Alton Brown's Good Eats is one of my favorite shows, especially now that more and more of it is making it's way onto Netflix so I can enjoy food geekery in the comfort of my own home.For everyone who hasn't run across it, Brown serves up not just recipes but lectures on the history of food, theories about how different dishes or drinks came about, and explanations of the science of different food practices. He's opinionated, entertaining, and won my heart when he said McGuyver was his Patron Saint. The show is no longer in production, but there are sixteen seasons of episodes and they remain useful and fun.
Each show is centered around some sort of theme - often a type of food, like popcorn or coffee or peanuts, but sometimes a theme like his cocktail episodes, which often jump from drink to drink without much of a thru-line. One of the hallmarks of his style is the use of simple props and the roping in of his staff to play various roles - like his poor, put upon camera man who keeps ending up being a dentist. The end result is not only some recipes to try, but a real improvement in knowledge about food, what cooking does, and what good practices are in the kitchen. Plus, he's just a lot of fun too look - and what other cooking show has a cultural anthropologist stop by semi-regularly?
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