Alton’s Future Cookbooks to Enter the Digital Age

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Photo by: brad swonetz ©brad swonetz photography

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The third and final installment of Alton Brown’s Good Eats cookbook series hit store shelves last week and the new volume is overflowing with colorful anecdotes, behind-the-scenes shots and a whopping 225 recipes from 85 Good Eats episodes.

We caught up with Alton at the New York City Wine and Food Festival last weekend and discussed his plan for future electronic cookbooks. Of the potential switch from paper to screen, Alton said, “I don’t know how it’s going to change things. I hope to make the cookbook a more kitchen-friendly device, to make it something where you can choose which knowledge you get, which information you get, when you get it and what order you get it in, so that people can adapt the information to the way they cook, instead of changing the way they cook to the way I cook.” He said that ideally, his series of e-book ventures would be available on the Kindle and Apple iPad, as the latter offers bright video and graphic possibilities.

An avid cookbook collector myself, I asked Alton how he envisions consumers accumulating his texts in a digital library. “I’m hoping that over time, they’ll be able to curate all their favorite recipes from different applications and different e-books that I publish into their own little kind of recipe book,” he said. Leave it to the food science guru to use technology to challenge and expand the limits of traditional cookbooking while increasing ease of use and accessibility for his fans.

Catch Alton on a brand-new season of The Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs premiering Sunday, October 30, at 9pm/8c.

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