The following is an original production of WTCI.

To me, you can't separate food from history.

You can't separate it from science, you can't separate it from people, you can't separate it and shouldn't, you know, that's where it gets its real context and its relevance.

So what happens when an eccentric and talented chef fuzes food with science lessons?

Tonight on the A-list, I'll get the behind the scenes scoop on the making of Good Eats and much more with Food Network star Alton Brown.

People say they didn't like.

If you've turned on the Food Network in the last 13 years, chances are Alton Brown face is pretty familiar with his revolutionary cooking show, Good Eats just completed its 14th and final season in February 2012.

But if Chattanooga fans are experiencing some residual sorrow in the wake of the show's farewell, they won't have to look very far.

For more from their favorites, Sardonic Chef.

I met up with Alton at our very own Tennessee Aquarium right here in Chattanooga, where he's been applying his own unique brand of culinary education to local area restaurants and patrons.

So you're an Atlanta boy now, but you have chosen a very special partnership in Tennessee with the Tennessee Aquarium.

Tell me about that.

I've always been a really big fan of this aquarium.

My wife and I have come here as long since it's been open and we needed to shoot an underwater scene for an episode of Good Eats.

And our very first year and I hadn't done that kind of thing before, and we called because we were fans of the aquarium.

We called and they said, Sure, you can come do this.

And so the first my first underwater shooting was done here.

And the thing that struck me was these folks really know what they're doing and they're really nice.

And so I've always adored this facility and Chattanooga.

It's so nice because really the aquarium is the heart of the city, which is really cool and so we just kept coming back here through the years and we had a daughter and she grew up kind of coming up here.

And and so finally some folks at the aquarium started talking to us about the possibility of doing something together, just like an event.

And I thought, well, heck, why don't we make it a little bigger than that?

Why don't we build something?

Because no one's really doing a really great sustainability program on the East Coast, I think.

And they were game for it and they've got the science for it and very imaginative, flexible thinkers.

And so we put together Serve and protect, which is really our mission is to make people aware of where their seafood comes from, to buy and eat American whenever possible, whether that's wild seafood or farmed seafood, and to get people to understand the differences.

And then the other thing is to get people to diversify their their seafood portfolio, as it were, to eat a wider range of fish and when possible, to eat smaller fish, which are generally considered to be more sustainable.

So what's an example of a small fish that if I saw on the menu that might not be unusual, the.

Fish that well, certainly.

Like sardines.

Sardines which come in many different forms I'm a huge fan of mackerel, is certainly something that you might see that way here in in Tennessee.

I mean, you raised some of the best aquaculture trout in the United States.

Usually those come head off, but very often they've still got their heads on.

And that fits beautifully on a plate.

It's a good pan fish, a fish that can easily be cooked in a pan in its whole form, and that's a fish you should definitely be embracing because it's a really great sustainability story, good success story and a great fish.

So if it can fit its whole body on a plate, really think about it, because that's a fish that probably has a very short life span comes to sexual maturity and can breed at a very young age.

So eating them and eating therefore lower on the on the the the food chain has a much more positive effect on on what seafood we have available.

As you can see, just a couple of minutes without and usually results in an impromptu lesson about the science of food.

And for fans of good eats, that should come as no surprise.

Speaking of breakfast, I like mine.

Purple.

It might surprise you to learn that Altin claims he was an abysmal science student in his youth and instead went on to study theater at the University of Georgia.

It was there that he began experimenting in the kitchen and gained a passion for cooking that would hugely impact the rest of his life.

Switching gears, after college, Allison worked for ten years as a cinematographer and video director and spent a lot of his free time watching cooking shows, which he found to be dull and uninformative, convinced he could do it better.

He and his wife quit their jobs and moved to Vermont, where Altan enrolled in culinary school and began building the Good Eats empire.

And so how did you know the direction you wanted to go after culinary school?

Not not in terms of the show, but what the show wanted to be.

If it wasn't going to be like every other cooking show.

I learned very quickly in culinary school that I actually wasn't a very good cook.

I wasn't a very talented cook in that I was never going to be the kind of guy that created amazing new dishes.

