Alton: No kitchen relationship is more mystical than the one between cook, and knife. Ironically, no kitchen tool is more misunderstood. With that in mind, I hope you’ll stay tuned to a humble program intended to elevate your cutlery consciousness and help you and your blades turn out some really... (Good Eats theme plays)

Alton: A baker can produce a chewy or crunchy crust, a firm or soft crumb, a dense or light texture, simply by varying the amounts of a relatively short list of ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, milk, baking powder, salt. Now, the metallurgist has a pantry, too.

Alton: Now, it order to give you an operator’s point of view of the various knife operations that we’ll be undertaking today, my technical crew constructed this vest rig, complete with a high definition mini-cam and... I don’t know (points) whatever that thing is.

Alton: Check out the drive arm on that engine. See how it goes up and down and front and back in an orbital pattern? That is exactly what you want to see out of your knife during the chopping process.

Alton: Remember: when you start forcing knives around, bad things happen.

Alton: By the way, capsaicin, the fiery compound in chilies, will stick to your hands for hours, turning your hands into chemical weapons! You can prevent this by wearing vinyl or latex gloves, or you can occasionally dip your fingers in a 5:1 solution of water and bleach while you’re working. The bleach will turn the capsaicin into a water-soluble salt that will then rinse away.

Alton: Well, we’ve packed a lot of knifedom into the last half hour, which is why the ending is going to be just a little bit (the production company logo appears)

When “Chef Klaus” cuts through a boot with one of his knives, he calls it “Das Boot.” Boot is actually the German word for “boat” and Das Boot is the name of a 1981 film about a U-boat and its crew.

Alton calls glass cutting boards “Dark Lord of the Sith” evil. Within the Star Wars universe, some of the most prominent characters employ a quasi-mystical form of energy referred to as “The Force.” The Sith are among these. Their ability to manipulate the force is fueled by rage, anger, fear, and hatred, and the uses to which the usually put it are evil. The highest ranked adepts in the order are commonly referred to as “Dark Lords.” Cos Palpatine, also called Darth Sidious, who founded the Empire and was the first (and only) Emperor was such a Dark Lord, as was his sinister apprentice Darth Vader.

The falling cherry tree and person dressed as George Washington refer to an apocryphal tale: supposedly as a youth, Washington chopped down a cherry tree. Confronted by his father, he admitted it with a phrase that has entered the pop lexicon, “I cannot tell a lie.” In fact, historians do not believe anything like this actually happened.

Alton hands some of his vegetable mixture to Thing, Jr. who (it was revealed in Behind the Eats) is the son of Thing from The Addams Family (1964).