Alton Brown's Worst Recipes

Some chefs specialize in the cuisine of a particular region, and others devote their career to perfecting a particular specialty, but Alton Brown's whole shtick is kind of a mad kitchen scientist thing. He's always experimenting, either with techniques or ingredients, and he frequently goes to great lengths to then explain the steps that led to his latest, greatest culinary innovation. He's had great success with this, needless to say, that a string of hit TV shows and best-selling cookbooks can attest to. Still, he's certainly made his share of missteps along the way.

If Brown were a baseball player, he'd be the kind who always swings for the fences. Many times, he will knock one out of the park, but there are plenty of other occasions on which he swings and he misses. The following is a list of times where he hit a foul ball, although some of these balls — er, recipes — are fouler than others.

This recipe for basic cooked wheat berries is, for Brown, a shockingly simple one, calling for nothing more than water, salt, and wheat berries (he doesn't even insist that you harvest your own wheat). You will, however, need a pressure cooker to make them, which is probably the kind of thing that should be indicated in the title, since not everyone owns such a gadget. What's even worse is the amount of salt called for — the 2 tablespoons, according to one reviewer, made the berries "WAY TOO SALTY." Another noted that they followed the oddly unspecific directions exactly as given and still found their berries burning.

Guess you could say Brown really choked when it came to this recipe. While apparently, these broiled chokes can work with some tweaks made to the cooking method, should you instead prepare them as per Brown's directions, well, in the words of one reviewer, the recipe is, "Perfect for turning a perfectly good artichoke into a decorative giant pine cone!" Another notes that, "If you really enjoy eating artichokes this recipe is not for you," as it calls for discarding the leaves that can be the best part of the vegetable. All of the artichoke leaves, outer as well as inner, deserve to be dunked in a delicious sauce rather than unceremoniously tossed in the trash.

As the word "chia" in the title more than hints at, this dessert recipe leans far more towards healthy than indulgent. In fact, this chocolate chia pudding not only contains chia seeds but is also made with coconut oil and avocado. While there is some sweetener — maple syrup, in this case — it's not enough to offset the other "off" flavors. Most cooks who tried this recipe say the consistency is sufficiently pudding-like, but the taste is decidedly sub-par. One describes it as "far too grassy/soil-like," while another says the pudding is "way too salty" and still a third complains that it's "Extremely bitter... like I dumped the cocoa right in my mouth."

The problem with this coffee isn't with how it tastes — unless you don't care for chicory — but then you'd hardly be looking to follow a recipe that includes this ingredient right in the title. The reason why we count Alton Brown's cold brew with chicory in the "fail" column is that, as the sole Food Network reviewer points out, the recipe is "very messy and time-consuming." The multiple steps involved in straining it took them over 45 minutes, not to mention the time they had to spend cleaning up the mess, and all they got for their effort was two cups of coffee (albeit a very tasty brew). As they concluded, "Life's too short!!!... I doubt I'll use that method again."

Alton Brown's crab cakes (which he also styles as fritters for some reason) are pretty simple, but for once he may have erred on the side of excess simplicity. They're made from little more than crabmeat, breadcrumbs, and mayonnaise, with lemon juice and pepper for seasoning, but the mayonnaise doesn't really do the trick of binding them together as an egg might have done. Many bemoaned that their crab cakes fell apart in the fryer, with one reviewer calling the results "crab hash." Another noted that this dish was lacking in flavor, although they did suggest a remedy, "Try using a dash of Old Bay."

The concept of vegetable "steaks" is a cute one, but there's no way that any type of produce can ever really stand in for beef, so it's a mistake to treat it that way. In other words, there are many good ways to cook eggplant, but drowning it in steak sauce and parmesan a la Alton Brown isn't one of them. Reviewers seem to concur that these eggplant steaks are, in the words of one, "not an eggplant dish for eggplant lovers" due to the vegetable's flavor being completely submerged under all of the toppings. On a side note, this meat-free recipe is still not suitable for vegetarians since it calls for Worcestershire sauce, and this condiment includes anchovies.

If you see a recipe for key lime sorbet, you'd probably expect it to be made with key limes, which are easy enough to obtain when they're in season. Alton Brown's recipe, however, calls for something you'll probably have a lot more trouble sourcing: key lime preserves. As one person says, "In the show he made it sound like you just pull them off the shelf of your local grocery store. So NOT true." Another feels that Brown's calling for this specialty ingredient, "Does not fit his philosophy of the average American being able to obtain the software and making this recipe." Apart from the issue with the preserves, there's also somewhat of a mystery surrounding the kosher salt listed among the ingredients since nowhere in the directions does Brown say what you actually do with the stuff.

