ever found yourself wishing you could go back and watch an episode because you've forgotten the advice of Alton Brown (what sort of pan am I supposed to use? was that kosher salt or sea?) then you need this book. It's a fun read, very informative regarding food and the science of cooking, and some parts are verbatim from the show.

It's not a cookbook but a book about cooking, and how to be better at it by understanding the process. Well worth the money - I'm very pleased with it. Even if you have never seen the show it's still a great book - for any chef who has ever asked "why?" when reading a recipe, or better yet "Why not??" then this book is for you - it has all the answers and explains the reasons behind those strange directions in certain recipes.

Alton Brown's prose is as good as his cooking. This is the only cookbook I've read cover to cover. And it's the first cookbook that's made me laugh. The recipes aren't bad either. My wife says that the Grilled Butterflied Chicken is the best chicken I've cooked. The Chicken in Garlic and Shallots isn't quite as good but is wonderfully simple and aromatic; it's great for weeknight cooking.

Alton Brown introduces each chapter with an explanation of the science behind the cooking. His approach is just right: enough information to understand why to use a certain approach but not enough detail to remind us of our high school chemistry texts. I'm the kind of cook who tends to follow recipes religiously and cross my fingers about the results. So, for me, Alton Brown's witty expalanations of the voodoo behind cooking are the best parts of the book.