Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the podcast Cooking with

Bruce and Martin. And I'm Mark Scrubber, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written 37 cookbooks. And so out of that comes this podcast about our passion for food and cooking, as is always the case. We've got a one minute cooking tip we're gonna invite. Talking about fall grilling ideas. I've got a list of things that I've put together that I think are great for a grill, and we're gonna let Chef Bruce respond to them. And how do these actually work on a grill? So I've got my list of what I think is great for fall grilling, and then he's going to respond with that. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. Alright, this is about apples and this is about my love of apples that come right off a tree. Me too. And my disgust at how quickly apples lose that crunch and lose their perfectness when they sit at room temperature. True, true. But also how beautiful apples that you pick. Off a tree, look in a bowl in the middle of your table. So when you go to the store or when you go to the orchard and you buy fresh apples, get enough to keep some in the fridge to stay crunchy and fresh and wonderful. And then buy some that are just for display in the middle of the table. And when those get too soft to eat. Make applesauce

because they will make your house incredibly amatic. Mm-hmm. Several God, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we went to belay in New York City, uh, back when it was just first opened and you walk through this narrow corridor into the restaurant from the outside street door and the narrow car corridor was just imagine tons of little cubby hole bookcases, and in every single cubby hole there was an apple. So when you. Open the door. That entire hallway just had this apple smell that was almost overwhelming. It So set you up for the dinner. Had it was a really wonderful experience and, um, they make four beautiful aromas in your house. Mm-hmm. As we say. Okay. Before we get to our fall grilling ideas or my fall grilling ideas that Bruce is gonna respond to, let me say that. It would be great if you could. Subscribe to this podcast. If you can rate it, if you can write a review. All those things really help out. We, as you probably know, we are otherwise unsupported, so thanks for doing that to help us out. Okay. Up next some fall grilling ideas or for our UK friends, some autumnal grilling ideas.

I wanna ask you before we even get into this, why did you pick some of these things and what about fall and. By each one of these things.

Um, because I think that they have big flavors and I think some of these things come into, uh, season in the fall, that, especially where we live up in the north, they're seasonal to the fall and I think that they have and can involve. Big flavors that are not the clean, vibrant flavors that you want in the summertime when you want more, let's say, just to be, uh, pedantic, you want more lemon zest than oregano or you, you want more olive oil than butter. Mm-hmm. I mean, when you're moving into the fall, you're talking about. Bigger flavors. And so some of these things are fall vegetables, as you'll talk about, and some of these things are just giant flavors all the way around. Cool. Okay. Excellent. My first one up is cauliflower steaks, and before Bruce responds to this, let me say that you can, in fact take a cauliflower, you can trim it, the leaves off of it, and then, you know, cut the bottom off so it was flat on your cutting board and they cut straight down, maybe about two centimeter or one inch. Stay cut thick. Slabs of it, and this will create cauliflower steaks which are ready for the grill.

You have to make sure when you're doing it that each steak has a big chunk of root of stem that holds all the pieces together. The the pieces closer to the outside of the circumference of the cauliflower will kind of fall apart, and you save those for other things. It'll be the center of it that'll make the most beautiful stakes. And my first thought is this doesn't matter whether you're doing this on charcoal or gas, either will work. If I was doing a cauliflower steak, I don't think it'll benefit from charcoal over gas. And I'm a firm believer that if it will benefit, you should go to charcoal. So I'm going to bring that up with other things that you're gonna talk about. Right? Um, I would heavily, heavily olive oil. It, I would consider. Um, sprinkling or flavoring that olive oil with an Arabic or Middle Eastern spice blend, maybe a han in the olive oil and some fresh garlic brush that on and you don't want to overdo it. You want the cauliflower in terms of cooking. You want the cauliflower to have some tooth, but to be nicely charred and have that beautiful Middle Eastern flavor,

I think it's great to grill this with scallions, with trim scallions together. Mm. I like it. Not so much Middle Eastern. I'm gonna correct the chef here. I like sweet red chili sauce, sometimes called Thai chili sauce. Sure as not a a, a glaze for the grill, but afterwards to pour on it. That's definitely

a reason to the scallions 'cause that combination of the charred grilled scallions and made for you doing the charred grill scallions. Make sure you lay them perpendicular to the grill grates and not parallel to the grill. Grates. Go through the grates. Okay? So, okay, that's the first thing out. This one that, okay.

