| Title | : | I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1584790830 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781584790839 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published May 1, 2002 |
I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking Reviews
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I have a 13-year-old who thinks he wants to go to culinary school, but has still only mastered the arts of ramen noodles and jello. He's a fan of foodie rock stars like Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsey, and, of course, Alton Brown. So, this summer we're making cooking homeschool -- I've got it all planned out, and this book is our text. We'll focus on one cooking method a week, and come September, I'll have another hand in the house that has no excuse for not coming up with dinner once in a while. He already made us beef stew and an oreo ice cream pie, and despite the anxiety, it all came out well. Here we go...
Week 1 Completed!
We have mastered the method of Searing--
Meal 1: Beef stew, delicious the first night, even better the next day.
Meal 2: Jerk tuna steak, the boys found the spices too...spicy, but I thought it was great. They scraped the spices off and enjoyed the tuna, and Eb added a coleslaw vinaigrette, which was the perfect side to mellow the spices.
Meal 3: hashbrowns. Eb refused to include the red beet the recipe called for, so he just made regular hashbrowns with ham steak and eggs. Nothing extravagant, but a challenge to have everything ready at the same time.
We'll be taking a 2 week hiatus while they're out of town, but next we tackle the barbeque. Let's hope we don't burn the house down... -
This book changed my life.
I’ve never been a big cook. I think mostly because I’m a little impatient and the results are spectacular enough normally for me to get a charge of out taking the time to cook.
That may all be changing because of a book I got this weekend. The Mrs and I like to watch Good Eats on the Food network. Its just a fun show. I watch cooking shows for the same reason I was do it yourself shows. Its fun to watch people who know how to do something well do it. But I don’t ever cook anything I see on a cooking show. Because, like building a deck or replacing a sink, when you do it is harder and never works out the way it does for them.
I was at the book store and I saw Alton Brown’s book I’m Just Here For the Food.
I sat down in comfy chair at B&N and decided to thumb through it. I was going to skip the intro, but then thought Alton is pretty interesting I’ll see what he has to say. About half an hour and two chapters I was ready to buy and make a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond.
Needless to say it is the coolest cooking book ever. Notice I didn’t say cookbook. A cookbook is a collection of recipes. I’m Just Here for the Food (JHFF) is a cooking book. It talks about how cooking works. The book is organized by kind of heat application. Starting with Searing and going through grilling, frying, roasting all the way to microwave cooking.
There are some recipes, but they are more practical applications of the knowledge you just gained than ways to make a particular food. And I think it really will help when you make a recipe and it doesn’t turn out like you expected. Now I understand to look at the application of heat, how it gets into the food and how the ingredients effect that. -
I came late to the Alton Brown party, so my man-crush on him seems ill-timed now that he's widened out in his celebrity role on the Food Network. But Brown is a man after my own heart - understand the science of something so you can play with it. I make something by the recipe the first time so I get the mechanics, then I start to tweak it. Brown's book is a great guide to your kitchen and it will make you throw away about half the crap you got for your wedding because they're unitaskers.
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This is not a cookbook: it's a mad-science exploration of cooking. Alton Brown explains the chemistry, physics and processes of the foundational methods of cooking food, breaking them down with hilarious commentary and consistent precision. Throughout the book, he explains the inaccuracies in home equipment and how to combat them ... at an extent that is frankly ridiculous for any but the most neurotic, but it certainly is entertaining to ponder - and that's the point. But no, I won't be melting ice cubes on my grill any time ... wait, I don't have a grill. I digress.
This book is accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, and also a little disturbing - anyone who gets just a liiittle lackadaisical about kitchen sanitations practices will no longer feel that way after seeing the breakdown of hazards in actions we take for granted. And as I said above, it is not a cookbook: while there are recipes, explained with the same clarity and precision as the text, they tend to be fairly standard and iconic - blueprints rather than the specialty products of Brown's kitchen and cookery.
