In New Cookbook, Alton Brown Revisits (and Improves!) His Most Iconic Recipes

Good Eats: The Final Years is available online and in stores now.

Alton Brown In Concert - Louisville, KY
Photo: Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images

The world of food has changed considerably in the 20 years since Alton Brown first wowed Food Network viewers with his scientific approaching to cooking on Good Eats.

A shift in the average person's attitude towards cooking along with a boom in ingredient accessibility created the perfect opportunity for Brown to revisit his best-selling cookbook.

Good Eats: The Final Years, the fourth and final installment in the series, capitalizes on the fact that home cooks have become more adventurous in the kitchen.

"If I had published a recipe 10 years ago that called for gochujang, people would have thought I was nuts," he told USA Today. Today's readers, however, will hardly bat an eye at the fact that Brown's new recipe for bibimbap rightly includes gochujang.

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Good Eats: The Final Years

Good Eats The Final Years Cookbook
Amazon

Speaking with Thrillist, Brown admitted that of the four cookbooks, The Final Years was the hardest to put together.

"This new book contains a great deal of original food photography as well as behind the scenes photos, things that we just didn't have for the first three books," he told the publication. "There are also more illustrations and in-depth explanations. Honestly, the first three books were written specifically for people who had actually seen the shows, whereas I assumed with this book that they hadn't."

Boasting 150 recipes, The Final Years is loaded with the history and science of food sprinkled with Brown's acerbic sense of humor. It includes an "improved" recipe for his famous chicken parmesan along with several brand-new recipes—such as lasagna, shrimp cocktail, and chili—that never appeared on TV.

WATCH: The Best Tips and Tricks We Learned from Alton Brown

The new lasagna is Brown's way of "atoning" for his broadly maligned slow cooker lasagna. It's an elaborate, multi-page recipe he described to USA Today as "quite a bit of work."

"I'm done with lasagna," he said. "(This) is the way to do it. I can walk away. I have atoned."

Good Eats: The Final Years is available online and in stores now.

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