I'm not that way.

And I learned very quickly that I don't really have an instinct for that.

And so what I decided was, okay, I'm not going to be this great creative chef.

Maybe what if I can just figure out how to make a better play the scrambled eggs.

If I can just figure out how to make a better meatloaf.

And so that turned me to the science of cooking, because in the end, you have to really understand your ingredients.

You have to understand cooking processes if you're going to make something better.

So I decided to focus on really examining common foods that everyone knows.

We don't invent much in the way of new food on on good eats, even after 13 years.

We try to make sure that the food that we did was was stuff that, you know, in everyone's mind you're like, Well, I know what that should taste like.

I know what French onion soup ought to taste like.

I know what banana pudding ought to taste like.

I'm not inventing anything new.

We're just trying to invent new ways to get to it.

And so I just decided that understanding science was what was going to save me.

And then it did.

That developed into, well, I really like telling these stories of science.

And by the way, we need to have some Monty Python in here, and we need a little Julia Child and a little Mr. Wizard, and just putting that together made for something fun.

So I started writing the scripts.

I remember was right after graduation.

And I remember my wife turned to me and said, So living on $20,000 a year is a lot of fun.

It's been been a blast.

We've enjoyed that.

And now I think it's about time you start writing that.

That show.

And I sat down and I wrote two episodes, which became episode one and Two of Good Eats, which is a steak show and a potato show, which seemed like a good place to start for an American, and then went out and raised money so that we could make the pilot episodes.

And the first people that I pitched it to who were people that we had known in the film business from before, because my wife was a producer and I was a director, offered to put up all the money for the first four the pilot episode, so all the development money.

But their caveat was that I had to be the host, which was not my plan really.

I had not planned to do that.

And I said no, I turned it down.

Who was going to be the host?

I didn't know yet.

I was going to find somebody good because I just never thought that I could do that job.

I'd never been in front of the camera.

And I got like I left the meeting and went down to the elevators.

And as I'm standing there, I was like, What did I just do?

No, I know I can do that.

I think I could do or I'll do it until we find somebody better, but we'll at least get started.

And so I went back and I accepted that, accepted the deal.

But I was still completely when we shot the pilot, I was assuming that we would replace me as the host.

I never thought that was going to work out.

And so when we did the pilots, I didn't really pay any attention to my performance.

It's yeah we're going to thing will replace this later.

And it never worked out but you know why And in the end, I was cheaper than the end.

I was cheaper and good, good talent cost money.

So 13 years and 250 episodes later, it's hard to imagine anyone else as the face of good eats.

Alison's off beat storytelling methods and genuine enthusiasm for food made all those science lessons.

He snuck into each episode completely palatable.

Those early pilots aired for the first time right here on PBS at W TV in Chicago.

Food Network picked up the show in 1999 and with Good Eats out and became one of the channel's first breakthrough stars.

But no matter how big the show became, Allison remained painstakingly dedicated to the process, acting as both writer and producer of every episode.

In addition to his hosting duties.

I think that I've spent the last 13 years 80 proof.

In all honesty, 60% of my waking hours in the last 13 years have been spent writing Good Eats episodes because it never really stopped.

The research doesn't stop.

We would shoot three times a year.

Recipe development would never stop.

My culinary team was always working, research was always going, and as soon as we finished shooting one batch, we were usually already behind.

I was behind in writing the next bunch of shows, so it just I don't know how long it really took.

You know, some shows it might take me a week to even get a rough draft.

Other shows, I wrote some shows in a day.

Very unusual.

And did you need approval from anyone?

I was very fortunate that at Food Network, once we were a few seasons in on Good Eats, they pretty much I would like to think that we earned the privilege of free reign.

They they gave me all the rope I needed to hang myself creatively.

Very few times.

Very few times.

Did I do something that they requested me not either didn't like from the idea standpoint, or I filmed something that they ended up not liking.

And it was almost always something where I had taken a comedy bit perhaps too far.

But that didn't happen.

Happened very often.

So I never had to give.

I never had to get script approval.

So if Food Network wasn't your script approver, who do you go to when you're like, How is this going to work?

