How To Transform Alton Brown's Favorite Comfort Food Combo Into A Single Snack

What does a discerning food nerd like Alton Brown consider to be comfort food? According to the man himself, it's kettle-style potato chips and a martini. With a little creativity, you can combine the two into some pretty good eats; it's all about infusing the flavors of a martini into a topping for your chips. For the best flavor, however, you'll want to turn to the dirty martini for inspiration.

Popular recipes for martini potato chips tend to include the key ingredient of a dirty martini: olive brine, which makes the whole dish more savory, and therefore more satisfying. The brine is mixed into a blue cheese spread, along with vodka, sour cream, and chopped olives; vermouth is optional. The end result is a tangy, umami, and creamy topping with a light fruitiness from the olives, giving you amazing texture when eaten with your chips. In short, it's exactly what you'd expect from combining a couple of Alton Brown's favorite foods.

Enjoying a martini and potato chips together is all about appreciating contrast. A good martini is crisp, clean, and lightly botanical in flavor — a perfect complement to the salt and fat of the average potato chip. This snack combination brings the best of both into a single bite: the elegance of the cocktail and the everyman appeal of the chips. If you're making everything from scratch, just make sure you're using the right type of potatoes for homemade potato chips; otherwise, the texture might be a little off.

You might notice that dirty martini chip recipes use vodka instead of gin, and Alton Brown is pretty vocal about using gin in martinis. He does, however, make an exception for dirty martinis — he actually recommends using vodka because olive brine tends to overpower gin. The specific vodka he prefers for the cocktail is Kástra Elión, a Greek vodka distilled from olives. Using this for your dirty martini chips enhances the olive flavor in your topping. 

Instead of using olive brine straight from the jar, try Brown's "superior" version, the recipe for which is on his YouTube channel. Blend together Castelvetrano olives (make sure they're pitted), their brine, water, capers, salt, anchovies, and a touch of spice, then strain it until you get a clear liquid free of any olive chunks. This is a more fully rounded, "dirtier" brine that highlights the olive flavor while adding some nuance via the capers, anchovies, and spice. You can also try adding dirty pasta water to make it an even filthier martini. 

Finally, you may want to borrow an idea from Brown's recipe for blue cheese dressing and add a dash of Worcestershire sauce to the spread. Blue cheese is typically paired with martinis because its richness and pungency go well with the sweet-salty profile of olives. Worcestershire sauce elevates the combination by adding zest, spice, and a deep sweetness to the mix, giving you a wonderfully complex spread to top your potato chips with.