Alton: Despite my Uncle’s pernicious propaganda, I later learned that the roast I enjoyed that evening wasn’t a roast at all, but a braciola – a member of the roulade family, whose members are all composed of flattened food, covered with some kind of filling, which is then rolled, usually tied, and then cooked.
Crew: (waving a sign) STUFFING IS EVIL!!!
Alton: No, I'm not talking about stuffing. I'm talking about a thin layer of goodness, a strata if you like, evenly distributed through the food. Not a big, nasty handful of breadcrumbs shoved up the backside of some poor turkey!

Alton: What we need to do now is contemplate a stuffing. I really like...
Crew: (waving a sign) STUFFING IS EVIL!!!
Alton: Okay, not a stuffing, a filling. A filling is what we need.

Customer: Hey, is that Alton Brown over there?
W: Who?
Customer: The guy from the cool show on the Food Network!
W: I didn’t think he was so fat. And balding.

Alton: You ever been tying up a roast and you try to cut the butcher’s twine with a knife?
Customer: No...
Alton: (laughing) Well, it’ll leave you in stitches!

(After Alton has given him some good advice, a customer is pleased.)
Customer: Now there goes a...
W: (sotto voce) ... dead man.
Customer: What?!?
W: Oh, nothing...

(After demonstrating the right way to tie up a roast.)
Alton: Now... you’re ready to cook it, or you can try this out on your mom and tie her to the railroad tracks – that’s fun, too!

(On preparing a seafood roulade)
Alton: Move this straight into the refrigerator. After a couple of hours in the chill chest, this meat will firm up enough so that it can be cut into rounds without unraveling, which would be a very bad thing. If you’re in a hurry you could skip this step – but I wouldn’t if I were you...

Alton: (trademark line) Mmmmm... golden brown and delicious!

Alton describes a “thin layer of goodness, a strata if you like” that is a component of roulade. Strata is actually the plural of stratum, the correct term for a single layer such as Alton describes here. Those wacky Romans and their plural forms!

The episode opens with Alton visiting his Aunt Ethel and Uncle Fred. These characters are likely an homage to Fred and Ethel Mertz, the neighbors (and comic foils) of Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy.

The roulade uses Good Eats tomato sauce from either Pantry Raid II: Seeing Red or Tomato Envy. Alton serves his fish roll rounds with compound butter. Learn more about this in The Case for Butter. (Find all of these recipes at the FoodTV site).