Is it your wife?

Is it?

Well, my wife was there as the executive producer and president of the company was there to stop me from from hanging myself.

She was usually the one that stopped me from writing something that was comedically caustic or would remind me who my audience was, because sometimes my humor would go dark and deep and hello.

And that was sometimes a problem.

So she would she would generally stop me.

I would like to think that I'm a good editor of my own work.

I don't think every word I writes are precious snowflake.

So as soon as I write it, I become a critic of it.

But she was the one that is probably most, most often pointed to something and said, This isn't what you ought to be doing.

Do you have a favorite episode?

No, I don't.

They're all my precious little children.

You know, I love them and I hate them all.

I hate when they're over.

You know, we're done editing them.

I always just look at them and see the mistakes.

But I do think the show's got better through through the years.

The last two specials that we did, we did have a dark chocolate special and a Thanksgiving special, both one hour episodes that I think we're pretty as good as I could do.

I don't know if they're my favorite, but they're the best that we could do.

I think Altan may be critical of his own work, but audiences fell in love with his game changing vision of what a cooking show could be.

In 2007, Alton became the first Food Network star to receive a Peabody Award for his talents, his library of knowledge about science, history and pop culture also served him well in publishing seven books, earning him the titles of New York Times best seller and James Beard Award winner.

With such a positive reception, it's no wonder that in 2006, when Altan began a new journey into food exploration, fans were eager to come along for the ride.

Well, as much as I love Good Eats, I loved feasting on that.

So I just thought that show, I mean, why.

Why did you like it?

So few people did.

When people say they did like it, I always ask why.

I love it because it is middle America.

It's everybody's you know, we took road trips all the time as kids and stopping off at the random places.

And I have an Uncle Raymond who he couldn't find his way anywhere if he had directions, but he would land just, you know, by chance at the best oyster bar, you know, a little shack somewhere or the best place to get barbecue.

And it would always be a great story.

And to me, that's what life is about.

I mean, food is essential, but at the end of the day, you want to know the good story about why that barbecue restaurant, you know, happened upon here and and and what was the history of this town.

And to me that I love that.

I mean, I like the documentary esque nature of it.

Well, what we wanted to do in the end is, is I remember as well from childhood that the travel by car wasn't just about getting from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time possible, which we do now.

There was more of a sense of wandering around.

And so when we made Feasting on Asphalt, it was a true documentary.

We did not know where we were going.

We had a general direction and every day woke up and said, I don't go that way.

Which is pretty risky stuff from a filmmaking standpoint, because you might have a whole day where you're like, Well, what do we get today?

Nothing, because you just didn't find anything that was any good.

And so it took a long time because of that.

But hopefully what came through in that show was that you could still have real documentaries.

You could still really just stumble into things because everything else on TV travel wise is because time is money.

Those things are produced.

Everybody knows where they're going.

There are no surprises.

Nothing surprising happens.

By and large.

I mean, there are a couple of shows that did break that mold, but by and large it isn't.

But I don't think that many people liked it.

I think you, me and a handful of us, well.

They must have liked it.

Not because then feasting on waves happen.

Did well, but we did two seasons of feasting on the asphalt.

We did one east west and then we did going up the Mississippi River.

That turned into a book.

And then we did.

Feasting on Waves.

Feasting on waves is very difficult.

Very difficult, because, well, a couple of reasons.

Boats are a lot harder to steer around.

The motorcycle's harder to just stop, you know, whether slightly dependent and down in the Caribbean, you know, in the United States, you turn on a camera, people flock.

Everybody wants to be on TV, everybody wants to be famous for their 15 minutes or however much time they can parlay down in the islands.

Not so much, no.

You've got to actually earn people's trust.

They've got to know what your intentions are.

And so we had to put a lot more effort into just getting people to let us turn a camera on.

And sometimes they wouldn't know, not interested, don't want you around some islands more and more than others.

So it was a very rough journey because of that.

I mean, satisfying.

Yes.

Who doesn't want to go boating around the Caribbean right.

Eating food.

Eaten.

Yeah.

Leaving a lot and way too much of it and drinking an awful lot of rum.

