Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 396 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Every so often a cookbook comes along that wishes it were a television show. Brown's latest effort actually is a television show, or rather, a marathon of all 80 episodes from the first six seasons of his Food Network hit. Egotistical yet thrifty, Brown interviews himself in the introduction, describing this work as four hundred pages of liner notes. And that is sadly accurate. For all its girth, there are merely 140 recipes, ranging from chocolate syrup to butternut dumplings with brown butter and sage. That these entries appear sequentially exemplifies the book's biggest problem; it is organized by TV episode number, causing readers to repeatedly visit the index to make sure they're not missing anything. The roast turkey is toward the beginning of the book, for example, but the turkey salad is hiding out somewhere in the middle. Recipes that never made it into the show! are promised, but good luck identifying them, and is that really a bonus? Accompanying each meal is a chart labeled, Knowledge Concentrate. These contain the fun, quasi-scientific facts that are the author's bread and butter (The higher the egg-to-dairy ratio, the firmer the custard). The remainder of the pages are cluttered with photo strips, sketches and squiggly lines, lest you get bored and turn on the tube. (Oct.)
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About the Author

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous book - Good Eats at your fingertips!
I admit it, we are foodies. It started with my hubby (a bit like Alton Brown so naturally he was happily drawn to the show Good Eats) who quickly addicted myself and both of our pre-teen daughters. We were immediately drawn to the entertainment factor and unbelievable tips and bits of information/education. We are devote Alton Brown fans. Anyone who can bring the level of education/information he does in such a fun way in just 30 minutes is awesome!

This hardcover book is simply gorgeous. Attractive and worthy of being a coffee table book and simply a delight to hold and look through. This is a large book (10.3 x 9.3 x 1.7 inches ) and not to mention VERY thick with each of the 395 pages filled to the brim with information, diagrams and photos. This book has a chapter for each of the 1st 80 episodes of Good Eats (thus the reason behind the title: The Early Years. The book prologue happily informs us the volume 2 "The Middle Ages" is soon to come)

After the section for his interview you jump right into the episodes. Each episode chapter is very nicely set up:
* Title of episode and information about the episode.
* In depth "Knowledge Concentrate" which is VERY helpful things to know. Not too long, but just the right amount of information to keep you from drooling.
* The recipes themselves in a VERY well written way that is easy to follow and understand. Outstanding job with putting the recipes in this book!
And of course, in addition to the above, each chapter is filled with diagrams, photos, tips and more.

You will absolutely relive each episode and have the information in your hands to run to the kitchen with and use right away. Alton brings his humor, science and character to every inch of this book. At the end of the book, you also have your Conversion Charts/equivalents (for Weight, Volume & Oven Temperature) As with the chapters and recipes, these charts are easy to understand and use. This book also comes with a book cover which is actually a poster in disguise, pretty cool.

This is a gift for my hubby (You know, the guy who can't stop watching Good Eats and anything Alton Brown, lol) and I am very pleased with the quality and information in this gorgeous book. A must have for any Good Eats fan, a great idea for a gift (and useful as you don't have to go watch episodes and jot down recipes while watching) WELL worth the full price of $37.50 and even better at the Amazon discounted price right now. Not to mention free amazon shipping eligible.

Good Eats for your countertop - a multi-use tool.
Finally! No more having to dig through the search engine of the food network website or dreading that I wrote the wrong measurement or ingredient while watching the show and frantically trying to copy all the juicy "tidbits"! No more looking at the DvD collection and sighing at the price, knowing I could never afford it! It's Good Eats, concise, compact and affordable.

This volume contains the first 6 seasons and covers all 80 shows, covering: steak, spuds, eggs, baking, grilling, jams, frying, apples, mushrooms, and many more Good Eats.

All of the tidbits are here and I dare say if not all, most of them, including updates on some of the tips and hints since the episodes were made (such as the recent teflon scare and how teflon isn't bad below 550F). The recipes from each episode are listed with procedures, diagrams, pictures and notations. It takes the fear away from the complexity of cooking and gives you fun history tips that you can pass on during dinner chat or use in a friendly game of trivial pursuit. Having seen other works of Alton's and considering him the best of the best for telling you how, when and why with science to back it up, I rate this the #1 must have.

BTW, it's printed in a durable binder and the dustjacket folds out into a pulp-fiction type poster (cover art) that I'm seriously considering hanging in the game room due to its fun nature.

Great book but could use some tweaks
Ok, I didn't give this five stars...which really kind of hurts to do because I am a huge Alton Brown fan. (My DVR is set to record every episode of Good Eats as it airs, I have autographed copies of all his other books and I've cooked just about everything on the show so far.) Anyway, the book is great, the "knowledge concentrate" is great in that it gets to the point of each topic/show, the recipes that are there are great and well written and the book is very well put together in general.

So why didn't I give it five stars...well mainly because I find myself wishing it had a better way of organizing it and making the information and the related recipes easier to get to when you are cooking and don't really want to improvise and want to try his recipes out. Case in point, I had a bunch of friends coming over for dinner and I had very short notice to throw something together so I was following Alton's recipes for meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Finding the recipes was kind of challenging because i first tried to use the table of contents but that is sorted by the order of the episodes so it isn't really that helpful. next I turned to the index which actually worked very well. I think I am just spoiled by the ease of use of some good eats fan pages websites as easier ways to find recipes by searching by things like food and find myself wishing that was included in the book. I am also hoping (Wishing) that future editions will include some sort of master index (hopefully by food too) so that I can just look up something like "Pork, tenderloin" and see that it was used in his schweinbrauten recipe in episode x, and the recipe is contained in book y on page z kind of thing. Otherwise it is going to be messy to find something since the reader will have to remember which season/book the recipe is in. Other minor complaints involve the recipes. I got very excited to see in the first episode that he included an additional recipe that wasn't in the show but was kind of let down by the scarcity of more of these recipes throughout the book. Also, some of the recipes seem to be missing. Case-in-point, the chapter about pickling is missing some of the recipes he went over on the show such as for "firecrackers" and I had hoped that this book would become my one-stop source for all Good Eats recipes but some of them are missing and must be found on the internet.

The above complaints may be things that are specific to me and not something other general readers would find as a problem. Me, personally, I'm a bit spoiled by how easy Alton makes it to explain and understand some of the complex things about cooking so I wish they took some extra steps to make the book easier to use. Overall though I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book...especially for people that are new to cooking or shy about cooking since it does contain a treasure trove of information that can be unbelievably helpful to people whether they watch the show or not.