Alton Brown is not retiring.

The famous foodie known as the face of culinary shows like “Good Eats” and “Iron Chef America” is, however, preparing to spend at least a month secluded at his Atlanta home, frolicking in his bathrobe, living in idle bliss once he wraps up his current venture: his fourth and final tour, coming to a stage near you.

Before the culinary legend can retreat from the limelight, though, there’s still a marathon production to pack into an 18-wheeler headed to a grand total of 62 stages across America. The show, Alton Brown Live: Last Bite, comes to the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord on March 11 before continuing on to Boston, Atlantic City and Pittsburgh.

“I promised myself four tours, and this is the fourth,” Brown told the Monitor from aboard the tour bus that has been his home since early February after his cross-country road trip kicked off in Melbourne, Florida. “I’ve also made myself promise that I will not think about what’s next until this is over. My brain needs a break.”

The tour coincides with the release of Brown’s tenth book, “Food for Thought,” a sprawling collection of personal essays, the inspiration for which he discussed with the Monitor. Brown also explained the practical demands of putting on a touring live show, a medium he called “the last bastion of creative freedom.”

I’ve read the initial reviews of your book on Goodreads, they’re overwhelmingly positive. I’m curious: What do you think is your most compelling, your personal favorite essay from the compilation?

I haven’t read any reviews, I never do, but I want to just say that the book was an accident. If you’ve seen the cover, the typewriter that’s under my arm I was repairing. It had a sticky key, the ‘J’ key, in fact, and I lubricated it. I put some paper in the typewriter, and I started typing. I typed a few pages and just set them off to the side, and I came back a few days later and read it. It was the first essay for the book, which I had not thought for a moment of doing. That turned into 39 essays. My favorite is probably that very first one, which is an essay called “The Howl of the Husky,” which is about being a chubby kid, mostly chubby adult, as well. That’s probably my favorite, simply because it was the first and it’s the thing that opened the door to this particular venture, which I did not intend to do.

You have been known to say that “food is best when it’s not fussed over,” and you’ve coined all of these mega-hacks for cooking. “Food for Thought” is not necessarily a recipe book, but is there a big takeaway or an overarching message, guidance or instruction from your book?

The main takeaway, I think, for the book in general is that I hope that it’s thought-provoking. Hopefully, it gets people thinking about food in different ways, or food and food and culture, what have you. Not all of the essays are about food, but most of them have something to do with food. But there is no big takeaway other than that, unless it’s for fans that want to get kind of an idea of the inner workings of why I’ve ended up where I am, because there’s some look-back there. Otherwise, it’s an easy-reading collection of 39 essays with a bunch of illustrations that I did.

You kind of alluded to this, “how you’ve ended up in this place.” This place being your farewell tour. What do you intend to do with your seclusion?

My brain needs a break because I’ve spent the last 25 years with one part of my brain constantly figuring out what’s next and calculating that. I’m 62, I think I’ve earned it to not know what it is yet. I’m not saying that I won’t ponder the possibilities, but I’m just not going to plan it. I’m going to finish the 62-city tour, I’m going to go home and I’m going to sit still for about a month and I’m not going to take my bathrobe off.

Then, if I am Phoenix-like, I will rise from whatever the ashes of that looks like. But I’m going to take a break, and then, I will reassess. I’m not dead yet, and I’m not retiring from the business. I’ve got too much energy and too much desire to work, but I will be leaving this particular life behind. Living on a bus for 13 weeks is not nearly as glamorous — I would rather be home.

You mentioned that the seed for the book germinated from lubricating your typewriter. How did the show come together? How did it take shape?

This is my fourth tour. The first time I did it was back in 2013, it was kind of a dare I had done. I was like, “Okay, well, I’ve got this TV thing down. Why don’t I try this?” And what’s been interesting is that it’s turned into, it’s kind of the sleeper hit for me personally. I now really enjoy this more than television because I very much enjoy live audiences, and I love having a bunch of people in the same room having the same experience together, which, by the way, I think we need more of in our culture now. We’re all separated enough. We need to all get in big rooms with each other. The creative freedom is that nobody tells me what to do, you know, so I rise and fall on my own abilities.

And the acts: Do they just come to you like lightning rods? How do you piece it together?

No, I tortured myself over this show for eight solid months. We always have a very large culinary demonstration that is something we have to build from scratch. The large machine we have to build is mostly done by the guy that was my prop master on ‘Good Eats.’ But this one is the biggest that we’ve made, it’s 27 feet long. I’m not going to tell you what it does, but it’s the most mechanically challenging device that we’ve ever made, and there are a few things like that on this show. But hey don’t, you know what? They come from research, they really do.

And they come out of, of course, the kind of restrictions that this show puts on you. I mean, you cannot have fire on a stage in the United States. It’s almost impossible to pull off because of the rules of open flames. That rules out a lot when you’re a cook because fire is one of the major heat sources, not to mention very theatrical. I will tell you that steam is a huge part of this new show. I’ve been fascinated with steam since I was a little kid, and I cook with steam a lot, so we’ve expanded that. The whole second act of the show is about steam. So, it's just – you work and it comes, but it isn't easy.

Tickets to Alton Brown Live: Last Bite can be purchased at www.altonbrownlive.com.