Ask Alton Brown How Food+Heat=Cooking

This week's Slashdot interview guest is Alton Brown, host of the popular cable TV show Good Eats. This is a "reader request" interview in the wake of the surprisingly popular Slashdot review of Alton's book, I'm Just Here for the Food. Please post your questions below. we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated to Alton, and post his answers when we get them back.

Re:Vegetarians

[Matey-O]

I think Vegetarian food has lost the 'stigma' it once had. It's gotten to the point now where I'll frequently have a meal without meat and not think anything about it. (Certainly not "Hey! Look at that! I just ate something without MEAT in it!")

As far as doing it for your own political desires, have at it. I find it curious that much of the vegetarian food industry is devoted to foodstuff that looks and tastes like meat. There's a biological desire there to use meat as a source of protein. And really on a buch of levels, nothing beats a good Ribeye. (blah blah blah, 6 lbs of grain and 88 million gallons of water to make that ribeye, blah blah blah)

That's not to say I don't also love a good vegetable curry now and then.

Re:Iron Chef

[Malic]

...and what would be your prefered featured ingredient? (!)

Re:Recipes on foodtv.com

[pthisis]

Question: Is a cup a pound the world around? You seem to repeat that a lot in your show. However, 16 fl oz of cream weighs less than 16 fl oz of the milk it floats on, right? 16 fl oz of Hg (mercury) weights a hell of a lot more than a pound.

A pint's a pound the world around. A cup's a half pound. It's an approximation; a pint of pure water at standard temperature and pressure isn't exactly a pound, but it's close enough for many real-world purposes. When cooking, you can usually assume equivalence of weight of water/milk/cream/etc without having an error big enough to present a problem. It's often even close enough for oils. Next time you cook with mercury, count me out.

Sumner

Re:Lower Fat and Cholesterol?

[Coolfish]

dietary intake of cholesterol has absolutely no effect on blood cholesterol levels. It's got more to do with transfatty acids and the like. Lower fat in and of itself is silly - take look at all the low-fat foods out there, and how many fat people there are. Now take a look at the ingredients of those low fat foods - fat tastes good, without it, you need something else so that the "food" is palpatable. And what's in the top 3 ingredients for all these low fat foods? Sugar. Empty calories that merely rape the pancreas, skyrocket blood sugar levels, and cause diabetes (is it any wonder in the early 1900s the average person ate less than 2 lbs of sugar per year, and now it is typically over 150 lbs! Any wonder diabetes has skyrocketed?)

Read Alton's book, he talks about different fats and cholesterol, and notes just how silly and misguided current low-fat trends are.