Marc Dacascos. Photo: Food Network.

Not enough tension in your cooking competition shows? Do you find your blood pressure leveling out to near-normal readings during "Top Chef"? Do you wish that "Chopped" had more creepy smoke-machine fog piped into the set? Would judges' decisions be more exacting if only they were accompanied by loud, metallic wooshing sounds?

You're in luck. Last week brought the return of "The Next Iron Chef," one of the Food Network's variations on the legendary Japanese cook-off show, and with it a heaping helping of adrenalin-fueled, hacksaw-edited mania. After just two episodes, it's clear the show isn't going to give us a moment's peace, whether to pour ourselves a nice glass of sherry or grab our anti-anxiety meds -- or both, should it ever come to that.

Next time you have the urge for English muffins, try this homemade version from Alton Brown and bake up your own batch.

Hungry for a little bit of behind the behind the scenes dish from The Next Iron Chef before tonight's premiere? Host Alton Brown chatted with our friends at AOL Television about culinary pattern recognition, his chances of competing and yes -- his favorite multitasking tool.

Read Slashfood's interview with The Next Iron Chef contender Nate Appleman.

When you're snacking on edamame, part of the experience is freeing the beans from their green pods. If they're for a dish, however, there's a quicker way to shell a soybean.

When baking, lots of recipes require a greased and floured pan. Luckily, there's a time-saver.

The best and easiest way to take your turkey and amp it up from tasty to epically wonderful is a good brine. If you're new to the world or brining, follow Alton Brown's technique below. If you're not big on the flavors of ginger and allspice, try something like a Simon and Garfunkel flavor combination.

Alton's Good Eats Brine for a 14-16 pound turkey:

* 1 cup kosher salt
* 1/2 cup light brown sugar
* 1 gallon vegetable stock
* 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
* 1/2 tablespoon allspice berries
* 1/2 tablespoon candied ginger
* 1 gallon iced water

Combine all brine ingredients, except ice water, in a stockpot, and bring to a boil. Stir to dissolve solids, then remove from heat, cool to room temperature, and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled.

Early on the day of cooking, (or late the night before) combine the brine and ice water in a clean 5-gallon bucket. Place thawed turkey breast side down in brine, cover, and refrigerate or set in cool area (like a basement) for 6 hours. Turn turkey over once, half way through brining.

Remove bird from brine and rinse inside and out with cold water. Discard brine.

Continue on for roasting instructions.

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The above video, which I originally posted back in October, is a perfect top to your tasty brine. See Gordon Ramsay's whole recipe printed out at FoodTVBlog. Adding one truffle to the mix won't break the bank, and it will give you lots of foodie cred.

But for roasting, I still love Alton Brown's technique, with a few adjustments*:

A few minutes before roasting, heat oven to 500 degrees.

Take the brined, rinsed, dried, and truffled turkey and place it in the roasting pan, on a solid layer of whole small onions and quartered carrots. (This will give you insanely delicious roasted vegetables as a side.)

Loosely pack stuffing into the cavity, and create a mound in front (you must have stuffing crispies!).

Tuck back wings and coat whole bird liberally with canola (or other neutral) oil.

Roast on lowest level of the oven at 500 degrees F. for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cover breast with double layer of aluminum foil, insert probe thermometer into thickest part of the breast and return to oven, reducing temperature to 350 degrees F. Set thermometer alarm (if available) to 161 degrees. Let turkey rest, loosely covered for 15 minutes before carving.

*The bird WILL be stuffed!

When I was in high school, I had a love-hate relationship with science classes. Geology was fine, biology was okay, and chemistry...well, chemistry was hell. Mrs. Olech, the troll who taught the class, regularly flunked half her students and had a teaching manner that made Alan Greenspan seem bouncy and exciting.

Ironically, while I flunked chem, I aced my cooking classes. Even at the time, I thought that this was a little weird; after all, what is cooking if not a chemical process? The subtle adjustment of flavors, the cultivation of certain bacteria, the measured combination of leavening chemicals are all, basically, a mix of applied chemistry and biology. However, cooking class captured my imagination and attention in a way that chemistry didn't.

Reading a recent profile of Alton Brown, I realize that the problem lay with Mrs. Olech and her ilk. The simple fact is that science can be a lot of fun, if it is applied in a way that is relevant and exciting. I was surprised to learn that, like me, Brown found his science classes "boring beyond words." Even now, as he has built his own store of scientific knowledge, he admits to having discarded academic journals and scholarly papers because of their inability to engage his interest.

Alton Brown, one of my absolute favorite culinary personalities, is helping GE to help make your life easier. He's worked with the company to develop a line of Trivection ovens, which combine microwave, convection, and thermal heating methods.

According to Cnet's Kitchen and Appliances blog, Alton worked with the engineers who designed the line of ovens to help them figure out how to create a better oven. He even taught them how to cook so they'd understand better what was needed.

He must have done a good job, because the trivection oven line looks great with cool features, like a glass cook top on the ranges and several different cooking modes (including "proof" and "Sabbath" modes). I guess most of the features are pretty standard on high end ovens at this point. Check out Alton's demo video for more, and pretty entertaining, information.