So that that that that part of it was fun.

But it was a tough show to make.

I wouldn't want to do that again.

Really hard.

Another challenge presented itself when Food Network decided to adapt the hit Japanese culinary game show Iron Chef for American audiences with English dub versions of the original series.

Being a top rated show for the channel, an emphasis was placed on maintaining the sheer spectacle of the original.

But with its own signature differences.

A lot of his own attention on the success of the soon to be Iron Chef America depended largely on putting together the perfect cast, and Altan seemed like a natural fit.

When they first decided to do the show.

I remember getting the call and they said, You've got a choice.

We want you in the show.

You can either play the Dr. Hattori role if you're a fan of the original, you know, he's the know it all, which seemed to be a perfect choice.

Or you can be the chairman.

Oh, and I said, I don't want to be the chairman.

That's boring.

You don't really get to do that much.

But of course.

Yeah, we've got that.

We have a lot of sound effects and I don't get sound effects.

He gets up right?

But I didn't want I didn't want the chairman job.

I wanted to, to, to call the action.

And so they let me try that out.

And it seemed okay.

So it's like, okay, so give us some some interesting different kind of.

Job, though.

I mean, really when when the secret ingredient is revealed, the chefs really had no idea the.

Way it works.

And this is the way it worked on the Japanese program as well is is and I'm not sure of the time frames.

I think about a week before the battle, the chefs are given a list of like eight possible ingredients, and it's going to be one of these eight.

So they have to plan for those.

And so you get the ingredients beforehand.

So I know these are all of these.

I know the ingredients well ahead.

I know what all the secret ingredients are going to be.

That's not the challenging part, because I can do research and there's a researcher, Food Network, that helps me with my research.

What's the challenge is that each chef is allowed to bring in, I think it's $500 worth of their own stuff, things they want.

And that list I don't get sometimes until the day of the battle.

And so typically I have to get in pretty early in the morning and actually see the stuff as it comes in, especially if it's like a Morimoto battle.

A Morimoto battle.

It's like, Oh my God, he's going to bring 15 things I've never even seen before.

And I got to know what it is when it hits the counter.

And so that's most of my time is spent researching all that pantry stuff.

So are you like taking pictures on your iPhone and then scanning?

Oh.

I will take pictures and try to match them up against other things.

You know, it's like this is okay, this is kelp or this is some bizarre mushroom.

I got to figure out what this is.

I'll take a picture and run off.

And I've actually built a database, this kind of massive PowerPoint of pictures of Asian ingredients and Italian ingredients so that I can quickly cross-reference things in.

The show is edited, but it's shot live on tape.

Oh, yeah.

So there's no I mean, you can't say, Hey, hold on.

Oh, no, no, no.

The kid.

The clock is never stopped.

It's an hour.

And it didn't matter if you lop off your finger, it doesn't matter who gets set on fire and things do happen.

But no, we're not stopping.

And off camera, what kind of reporter do you know?

The crew, the cast, all the chefs?

Well, there's so many of us there, like 90 people on that show is 13 cameras.

I mean, the culinary staff alone is about 20.

So there's there's a lot of folks.

But, you know, every everybody gets along.

It's very professional kind of place.

There's a lot of egos to stumble into, though, if you're not careful.

And copy flavors on Entourage, you know, I'm not sure how we're going to deal.

With.

I won't be able to live with them.

Starring in four hit TV shows and completing several book tours has made out and pretty used to life in the public eye.

But in 2009, he began receiving attention for something a bit more personal.

When a promo for an upcoming season of Iron Chef America hit TV screens, audiences were shocked to see an almost unrecognizable Alton Brown, who had just shed £50.

I set out to increase my nutrition to energy ratio, and to do that, I came up with the plan of four lists.

Focusing an episode of Good Eats around his weight loss plan.

Alton was able to teach his audiences a new way to look at their daily food consumption.

I know in 2009 you went through a physical transformation.

You lost £50 at.

Almost 50.

Pounds.

Congratulations.

You have kept it off.

I mean, you.

Know, I've kept off 80% of it.

I got too scrawny.

