The Mega Bake Oven

Went to see Alton Brown Live down in Colorado Springs last night, and this — the Mega Bake Oven — was his over-the-top tribute to the Easy Bake Oven he was denied as a child. Instead of 100-watt bulbs it uses two arrays of stage lights, top and bottom. If I remember the figures correctly, it draws 54,000 watts and produces over 1,000,000 lumens and enough heat to bake a couple of pizzas in three minutes.

And that was at 87% power. Any higher and he’d have thrown the theater’s massive breaker.

But the highlight of the show for me was in the first act, when he was dismissing organic and sustainable foods. The problem, he said, is that it was impossible to know what those words actually mean after the government got involved. He added, “I’m 51 years old and I’ve never seen the government make anything better.”

I like this guy more than ever.