The second thing I that I have on my list are fennel halves. Halves. And these are when you take a fennel bulb, not a giant. Huge one, but a moderate size, medium fennel bulb. You trim off most of the outer stalks. Mm-hmm. And you trim the bottom a little bit. Mm-hmm. To get the hard woody part off, and then you just cut it in half the way. You would cut, let's say an apple straight down mm-hmm. Through the stem in half, and now it's ready to be put on a grill. Mm-hmm. In some ways. Mm-hmm. It sounds really good. So what would you do with this?

I would grill it as it is in the whole pieces, and then I would thinly slice it after it's been grilled, uh, and toss it with some, uh, grapefruit sections and maybe a little avocado, and make a lovely salad with the chard, fennel flavor with some avocado and some grapefruit. And just a drizzle of maybe some lemon infused olive oil and some good, uh, crunchy flaked salt. Yeah, he went all out. What would you, uh, oil this thing up for the grill? I would actually just very lightly, I don't want to give this much oil. Because there's gonna be oil drizzled on it afterwards as the salad, so I might even give it a little non-stick spray or just a light brushing of a flavorless oil, like a canola oil, just so it doesn't stick. So it does get a char, but most of the oil's gonna come after the cooking in this one. So

I said that fall is all about big flavors, which it is. It's moving into the winter. The flavors get much, much larger. And we're gonna move away from vegetables for a second and talk about what. Something that I think is delicious on the grill, and you may have had it in North America if you or the UK if you've been to an Asian restaurant. Mm. And that is a salmon collar. Alright. And I have to explain what

the collar is. Yep. So the collar is basically, if you think about the, your collarbone and where your collarbone is in relationship to your head, think about the same thing on a salmon. When you're cleaning a salmon, you cut the head off. There is a bone that it goes around the whole fish. Right behind the head. Mm-hmm. Before the filets begin. Mm-hmm. And that is the collar. Mm-hmm. And when they cut that off, there's a lot of delicious meat attached to that. Delicious. It's fatty and it's yummy. And it's

rich. It's a incredibly strong flavor. It

is very strong and it's hard to find in most fish markets. You, as Mark said, it's in a lot of Asian restaurants, you might wanna go to. Asian store. And if you're lucky, they'll not only have salmon collars, they might have yellow tail collars. There might be collars from other fish. And how would

you grill a salmon

collar? Now I'm going to say, you want to take out your charcoal for this. If you have the ability to grill on charcoal versus gas, the smokiness of the charcoal will add so much to this. I would rub it with a little bit of sesame oil, just a tiny bit of sesame oil, and maybe even a little soy sauce. Put it on the grill just enough to get the flame shooting up. You want the skin around it to char, you want it to be cooked through. You don't want this still gelatinous in the middle like you would a filet. You want this cooked to the bones, so the meat is. Falling off the bone in rich fatty bites. And then if you wanna make a dipping sauce of some more soy and rice vinegar, just like you might do for sushi, a little wasabi in there. That would be a good way to do it.

Right. That, I think that's it. And I think that the important thing here is to blacken it up a bit again, big giant flavors. And also by blackening it up slightly, you're gonna get rid of a little bit of the salmon oil, so you're gonna pull down the fishiness slightly in the collar, but mm-hmm. This is a. Big flavor. Okay, let's go back to vegetables. So here's a fall vegetable that I think people often don't grill and that needs to be grilled. And that is Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprout. I sout from Brussels. Say brussel sprouts and it, no, there's sprouts from Brussels, Belgium. So Brussels sprouts. And I think what here you wanna do is not get the tiny ones that people like in salads or that are match more, um, gently flavored. You're looking here for large brusselsprouts. That you can cut in half through the stem and now they're ready to grill. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I'm gonna say something that you might not like to hear, but if you're doing vegetables like Brussels sprouts, which are small, even the big ones are smallish. Yeah. You want to consider either a vegetable basket or a fish basket for your grill, so that way you could put them all in one layer. Sure. And you could turn them all at once rather than try and turn each one. And the other thing about Brussels sprouts, what makes them so amazing is the charred, burned, crispy edges. But you run the risk on a very hot grill of charring the outside leaves before you cook it through. So I'm actually gonna suggest you don't have a hot grill, but a medium grill, right? So you don't want your grill up to 500 degrees, right? Right. You want your grill at like 300 degrees. I would do charcoal again here. If I was given the opportunity, I would toss these Brussels sprout halves in olive oil and salt and pepper and probably not much else. Layer them in my vegetable or fish basket. Put them over. Direct heat, medium.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. The writer's gonna stop you. Cut side down, because I don't think you ever turn these

No, I'm gonna turn them. 'cause I want them to go all over.

