Primal Grill with Steven Raichlen Season 2

When it comes to flavor, you can’t beat meat that’s still attached to the bone. This simple truth is appreciated by anyone who has ever barbecued a rack of ribs, grilled a long-bone veal chop, or roasted a whole leg of lamb. Grilling and, more importantly, serving meat on the bone, transports us to a time back before the invention of knives and forks when barbecue buffs ate with their hands, chewing the fire-roasted meat right off the bone. Discover your inner caveman.

More taste than time? There’s no excuse not to fire up your grill. Travel the world’s barbecue trail and you’ll discover that in many countries, grilling is the original fast food. Here are three grilled masterpieces that let you assuage your hunger without making you break a sweat—basil-grilled tuna steaks, chicken breasts grilled under a brick, and coconut-grilled pineapple for dessert. Because there’s simply no reason not to fire up the grill when you get home from work.

Back before there were supermarkets (or barbecue grills), grill masters hunted, fished, gathered, and grilled in the wild. This show celebrates the primal pleasures of cooking wild foods with live fire. It starts with—what else?—wild salmon from the Pacific Northwest grilled on cedar planks with a juniper and wild berry glaze. Our next course is grilled elk loin, marinated in wine and wrapped in bacon, and grilled wild mushrooms foraged in the forests of Washington State. Steven will even show you a wild dessert—a smoke-roasted wild fruit crumble.

Seafood may come from the water, but nothing brings out its briny succulence like the high, dry, smoky heat of the grill. This truth is readily apparent on the beaches of Brazil, at the waterfront grill stalls in Asia, and the seaside communities of the Yucatan. Here are three great grilled seafood dishes that solve the age-old problems of fish sticking to the grill grate or breaking apart when you go to turn it: Brazilian coconut grilled shrimp, Asian garlic grilled halibut, and snapper grilled in banana leaves, Yucatan-style. And grilled asparagus rafts make an appropriately nautical accompaniment.

Grilling brings out the cowboy in all of us. After all, smoked brisket originated in Texas cattle country and barbecue was brought to Missouri with the great cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail from Fort Worth to the meat-packing houses in Kansas City. This show will make you at home on the range, or at least at home with some of the smoked and grilled foods traditionally associated with America’s cattle country: Hellfire T-bone steaks (with grilled jalapeno poppers to keep them company), smoked brisket, and, the newest addition to the “range”—free-range chicken grilled with herbed butter under the skin.

Barbecue means meat to millions of grill masters, of course, but it’s also about vegetables. Just ask one of India’s 300 million vegetarians, who love tandoori (Indian barbecue pit cooking) every bit as much as a carnivore does. When it comes to bringing out the caramelized sweetness of a vegetable, nothing beats the searing heat of a grill. In this Episode, Steven will show you a barbecue where vegetarians will not feel like second-class citizens. On the menu? Grilled eggplant “caprese” salad; Indian pepper, tomato, and paneer cheese kebabs (served with Indian grilled puff pastry); and a “carb-haters” sandwich—grilled portabello mushrooms cheeseburgers.

Beer may be the beverage served at a lot of American cook-outs, but much of the world’s barbecue trail runs directly through regions famed for their wine. This show will focus on the important role vines and wines play in barbecue—the former as a wrapping and fuel; the latter as an ingredient in marinades and sauces. Trout grilled in grape leaves; red-wine marinated filet mignon; and an interesting twist on “beer can” chicken, made with cabernet sauvignon. So the next time you fire up your grill, don’t forget your corkscrew.

Many of the world’s great grill cultures cook their best barbecue on the rotisserie. Consider Brazil’s rodizio, Greek souvlaki and gyro, and Morocco’s majestic mechoui. To judge from your many e-mails, spit-roasting is a live fire cooking method our viewers would like to know more about. In this show, you’ll learn how to grill a sausage - and cheese-stuffed rib roast, how to grill a Greek-style whole hog over a wood fire, and how to make Moroccan-style lamb ribs—cooked to a turn on a gas-fired rotisserie.

Barbecue neophytes and brining are a little like teenagers and sex: the minute they learn how to do it, nothing else seems to matter. Brining may seem like a relatively modern technique, but it’s centuries, if not millennia, old. In fact, that’s the origin of the English word pickle—pockel was the Old English word for brine. Brining has the dual advantages of keeping intrinsically dry foods, like pork chops and chicken breasts, moist on the grill, and it also adds an extra layer of flavor. In this show you’ll learn all about brining and marinating, including a wine-brined butterflied leg of lamb, bourbon-brined pork chops, and a “brine” you actually inject into a turkey with a hypodermic needle.

Spice may give barbecue its personality, but smoke is its heart and soul. This truth is obvious to anyone who has spent time in American barbecue country (in Texas or Kansas City, for example). What you may not realize is how universal smoking really is. In this show, you’ll learn how to smoke Cousin Dave’s chocolate chile ribs in an offset barrel smoker, Chinese-style duck in a water smoker, and ginger-stuffed smoked pears in a kettle grill. And because, as Raichlen’s rule states: If something tastes good baked, fried, or sautéed, it probably tastes even better grilled.

When we were growing up, barbecue meant chicken that was burned black as coal on the outside (the result of applying the sweet barbecue sauce too early), served half-raw inside, and perfumed with the scent of lighter fluid. If this sounds familiar, listen up. Here are three great fail-proof ways to grill chicken—yakitori-style, herb-scented game hens on the rotisserie, and Malaysian-style spatchcocked chicken.