Audience eats up food, science mashup

While replicating popcorn during an experiment for his Alton Brown Live: Eat Your Science tour, Food Network personality Brown said he had trouble finding a suitable ingredient in these parts.

“As it turns out, in Arkansas, there are no fat-free proteins,” said a deadpan Brown on Saturday night at Robinson Center Performance Hall to good-natured audience volunteer Kent, who had a “popcorn” balloon of dried crickets (the backup protein), packing peanuts and water explode on him. Kent then had actual popcorn shoot out of a giant rocket at him — so did the whole front row, for that matter.

The popcorn experiments were like the quick-witted Brown’s two-hour-plus variety show itself: messy, too long, a wee bit boring, yet nerdily entertaining nevertheless. Brown — part stand-up comic, part science teacher, part storyteller and part singer — had the audience eating out of his hand.

Dressed in a regal garb, wearing a crown of plastic spoons and carrying a whisk scepter, he joked about what he’d do if he became the food god: require tortilla chips to support 500 times their weight, outlaw kiddie menus (“Children plus power equals terrorists”) and require permits and establish limits for Sriracha sauce (“One bottle per year … or you’re using too much”).

For a cocktail experiment, Dana, a dental hygienist from the audience, was quick to volunteer (“I just like to drink,” she admitted). After spinning a wheel of three ingredients to make a cocktail and landing on vodka, amaro and — gag! — mouthwash, she and Brown used liquid nitrogen to turn it into a more tasty snow cone.

Even then Dana didn’t find the final product palatable. Perhaps the components didn’t all combine perfectly, but it was still cool. Like Brown’s show.