No, I don't want 'em turned. I just want 'em to cut side down because No, Jeff is turning them. No, because then it gets too black. Now see, we disagree. I would just want them on one side only because then they get too charged from it. If you're gonna

do them on one side only, then you're gonna go from even lower heat and cover the grill so that they cook through enough.

Okay. All right. See th this is the kind of discussions we always have, and I think once you grill these, then you wanna drizzle 'em with a little more olive oil. You wanna dust them with Parmesan cheese, with parmigiano riano, maybe a little lemon zest. Mm-hmm. And then they're just perfect, right off the grill. Actually. What

else would be good tossed with those? If you're doing the cheese and the lemon zest is some toasted sld almonds.

Sure. I can buy it. Okay, so, um, let's talk about something that maybe is a total splurge in this world, but that is Bica Fiorentina. And if you don't know what Bica Fiorentina is, we're talking like a one kilo, or it is a one kilo, 2.2 pound. Uh, T-bone or porterhouse steak. Mm-hmm. A giant steak. And I will tell you that Bruce and I, uh, routinely, no, not routinely, maybe once every two months we will split a steak of Fiorentina off the grill. And I just think it's the ultimate. Fall grilling thing.

I wanna start by saying what the difference is between a t-bone and a porterhouse. Okay. They're both kind of from the same cut, um, of the animal. Um, it is a t the bone is shaped like a t and on one side of the bone is the strip loin, so that's like a New York strip steak. And the other side is the tenderloin, the part of the animal where you have a nice big tenderloin. Piece is a porterhouse. As you go down towards the back of the animal and there is less and less tenderloin, it becomes the T-bone steaks because you can get T-bone steaks that have only the strip on one side and no tenderloin on the other. Okay. Can we come back to be it stick a fina? Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, we had to clarify what you're getting when you go to this store. All come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First time Mark and I had a mistake of you and Tina was in Florence, Italy, and it was just the most amazing thing to come.

Yeah, I wanna say that we went to this restaurant in Florence and we sp Split

Leone. Yeah. Four lions. We

split a best steak of fiorentina and um, it was great, but what really cracked us up, okay, so we're talking 2.2 pounds steak. Mm-hmm. A kilo steak. Um, and uh, it was a French couple, a young French couple, I would guess them in their late twenties or early thirties, and they. Each ordered a Bica Fiorentina. Mm-hmm. And they each finished it. Mm-hmm. With their bottle of red wine. She and he each ate 2.2 pounds, I guess with a bone. It's less than that, but still a 2.2 pound. Mm-hmm. One kilos steak. And they downed it with a bottle of red wine. And we made our way through. One of them we did between us, but we

also ordered the contour. All the vegetables that come, they ordered none. They didn't, they ate meat and wine. That is what they do their dinner. So I am once again gonna break out the charcoal for this because this is, this is too good to just cook over over gas because I want the flavor of the wood. I want a little smoke. I might even throw a piece of wood in the charcoal fire as well to give it even more wood flavor. You want. Eat this rare. You want this to be at about 127 degrees. When it comes off the grill, I would do it over direct high heat, about five to six minutes aside. And if it's not at the right temperature, then I stand it up on its flat end, so the steak is standing up in the air, bone end, and I let it go another few minutes until the temperature is 1 27. On the bottom side, we should say. And that is how I eat a BT stick if fiorentina, and it's always,

um, uh, rubbed with olive oil, right? And lots of salt, right? Olive oil and salt. Yeah. And uh, you can bring it off and do things to it. You can grate lemon zest over it. You can put rosemary. You can make a chimi chew. Yeah, you can make sauces for it. I prefer it just straight on. And this brings up another question about fall grilling. And this is what I wanna say. I think fall grilling is made for bone in cuts of meat. Mm-hmm. I think fall grilling is when you want to move away from boneless, skinless chicken breast Sure. Or boneless skinless, uh, chicken thighs. Sure. And you wanna have bone in chicken breast. Mm-hmm. You wanna have bone in chicken thighs? They taste better anyway. Well, they do, but it's not, it gives you a bigger flavor. Other stuff. Faster in the summer. It has lighter flavors. The bone deepens the flavor dramatically. It does,

