infryq reviewed I'm Just Here for More Food by Alton Brown
Review of "I'm Just Here for More Food" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Not as good as the first book. In "I'm Just Here for the Food", AB had a very casual, minimalist attitude towards tools and techniques: keep it cheap but heavy; you don't need a thousand pans to be a good cook; good cooking is really only variations on a very few common themes, so learn to trust your instincts and play around a little, and people will think you're fabulous.
Now, baking is a more fastidious endeavor so you can't be quite as hippie about it, and he seems to have compensated by injecting the leftover handwaveyness into his explanations, flaunting hunches instead of using actual science to combat the conventional wisdom.
He also spends a lot of time talking about specific brands of tools, and has a crappy attitude about it -- where in IJHftF he would've said "Don't bother getting X if you're not going to cook Y …
Not as good as the first book. In "I'm Just Here for the Food", AB had a very casual, minimalist attitude towards tools and techniques: keep it cheap but heavy; you don't need a thousand pans to be a good cook; good cooking is really only variations on a very few common themes, so learn to trust your instincts and play around a little, and people will think you're fabulous.
Now, baking is a more fastidious endeavor so you can't be quite as hippie about it, and he seems to have compensated by injecting the leftover handwaveyness into his explanations, flaunting hunches instead of using actual science to combat the conventional wisdom.
He also spends a lot of time talking about specific brands of tools, and has a crappy attitude about it -- where in IJHftF he would've said "Don't bother getting X if you're not going to cook Y every day of your life -- while X is useful, it's probably not worth it," in IJHfMF he says "If you're going to do Y a lot, you really need to get an X. Do it for the children." Maybe it's a subtle difference, but it's one I find unbelievably snooty, as if I can't be a real baker without some special kind of stand mixer. Pah!
At the same time, this is still a very different book from most cookbooks, and it still focuses on basic techniques and variations rather than just listing gobs of recipes. And that's why I will probably keep buying AB's books until he tires of writing them. I just liked him better when he was a Revolutionary Telling Us the Secrets! instead of an Authority Figure Telling Us the Answers... maybe he changed editors?