Alton Brown dishes the laughs in CFA

Alton Brown, Food Network celebrity chef and self-described food geek, sold out the Center for the Arts Nov. 16 to close out his national tour, “Alton Brown Live! The Edible Inevitable Tour.”

To start a performance that was part lecture, part variety show, Brown wasted no time in announcing two things: One, he was very full from eating chicken wings and beef on weck all day. To the delight of the packed house, he gave a genuine-sounding shoutout to the glazed old fashioned at Paula’s Donuts.

Two: The show was his way of doing “everything I don’t get to do on TV.” Brown is known for his science-based, Peabody Award-winning Food Network cooking show, “Good Eats,” that ended its 13-year run in 2011. This included a few messy bits of ice cream-making and pizza-baking, a few pokes at the industrial food system, and a lot of Brown’s trademark food trivia and showman’s bravura.

Material for the show took a comedic look at eating and making food, and was culled from a decade of Brown’s work as a chef, food instructor and TV writer and producer. There were several musical numbers, including a rap song and a cute acoustic-guitar ditty at the very end about the basics of cooking that Brown wrote for his then 4-year-old daughter.

Brown’s show even embraced Twitter, asking the audience to snap selfies with their questions and providing the hashtag #AltonBrownLive for an in-house Q&A.

In two of his stories, Brown related anecdotes about choking down trout ice cream on “Iron Chef” and serving fried chicken feet at his daughter’s birthday party, to the horror of the young guests. “Rule one: Chickens do not have fingers,” he told the audience, hence the Chinatown spin on the American classic. Avoiding trout in ice cream was another rule.

Brown’s clean-but-campy antics were familiar to fans in the audience: costumed assistants, hand puppets representing food ingredients and cameras attached to just about everything: ovens, fridges and, in one the night’s biggest stunts, the Mega Bake  -- think Easy Bake Oven, only 20 times larger.

He drew two audience members up onto the stage: one to bake pizzas in said oven, which harnessed stage lights to produce 54,000 watts of baking power, the other to test his “Jet Cream” machine, a homemade contraption that used duct tape, water cooler barrels and a fire extinguisher to instantly create a gallon of freezing-cold chocolate ice cream. Both demos got close enough to the first row of seats that ponchos were tossed out as protective gear.

In addition to producing TV shows, Brown has written seven books, including the James Beard Award-winning “I'm Just Here for the Food,” and has hosted numerous food series, among them “Iron Chef America.” He currently serves as host of the game show “Cutthroat Kitchen” and as a judge on “Food Network Star."

When Twitter’s last question asked if “Good Eats” was coming back, he replied cagily: “Watch the Web.”

You can’t keep this cook down.