My boyfriend doesn't like blueberries, particularly baked goods with blueberries in them. He had an unfortunate encounter with a blueberry pancake when he was a kid that has left him permanently scarred and so he now avoids them entirely. This means that if I bake items with blueberries, I am responsible for the entirety of the batch and so I've all but completely given up making blueberry muffins and cakes (I will make up batches of things with blueberries if I know I'll have a crowd who will help me eat them up).

However, I am happy to ogle blueberry treats whenever the opportunity occurs, and so I was delighted to discover this gorgeous image of blueberries muffins in a basket from Ariela of Baking and Books. She uses Alton Brown's recipe and says that they've saved her marriage.

Thanks Ariela for adding your image to the Slashfood Flickr pool.

It's official folks, Nintendo is releasing Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine for the Wii and DS systems. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of details available. Added to that, the promotion video doesn't have any game playing. We're left with very little information.

Some people are speculating that you'll be able to play as the Iron Chefs, but I don't know. I would think you'd be playing against the Iron Chefs and try to take their titles. As long as Alton Brown does the play by play I would be happy.

[via Serious Eats]

It is my opinion that Alton Brown is one of the best things about the Food Network these days. Rachael Ray jumped the shark when she teamed up with Oprah and I can not deal with the train wreck that is Sandra Lee. But Alton continually provides great programming that expertly pairs education and entertainment.

He'll continue to produce his fun and informative content for another three years, as today he signed a new contract that will keep him emceeing Iron Chef America and manning the stove at Good Eats. Additionally, he'll be taking his "Feasting on Asphalt" concept to the water with a program called "Feasting on Waves" that will air this summer. In this show, he'll explore the waterways of the Caribbean, eating, joking and exploring in his trademark way. I can't wait!

[via Food Network Addict]

I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but last summer I was totally glued to Alton Brown's summer road trip show, Feasting on Asphalt. So you'll understand just how thrilled I was to learn that he's done it again this summer, this time hitting the road in the Mississippi Gulf states. The Food Network is rerunning last summer's series all week, in order to get us fans all juiced up and ready for the new season. The first fresh episode premieres Saturday night at 9 pm and I believe that it will deliver all the grit, fried food and gorgeous views that I've come to expect from AB's forays into reality food television. I can't wait.

Way back last October I had the distinct privilege of attending a taping of Iron Chef America with my fellow blogger, Jonathan. The challenger that day in Kitchen Stadium was cowboy chef, Tim Love. This was well before Chef Love was ridden out of Manhattan on a rail out after a wave of negative reviews of his restaurant, Lonesome Dove. Frank Bruni slammed the New York City outpost of Chef Love's much acclaimed restaurant in Fort Worth. The Brunster didn't even dole out any stars. He was reduced to a kindergarten sort of rating system, citing the Dove as "satisfactory."

In the interest of fairness, I must admit that I never ate any of the dishes such as "bony, dry antelope ribs," which caused my man Frank such dismay. I did, however, get to sample the Prairie Butter, which caused the Village Voice's Sietsema to wax rhapsodic. After what seemed like an eternity watching the taping, this signature appetizer proved quite the pick-me-up when Jonathan and I chowed down on it afterwards at Lonesome Dove. The jalapeño margarita and ice-cold shot of Tuaca, and Italian liqueur flavored with vanilla and citrus, also helped shake off the fatigue and the remnants of a raging hangover. I'm not quite sure what Tuaca has to do with cowboy cuisine, but Love seems to like it quite a bit. And just what is Prairie Butter? Well let's just say that any cowboy who gets city folk to belly up to the bar and chow down on split buffalo femurs and the gloriously greasy marrow therein can't be all bad.

But enough of the trials and tribulations of the New York City restaurant scene, as they say in Kitchen Stadium, "Allez cuisine!" By now you're probably wondering why this is being written so far after the actual battle took place. Two reasons: It just aired last week, and more important, due to ICA's strict privacy restrictions no one can reveal the secret ingredient or winner of the battle until after the episode airs. So if you haven't seen Morimoto vs. Love, I advise you not to read the jump.

As entertaining as Alton Brown is, I can't help but think of him as more of a cook than a baker. The reason for this is that he likes to play with science and although baking is certainly scientific, the methodology is not what is going to take your baking to the next level. Technique is important, but flavor may be more so.

That said, there is plenty of flavor to be found in AB's baking book, I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking, just not the extensive range of old and new combinations that you might find in a book from a professional pastry chef - and if you're not looking to emulate cutting-edge, five-star at home, you shouldn't have any problems here. Alton is precise, thorough and very accessible, due to a generous use of entertaining illustrations sprinkled throughout the text. His recipes and methodology are well explained and will provide the reader with a solid base of knowledge of the hows and whys of baking. On top of that, they always turn out good results (barring technical difficulties, of course), so you have a built-in way to reward yourself after learning a new lesson. Recipes include topics from scones and cakes to custards and candies.