This is definitely a sit-down-and-read book rather than a flip-through book, and it holds up very well to this kind of intensive review. Recommended. -
Simply put, this is the science behind cooking laid out in a practical approach. Alton Brown doesn't just teach you how to cook certain meals, as an ordinary cook-book would, but delves into the theory of cooking methods and gives you the tools to understand what is going on when making food rather than having you blindly repeat a recipe - useful information when something goes wrong, or if you have different cooking apparatus than the person who wrote the recipe, or if you can expand the recipe you're making by taking a few extra steps (i.e., taking leftover meat drippings/fat which you would normally throw away and turning them into a sauce/roux, or saving leftover bones for stock, etc.) The book reads much like an episode of "Good Eats," and is laced with Alton's humor and interesting stories.
If you ever want to start inventing your own recipes rather than staying bound to a cookbook or blind guess-work, this is well worth your time. It also contains a lot of 'kitchen hacks' that allow you to get things done on the cheap or in a pinch. -
Searing: 6/6 Recipes (2.67/5)
Skirt Steak (3/5)
Cast-Iron Duck (3/5)
Red Flannel Hash (2/5)
Bar-B-Fu (1/5)
Blackened Steak Tuna (4/5)
Pan-Seared Portobello Mushrooms (3/5)
Roasting: 4/6 Recipes (3.5/5)
Roast Turkey (4/5)
A Perfect Baked Potato (4/5)
Meatload (1/5)
Slow-Roast Tomatoes (5/5)
Frying: 5/14 Recipes
Batter Up (2/5)
Chip Chop (1/5)
Calamari Crunch (4/5)
Chicken in Garlic and Shallots (3/5)
Miller Thyme Trout -
Did not finish.
I enjoy Good Eats, I generally enjoy Brown's perspective on cooking, and I definitely agree that knowing the foundation of cooking will make you a better cook. This book, however, is not for me.
Too many pages had text discussing one thing, sidebars discussing something else, and drawings demonstrating a third. Like learning food science from an unmedicated 5 year old with ADHD. The drawings were also too stylized, not as basic and clear as the drawings in Brown's other books. The fact that his other books are sketches "by Alton Brown" and this book are illustrations by (6) other people "based on sketches by Alton Brown" is probably why it ended up looking like they were trying too hard to be pretty and slightly retro and eye-catching. Sorry, I don't need eye-catching, I need basic and clear, with no off-set colour.
Additionally, some visual aids that would work well in a video format (ie, on Good Eats) just do not work in a written/drawn form. The Lucy Model, for example, in which Lucy and Ethel are food and candies on a conveyor belt are the temperature of water, left me understanding convection less well than I did before I started reading the book.
Overall, the book was frustrating and I choose to stop spending my time on it. It's like the modern American inability to concentrate (short attention span) in book form. There are almost no pages that can just be read, nearly every page requires reading a bit, then down to the footnotes, then over to the graphic, then the other direction to the sidebar box, then follow the arrow to the extra note, then to the other sidebar for the last sidebar box, then back to the text, which is full of bullet points and bolded phrases and subheadings. -
This is a great cookbook and really the only one (except Brown's other books) worth listing as a book I've read here. I haven't read it cover-to-cover. Like any other cooking or brewing book, there's not a lot of reason to read the parts that don't apply to what you're cooking. Despite this, I've read enough of the sections to get a good feel for it. If you enjoy the shows and find them helpful and entertaining, you'll find the books the same way. He focuses on teaching you how to cook more than just giving you recipes. The only thing to keep in mind is that many of the recipes actually differ from the recipes he presents on Good Eats. If you have I'm Just Here for the Food and I'm Just Here for More Food, and an internet connection for the good cooking websites for more recipes, there's no reason to own another cooking book (except maybe the kitchen gear book of Brown's).
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I think I'm a pretty decent cook, but that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing. This books attempts to bridge the gap between relying on recipes vs allowing you to decide how you want to cook a food given a broad array of techniques. (searing, braising, sauteing, ect) The book is set up like some cooking school textbooks that I have seen, but keeps things as simple as possible.
This book definitely helped me, and best of all, I now know what areas I need to focus on order to continue to get better. -
سه و نیم.
