Star:	Alton Brown (Host and Creator)
Recurring Role:	Deborah Duchon (Nutritional Anthropologist)

Food Network (and program guides relying on their information) provides the name of this episode as "Cubing Around," but the onscreen title is "Cubing a Round." (edit)

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Onscreen trivia: Smoked paprika is made by drying ripe peppers in adobe smokehouses; gently heated by slow-burning oak wood. (edit) Onscreen trivia: According to the Texas Restaurant Association, some 800,000 orders of chicken-fried steak are served daily. (edit) Onscreen trivia: Want to cube? Feed your favorite search engine “48 blade meat tenderizer.” (edit)

It will be… it will be…
In the 1980 film Star Wars V: Return of the Jedi, Yoda countered Luke’s boast that he wouldn’t be afraid when he entered a place strong with the dark side of the force, saying “You will be...you will be...” Alton uses the same intonation and similar words here to counter anticipated complaints that the cooking liquid for country style steak “isn’t a sauce.” (edit) Until it’s the consistency of buttah
Alton’s pronunciation imitates Linda Richman, a character created by Mike Myers for a series of Saturday Night Live sketches about a group of women gathering to discuss one inanity or another. For the character, Myers affected a Yiddish accent and salted his dialogue with Yiddish words of dubious pedigree. The phrase was “like buttah” appeared on a number of occasions, eventually becoming a stock phrase for the character. (edit) She hateses us!
Threatened with “W” the Dungeon Master tells Alton “she hateses us.” A similar dark dwelling character, Gollum, speaks this way. In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum held onto the One Ring just a little longer than is wise, and the magic corrupted his body and mind, giving him strange speech patterns and evil habits. (edit) The Dungeon Master
This robed character with his fiendish array of instruments and apparent sadistic streak (barely kept in check by Alton) is likely a spoof of the Crypt Keeper, host of the Showtime series “Tales From The Crypt” (which was itself based on a comic book from the 1950’s). (edit) Frankensteak
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818, tells how Dr. Frankenstein assembled a man from pieces of corpses and brought him to life. The prefex “Franken” or the entire word “Frankenstein” has since entered pop culture as a description of anything made from various parts with the implication that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. (edit)