This Is Why Alton Brown Keeps A Brick In His Kitchen

As far as celebrity chefs go, Alton Brown is considered fairly down to earth when it comes to his cooking. The star of Food Network's "Good Eats" and "Cutthroat Kitchen" will sometimes put together complicated dishes, but just as often Brown is making the perfect cup of coffee or a simple, no-nonsense omelet (which is his favorite food). So it's either no surprise or just a mild surprise that he swears by keeping a brick in his kitchen. Which raises the question: What can you do with a brick?

This is the wrong question, though. Brown has tapped into the correct question: What can't you do with a brick? According to a story Brown likes to tell, the idea came to him just a day after spending a bunch of money on an Italian meat tenderizer. The next morning, he walked into his garden shed, saw a pile of bricks, and had an idea. He wrapped up a brick in foil (for sanitary reasons) and found that it did just as good of a job as his pricey tenderizer. Tenderizing is mostly just smashing, after all. Subsequently, according to an interview with Fox 11, whenever he was in the kitchen, he began asking himself, "Can I do it with a brick?" More often than you'd expect, the brick works.

His brick story seems to check out if you look at Alton Brown's recipes, specifically the one where he includes "brick" in the supplies you'll need. It shows up in his official recipe for gyro meat, where Brown specifies that you should place a brick wrapped in aluminum foil on top of the meat to weigh it down while it's heating up. On an episode of "Good Eats," there's also a moment where Brown suggests placing a couple of bricks on top of a smoked salmon, as he claims the weight and compression will help the salmon absorb the cure he's prepared. To be fair, he also uses a wooden board to separate the salmon from the weight and says that heavy tin cans or a phonebook can also do the job.

Cooking with bricks is a well-known strategy, in fact: When you use a foil-wrapped brick to flatten out your butterflied poultry on the grill, it becomes an Italian dish named pollo al mattone. This literally means "chicken with a brick" in Italian. A brick is sturdy enough to withstand the heat of a grill, and it's fairly safe so long as the brick isn't touching the food directly. Once you're done cooking, you can unwrap the brick and — according to Brown — use it as a doorstop.