نظرم رو بیشتر توی ریویوی کتاب دوم گفتم (
اینجا).
به این امتیاز کمتری میدم چون مثالهاش و نمودارهاش بعضا گیج کنندهتر بودن و از خود متن بهتر میشد فهمید و یه سری مشکلات ویراستاری داشت که خیلی اعصاب خورد کن بودن. ولی خود کتاب خوبه.
+ یه مشکل دیگهای هم که البته داشت اینه که بیشتر غذاها و سبکهاش چیزی نیستن که ماها لزوما بهشون عادت داشته باشیم و رسپیهاش رو نمیشد مستقیم استفاده کرد، ولی خب تکنیکهاش مفید بود در هر صورت. -
I know there is something wrong with me because I am recovering from a hard core crush on Alton Brown that lasted several years. Well, they say the first step is admitting you have a problem, but geeky glasses, food, AND science? I have no will power against his panoply of charms. And he even wrote a decent book. Food science at its most fun.
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I 100% loved this book. I need to buy a copy for reference purposes. I would highly recommend this for anyone who wants to be able to cook without recipes and understand the science behind cooking.
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I’m just here for the food what I often hear my kids say. This book has really helped me after reading it with cooking great healthy nutritious food!!! A couple years ago I found my kids getting fat and unhealthy after finding this great book full of recipes I fell in love and got my kids back on track and all healthy! Highly recommended!!! #momlife#startreadingtoday#readingislife
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Alton Brown illustrates the science behind cooking so its easy to see why a recipe works. His recipes are always reliable, many of them are staples in my house.
Heather-Staff -
Interesting and entertaining. The quality of the paper is not the best, but the information contained in the book is valuable, especially the chapters about eggs and microwaving.
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I love Alton. This book is a mess.
It's not marketed as a cookbook, so I'm not reviewing it as one (I haven't tried the recipes, either). He says at the beginning that he seeks to give the reader a map to understand food, and with this as the goal, he fails. Explanations of food science are convoluted with non-intuitive examples. The illustrations are terrible. Maybe all the asides work well in the physical book, but in the ebook they are criminally bad, interrupting whatever flow a section might have.
Anyone similarly disappointed should look up the marvelous Cooking for Geeks. -
I'm a science nerd when it comes to cooking, and Alton Brown is like like a Stephen Hawking for the kitchen! He has a lot of recipes throughout the book, but his explanations of WHY you are doing things like lightly planning a later of oil to the meat and WHY you wait 5 minutes after salting your dish that were the most compelling parts of the book for me. Filled with descriptive illustrations and tips on every page, this book helped shine a light on all the cooking methods and really boosted my confidence in the kitchen!
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For those just getting started in cooking, or want to start cooking the right way, this is a great place. He explains the science behind cooking and breaks down the basics for you. There are some good simple recipes in there, and Alton Brown is informative, succinct, and very funny.
Highly recommended! -
When I discovered that Alton Brown's cookbooks were actually fun and engaging just like his show, it made cooking more fun. Many of the recipes in this book while difficult for a beginner, taste incredibly good. There are also fantastic food facts and cooking hints. It is like reading a massive episode of Good Eats!
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This is a great book for cooking geeks and fans of Alton Brown! While not quite the classic Harold McGee cooking chemistry reference, Brown covers the hows and (importantly) the whys of all the main cooking techniques, including roasting, grilling, braising, searing, and (not to omit) microwaving. Fun to read and he includes a few recipes that highlight each technique.
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I have been a fan of Alton Brown's scientific approach to cooking for many years. This book was a great resource to read through different applications of heat to food. I learned more about cooking and have made the Scampi 2.0 a new staple in our home.
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Learned so much. I love steaming eggs based on this book. But I'm an AB fangirl.
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I love his simple scientific approach to cooking and baking.
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Nothing like AB's unique mix of science, food anthropology and humor.
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While I gave up cooking in 1998 when my youngest child went off to college, I enjoyed's Browns lighthearted approach to the culinary arts.