and partly is because you have to cook it longer, so the longer cooking time gives you more mayard reaction, more caramelization of the natural sugars and the meat. The skins get crispier, the meat gets sweeter. You get beautiful browning happening. The longer cooking time means those bones impart flavor to the meat inside, and I don't care whether it is a chicken thigh. Or a leg of lamb bone in meat requires charcoal. Get yourself a charcoal grill for this. You will. Thank me for it.

Okay, so, um, here's a basic tip all the way around about this fall and, uh, early winter grilling. And that is you just wanna up the flavors. We were talking about this kind of with the bone, and I think this is really important. You wanna up the spicy flavors. You wanna wear up the herbal flavors. Mm-hmm. You wanna up. All the flavors in the summer. Yes, we want lighter flavors, brighter flavors. We want less complication. Now, I think it's the time to pull out the really crazy rubs. Mm-hmm. For barbecue, now is the time to pull out crazy barbecue sauces. If you like such things, do

not be afraid of your spice rack. Do not be afraid of that spice rack in the store. Pick out some blends you've never tried before. Just pick out some new spices you've never tried before because you might actually discover some flavors you love, and the fall on grilling is a perfect time to try them,

right? Chili weather calls for bigger flavors. Just remember that seems to be the dominant theme for us, and we hope it's a dominant theme for you. Thanks for being a part of this food journey. Always say thanks for subscribing to this podcast and radiating liking it. All that stuff we always say to do. Thanks for doing all of that with us and thanks for grilling in the fall because we like it too. If you want to talk about fall grilling,

then you should go to our Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark and have this discussion with us there. Share some of the things you. Love to grill in the fall. Next time I grill, I will take pictures of it and show you what we are making. We wanna know what you are making, so share it with everyone.

Okay. As is traditional in this podcast, the final segment, what is making us happy in food this week? If you've

listened to other episodes, you know that I went sour cherry picking earlier this summer. You know, I have. Sour cherry jam from our book called Canning. You know, mark made a sour cherry pie a few nights ago that he was as unhappy with as I was delighted with, because he likes that canned cherry pie filling I do. As opposed to his own homemade. I do. I do. So what was left after all of that was a bag, a Ziploc bag full of sour cherry juice from those cherries. It's true. So what I did last night when company came over is I made sour cherry margaritas. You did. And they were. Astounding. I was Tequila quantro, lime juice, sour cherry juice, and a little grand Classico, which is another orange flavored Italian liqueur, which gave it, it is this flavor that bound everything together. It wasn't too sweet. No sir. No, none. The grand Classico gave it that sweetness. Okay. It was, I had three of them and I suffered for it. Um, you

did? I had a half of one and Bruce had three of them. Uh, so that tells you the difference between the US I guess what's making me happy in food this week is he the wood mushrooms, they are now coming in in New England. We've had an incredible drought. New England and the Inwood Mushrooms are pretty pathetic this year, uh, because we've just been in such drought conditions. We did get a ton of rain a few days ago, and there may be some now that spring up on people's properties. We have actually friends who ask us to come and take some off their property every year, but this year, uh, she hasn't had any. She shed one and except for herself, of course, it's her property, but there was no. Easy picking of them, but now we have some coming in. We just got a bag of them all ready to go and head of the wood. Mushrooms are so woodsy, tasty, earthy. I, they are going to make me happy in food this week because Bruce hasn't yet done anything with them. They're sitting in a bag on the counter, but I very much look forward to eating those. Okay. That's the podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being a part of this journey, and we certainly appreciate your connecting with us across all social media platforms,

including our TikTok channel. Please go to TikTok and check out cooking with Bruce and Mark. We post a lot of videos of us cooking in our kitchen. Mark Cooks, I cook. Sometimes we cook together and it's a chance for you to get to see us in our own home environment doing what we love best, which is cooking and eating here at Cooking at Bruce and Martin.