Alton Brown Serves Fine Food on his Airplane
By: Rosemina Nazarali
Published: July 16, 2012

When Food Network star Alton Brown travels, he likes to do so in style on his very own airplane. The perks of being a chef and being your own pilot are obvious -- he doesn't have to eat bland airplane food. Since Brown travels as much as he does, it definitely makes a difference. Brown often comes prepared with his own food for himself and guests that may be on board with him. 
"I can make stuff for my guests, or I can make stuff for me and my copilot, and of course that means being able to eat in the cockpit," Brown said. "So I ave a special cooler that will slide up in between our seats, and I'll be honest, we eat a lot of shrimp. We eat a huge amount of shrimp on that airplane: shrimp cocktails, shrimp salads, we also have more than our fair share of egg salad sandwiches and a lot of nuts."
The celebrity chef also has very strict rules for what is not allowed in the cockpit. "You don't see a lot of pizza, you're not seeing a lot of soup, nothing that you could spill on instrumentation. But pilots love to eat, and I'm certainly one of those."
His favorite dish to eat while piloting his plane is, of course, shrimp.
"Jumbo shrimp would be the number one thing, with an incredibly fiery horseradish sauce I make," Brown said. "Keeps the nasal passages open up in the air, and of course you have to heavily season food when you're traveling at high altitude because it tends to dumb down your palate a little bit. Which is one of the reasons aircraft food is typically so bad -- but not on my plane, by golly.