You know, my my wife said I had a turkey neck, you know.

Oh, that's not very special.

As you age, that's never good.

Yeah.

You know, you start realizing, well, that skin's not going to just snap back now that it's empty.

So it's kind of hang in there like a piece of old luggage.

So it's like I got to work on that.

So I put a little bit back on, but I think I'm in a good place.

But you did it by following these lifts.

Did I have to.

Share that with you?

I was just telling a friend of mine about these Les, and she said, I'm a lost person.

I could do a list.

Lists are good.

What I did is I decided that I was never going to be able to lose weight if I just told myself I can't have things.

And so I started by trying to think of a diet as a first concentrate on what you need.

And so I made a list based on research and research of foods that I felt that I needed to eat several times a week.

These included dark, leafy greens, sweet potatoes, oily fish.

So my first list, first of the four lists were things that I needed multiple times a week.

My next list was things that I needed to have at least once a week.

My third list were things that I could have once a week on that list would things like dessert and martinis once a week only.

And then I have.

Them or only ones right.

Now.

Each, each, each, each of these things I can have once a week.

And I was really losing weight.

Red meat was on that.

I could have like a steak one time a week.

I could have one drink a week.

It was usually a martini.

And I get dessert once a week and I could really enjoy it.

And then the fourth list were things that I could not ever have under any circumstance.

Ever like.

Soda.

And I gave up fast food entirely.

And so by balancing the lists and really concentrating on the foods I needed to get, you know, like I believe I should eat nuts, specifically almonds every day.

So they're on my that number one list.

You find that when you really concentrate on getting the food you ought to have, there's not a whole lot left over.

I mean, you're not hungry for the bad stuff because I got to eat another sweet potato this week.

I need more broccoli or I need to have more fish.

And so that worked for me.

So whether it's a new take on dieting or the molecular makeup of a pie crust, Alton's insistence on pushing boundaries and igniting passion for both food and learning in his viewers has left a distinct impression in the culinary world.

So now that good Eats is officially over, what's next for the man who's seemingly done it all?

Is there any insight you can give us into what's next in your life professionally?

Well, I'm going to take at least some time to make a return to male modeling.

You know, they hold me back in one more time, so they'll be my line for the season next year.

That's your next.

Show.

Good comedy, right?

Oh, Oh, that struck me as funny.

I mean, to think that I am so sorry.

There are some some new programs for Food Network in development.

One is going to be called Foods to Change the World.

It is going to be a look at what foods through the history of mankind got us here, which and which one is going forward will probably change the course of mankind.

But that's going to be a miniseries.

There's another series that I'm not going to talk about in the works, and we're also excited about a new venture.

We're going to start producing enhanced books instead of paper books.

We're going to be producing a series called 25, which is going to be e-books that are only have 25 recipes in them, but they're going to be heavily advanced, heavily enhanced with video.

So it's going to we're hoping to kind of pioneer or help pioneer that technology.

So whether someone's watched your shows or read your books or is about to watch and read whatever you have coming next, what do you hope is the one takeaway?

Well, hopefully the the first take away, regardless of what kind of project it is, it has to be entertaining.

People have to want to pick it up and not put it down or want to watch.

And then hopefully they get infected by an enthusiasm for it.

And a lot of people that watch Good Eats people have often said, I don't care about food, I'm not a cook, but I like your show.

And then all of a sudden they start spouting knowledge that they've picked up and so that their appreciation for it deepens is like, yes, on Good Eats, we one time made us still to make our own liquid smoke.

I'm not assuming people are going to make liquid smoke at home, but the fact that they now know what's behind something like that enhances the way they look and taste things from then on.

So I hope that whatever we do is infectious for whatever subject we take on.

Well, it is I will tell you on behalf of your fans everywhere, we know more about eggs and the molecular makeup of things we never knew existed.

Hopefully that makes life better.

It does.

It does.

More good then you've been infected.

We are good.

The takeaway is.

Don't mind my job.

It's been good.

Good.

And on behalf of the fish, you.

Thanks for being on the show.

You're very welcome.

It's been good fun.

Thanks for having.