Celebrity Chef Recipes Made Easy

F&W editors attending the Classic introduce star chefs at cooking demos, then take seats in the audience to watch our culinary crushes. (Editor-in-chief Dana Cowin, for instance, finally learned the proper way to season food from Thomas Keller.) Here we’ve asked our Test Kitchen cooks to take our favorite Aspen recipes and simplify them, so we can take a bit of this fantastic event home and share it.

“Fishing in Maroon Bells with my wife and our boys has got to be my favorite part of coming to the Classic.”

Photo courtesy of Melanie Dunea

“My favorite Aspen memory is saving an upside-down cake that had exploded from the high altitude.”

Photo courtesy of Steven Freeman

“I still remember when my mother came with me to the Classic in Aspen, many years ago, and we shared several meals with Julia Child.”

“At 2 a.m. at the Classic, I’m usually walking home from my third party of the night.”

“The camaraderie of the chefs is a highlight—we definitely make time to play.”

Photo courtesy of Deborah Jones

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Celebrity Chefs Mix Food and Science

Food has become a cultural phenomenon in the United States and around the world. Food TV is bigger than ever, and chefs are now celebrities. Building on this new food culture is a surprising trend the fuses food with science. That is right; increasingly, both celebrity chefs and at home cooks are paying attention to the science that is involved in the preparation of food.

The trend seems to either have been started by or at least popularized by the idea that people can learn about a process better if they understand the why. For instance, in his show Good Eats on the Food Network, Alton Brown uses science to explain why foods are prepared the way they are. This deeper understanding through science has made its way deeper into the culture of food since cooking, essentially, is a series of scientific behaviors.

The fact is that food science is everywhere. When you go to the grocery store and see three kinds of flour, four difference chocolates, or even a few types of sausage, do you know what the differences are? They are all parts of understanding the science of food and the science of cooking that food.

It is not just Food TV, Emeril Lagasse or Alton Brown that have helped to popularize this trend, though. The general public, the internet, and the curiosity of the human mind are the real culprits. We grow up learning to ask, "why?" So it only makes sense that we would translate that question over to things like the preparation of food. In addition, knowing why food behaves the way it does titillates the mind while at the same time improves your ability to prepare it correctly.

The trend was actually started by a man named Harold McGee who published a book on cooking science. His book lifted the veil of mystery from gourmet food. That was in 1984, and in the two decades since, the science of cooking has become a national obsession as we try to understand why gourmet food looks and tastes the way it does.

Food has become more than just a sustaining fuel, it has become a part of the culture of our world. It only makes sense that we would eventually want to start looking for ways to make sense of that cultural piece. The science of food and cooking is a way of gaining a deeper understanding what has become a serious part of your culture.

Food TV experts such as Alton Brown [http://www.alton-brown.com] have become a staple in the diet of many Americans who enjoy food and the science that goes along with it.