This Is Alton Brown's Controversial Opinion About Steak

Alton Brown is a hard man to argue with when it comes to food knowledge. The amount of thought he has put into ingredients and dishes over the years could fill a book – and it has! According to Good Reads, Brown has authored and contributed to 16 books in the last 18 years. In addition he has hosted popular Food Network shows like Good Eats, Feasting on Asphalt, and The Next Food Network Star, among others (via The Famous People). In those books and on those shows, you're sure to find a few of Brown's recipes for steak, including perhaps his fan-favorite Pan-Seared Rib-Eye that's received five stars and over 700 reviews on the Food Network website. 

The ingredients are as basic as you can get: one boneless rib-eye, canola oil, salt, and pepper. The instructions walk you through searing the steak in a hot cast iron skillet before transferring it to the oven to finish cooking. What this very straightforward, crowd-pleasing steak recipe doesn't address is Brown's preferred, albeit controversial, way to enjoy the leftovers (should you have any). According to The Daily Meal, Alton Brown stunned Twitter by claiming cold, thinly-sliced leftover steak with Heinz ketchup is one of his favorite breakfast treats. We're not here to call Alton Brown's taste untrustworthy. His affinity for sardine and avocado sandwiches can do that for us. But we are saying the combo of cold steak and ketchup for breakfast probably raises a few eyebrows.

On one hand, microwaved leftover steak is gross. There are some proper hacks out there for reheating steak, like sealing it in a bag and warming it up in barely-simmering water. But if you're longing for some leftover steak for breakfast and aren't up to doing any sort of cooking at that hour, eating the steak cold seems reasonable. And hey, protein-rich breakfasts can be great for your metabolism, right? On the other hand, pairing ketchup with your steak is a questionable choice. When the question of why it's wrong to put ketchup on steak was posed to Reddit, one user compared it to mixing coke with an 18-year-old single malt whisky. Ok, we hear you. 

In Brown's defense, his tweet did clarify that "great steak requires no sauce" so maybe we can forgive him for how he chooses to adorn the leftovers? After all, ketchup is a match for other beefy indulgences, like burgers and meatloaf. And when you consider that Heinz ketchup-flavored ice cream is now a thing, enjoying the condiment on cold steak for breakfast really isn't all that alarming. Either way, we probably should have seen this coming from Brown. In a Saveur questionnaire, he named bacon as the most overrated ingredient and ketchup as the most underrated. Now that has controversy written all over it.