Primal Grill with Steven Raichlen - Season 2 (2009)

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.