Special event review

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.

Metro on 11/19/2017

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