How hard is it to macerate strawberries, anyway? Not very, since all you really need to do is cover them with sugar and they'll release their juices naturally. Not one to let any lily go ungilded, however, Alton Brown also adds honey (orange blossom, of course, none of your pedestrian plastic bear honey for him), lemon zest, and pepper to his macerated strawberries, along with way too much red wine. One reviewer said that half a bottle of wine "overwhelmed everything including the honey and sugar," while another agreed that it "completely dominated the strawberry flavor and canceled out the honey and sugar." One optimist, however, noted that all you need do is add club soda and you'll have yourself a decent wine cooler.

While classic peanut brittle is a very simple candy, Alton Brown, of course, puts his signature spin on it by adding cinnamon and cayenne and we're okay with that. What's not so okay, though, is what he leaves out — baking soda, the ingredient that gives the candy its distinctive slightly chewy texture (which you won't find here). As one reviewer notes, "If you want Peanut Hard Candy, fine, but call it by the right name." Not to mention, cooking peanut candy the Alton Brown way is a tricky, time-consuming process that's still not guaranteed to succeed. Several unhappy cooks wound up with "a sugar mess," while another said, "After 1 HOUR, all I had was beige foam."

Alton Brown's pistachio fruit balls are, again, on the simpler side of things for him: several different types of dried fruits combined with chopped nuts and bound with juice and liqueur. Of the Food Network fans who tried them, even the positive reviews were mostly from those who'd made significant tweaks to the formula. Others, though, abandoned the attempt to improve the recipe they found "too sweet," "too expensive," "a lot of work," "an awful sticky mess," and even, in one horrid case, "so gross it almost made me ill." Yep, sounds like a keeper — or not.

If you're looking for a fun new way to repurpose the seeds scooped out of your Halloween jack-o-lantern, you'd best look elsewhere. As many of the home cooks who have tried Alton Brown's pumpkin seed brittle recipe can attest, this one's a big old flopperoo. If you follow it as written, there's a good chance your candy will never crystallize. In the words of one disappointed would-be candy maker, "it was a mess... a huge block of sugar and the nuts didn't even taste good afterward." Those who found some success with the pumpkin seed brittle often made significant tweaks either to the directions or the ingredients, thus essentially creating their own (better) recipes.

Scallops are usually pretty high-dollar, and they deserve a recipe that showcases their delicate flavor at its finest. Alton Brown's scallop mousse is not that recipe. As one person who tried it says, "It definitely needs something... it was just boring and a waste of good scallops." Another reviewer, irate at this waste of perfectly good scallops, declares, "This is without a doubt the wor[s]t recipe I have ever tried from Food Network... a complete disap[p]ointment." Yet another person says they were able to rescue the recipe by adding caramelized onions, but notes that Brown's version "needs some major twe[a]king," (a familiar refrain).

Although there's no photo on the Food Network website, we assume that Alton Brown's Sparkling Gingered Face is a recipe from a Halloween episode of one of his cooking shows as he says to make it in a face-shaped mold. You could also make it in any other type of Jell-O mold or even a bowl, but the question is, should you? As we're including it on this list, you may correctly assume that the answer is no. The directions given on the website, it seems, differ from how Brown made the dish on his show and they result in gelatin that won't set up right. Someone who tried to follow this recipe admits "It turned out an awful failure" and laments "a bottle of champagne totally wasted. Ugh!"

We're not sure what Alton Brown was thinking when he got the idea to mix tofu with instant lemonade, cranberry juice, and fruit cocktail since his Tall and Tangy Tofy Thangy hits the not-so-sweet spot where it's really not all that healthy due to the sugar, but neither is it even remotely enjoyable. One reviewer describes it as, "Too meaty to be a spritzer or cooler and much too light in flavor to be very tasty or complex," and even the reviewers who did seem to like it made quite a few tweaks of their own (adding fruit, sweetener, different juices, etc.) in order to improve its flavor.

Alton Brown's whipped potatoes recipe is just wrong on so many levels. For one thing, why bother using a mandoline to slice potatoes that are just going to wind up mashed, anyway? For another, are you really supposed to pour nearly a gallon of milk down the drain once you're done using it as cooking liquid? (So much for trying to eliminate food waste). Assuming you do want to go to all this effort and expense, what do you get for your trouble? As one reviewer puts it, this recipe is, "a lot of extra work for mashed potatoes that tasted like scalded milk," while another feels it to be, "inferior to the 'old-fashioned' approach [with] less potato flavor and stickier consistency."

If you're the observant type, you'll have noticed that we've been proceeding through this list in alphabetical order, but these last two recipes deserve a spot right at the very end since even Brown singles them out as his two biggest fails. In "Good Eats: The Final Years," he admits that his pot roast was one of "the most hated Good Eats recipe[s] of all time." What makes a simple pot roast so hateable? One word: raisins. Another word: olives. Sure, these two ingredients work well together in picadillo and empanada fillings, but stick them in a pot roast recipe and you're just asking for trouble. One reviewer said the dish tasted "like chili mixed with bad A1 steak sauce," while others called it "absolutely nasty," "an awful combination of flavor[s]," and "Bad, bad, bad."