¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with my husband Bruce, we have written three dozen plus one cookbooks. In fact, this episode of the podcast is gonna be about that plus one, or at least introduce you to what the plus one is, which will be published this summer of 2025. We were very excited about it and we don't wanna make this too commercially or advertising Lee. So we wanna kind of tell you the process about how we came to write.
This book that is coming out this summer, we've also got a one minute cooking tip as we always do, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.
¶ Our one-minute cooking tip: Soak dried chilies and puree them rather than grinding into a powder for many rubs and marinades.
Our one minute cooking tip. Now this one is from Kenji Our one minute cooking tip. Now this one is from Kenji Lopez Alt, and I just love it. And I do love his work too. So he says, rather than grind, chilies into powder. When you're making chili or any dish that requires chili powder, soak your dried chilies in hot water until soft blend them into a paste and then stir them into your dish. You'll get more flavor, more heat in every mouthful and no ground chili grit. But what if
you need dry ground chilies for a rub? You can't do this for a raw No. This
is like if you're putting it into a chili, you're making chili with ground beef or with diced meat. Okay. Or you're making Paola. Yeah, I can see that. Or you're making an enchilada sauce. So his
claim is that if you rehydrate them under hot water and turn them into a. Paste. Mm-hmm. You'd have to stem them. Mm-hmm. And then you can or cannot seed them. Mm-hmm. Depending on your preference for heat. Yep. If you don't seed them, they'll be hotter. Mm-hmm. Um, then his claim is that you get more flavor, and here's
why. When you grind any dried herb, it starts to lose its flavor oils Right. And starts to lose. That's true. All of its aromatics. That's true. So you don't know how long that ground chili you're buying is now. He says, do this instead of grinding your own. Most people don't grind their own. No, I know, but I wasn't even
gonna point that out. But
it's a great idea to keep dried chilies in your house for this And we're talking about, yeah, I guess when you
dry, when you grind, wait, wait. I just wanna say, I guess when you, Dr. Grind, dried chilies, it does stand to reason that some of the flavor, estrogen, even what are now the dried oils in there, but they're still present as oils. Mm-hmm. That they would volatilize. In some way and escape the process. Whereas if you soak them, they're gonna be, uh, more weighed down and kept intact. That does stand to reason. Mm-hmm.
I trust him. His recipes always work. And the guy's pretty smart.
Yeah. Yeah. The guy is pretty smart, so. Okay. If you need, uh, ground dried chilies for a recipe and don't eat a powder for a rub, consider rehydrating them and then adding them straight to the sauce from there. All right. Before we get on to the new cookbook that's coming out in July, let me say that we have a Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark. We'd be glad to connect with you there. We'd be glad to further talk about Chili's or whatever you wanna talk about in that Facebook group.
You can also find us on Instagram under cooking with Bruce and Mark, and you can find us under our own names on Instagram, Facebook, and Blue Skies. So check us out wherever you can find us, and we're glad to have you as a friend. Up next, let's talk about the new book that is coming out this July.
¶ Our new cookbook out in the summer of 2025: COLD CANNING!
Let me start with the name of the new book.
Okay.
It is called Cold Canning.
It is cold canning,
and the reason we called it cold canning is because you are going to make. Everything that you could possibly imagine putting into a jar to set up for the year. From jams and jellies and chutneys and salsas, chili crisps. We even have reli cheese, fermented foods, pickles, sauerkrauts, Kim cheese,
dessert, sauces, strawberry sauce, chocolate sauce. We have laurs like your own homemade, triples sec. We have all kinds of ketchups and mustards and barbecue sauces, and
the reason it's cold canning is none of those. Get hot water processed. Yep. So it's all small batch everything makes one or two jars and it's all designed to go right in your refrigerator cold or freezer cold.
Okay, so Bruce set it up, what the book is, but lemme tell you about how this book came to be. So, we, as you know, have written a lot of cookbooks at this point in our life and our, we're lucky enough, I should say, that our publisher is also our. Editor. So our publisher at Little Brown is also our editor. And it's easier that way to sell a book because ultimately you have to sell it to a publisher, not to an editor anymore.
I don't know if you know this, but editors do not have acquisition rights in the publishing industry. So editors no longer buy books. They have to present the book well to their publisher and a whole marketing team and then sell it. And when you've already got a relationship with your publisher, who's your editor, it's just one step closer to selling the book. So in the end, we end up going out to lunch with our literary agent and our publisher editor, and we talk through book ideas.
We always come with some ideas. At this point, he's always got some ideas and I have to say, isn't
that nice when your publisher has ideas that he wants to use? I have to
that he's a little bit cagey sometimes because he says if he's got some ideas in his. Back pocket and he pulls them out during the course of lunch and throws them out on the table. Even though we've come with some ideas, he's, he, he hasn't yet told us what they are and then they come out. So we were sitting at lunch in a Manhattan restaurant with our literary agent in him and we were talking to the Chinese food,
if I remember right.
Yeah. And he didn't really like any of our ideas, which is fine. Uh, listen, this is just a brainstorming how to sell a book. Possession. So we started talking about it and he's like, his mandate has changed, and this is, maybe you'll find this interesting. So our publisher's mandate has changed from the corporation and it's changed in a really interesting way. He's been mandated not. To buy any more books from influencers and to turn away from social media laden accounts.
So people with 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million subscribers on TikTok or YouTube or whatever. He's been instructed not to buy their books anymore, and instead he's been instructed to go back to an. Old way of publishing books, which is to look for books that will exist on what's called the backlist, meaning after they're published, they continue to have a sales life long after they're published.
And you might not know this, but right now in publishing, most people look for the first three months of sales. Yeah. And that's it. But he's been instructed to look for books that will sell over five years.
And the thing is. Even if you have a million followers, it doesn't guarantee you're gonna sell a million books. In fact, our agent was telling us when we had dinner with her last week about some influencers she knew and the publishers paid huge money for their books and they sold 5,000 copies. Right? So there's no guarantee they lost like
a ton of money on the book. And this is the problem is that the Bruce is saying there's no guarantee and he's right. And also the problem is that if you are a hot influencer right now, it takes about two years to publish a book. Yep. So you gotta write it. It's gotta get. Photographs, it's gotta get printed mostly in China. It's gotta come back here, be shipped back here. That shipping back takes four to six months back here.
And then it's gotta get distributed in this country, in the United States and in Canada and other places as well. So it takes about two years. Mm-hmm. And listen, if you're an influencer, you're probably. Out of favor in two years. That's true. You're no longer an influencer.
And Mark says it takes so long to ship it back. 'cause things come on. Container ships. They do. And if you're lucky, they get back. We know about some authors whose unfortunately the containers containing their books fell off the ship. Yep. And went right to the bottom of the ocean. Yep. So they miss their pub date with no books. Right. And that's real problem. So
we're sitting there with our publisher editor at lunch and we're talking through this whole thing and. Of course he's got an idea in his back pocket, and he comes out with this idea because he's talking about longstanding books, about how long canning books last that is Ball, uh, cans, you know, ball jars published a series of canning books, I don't even know, 10, 15 years ago. Mm-hmm. And those are still inm print and still selling well. So he's like, well, let's do a canning book.
Both Bruce and I have to say. Backed up at the idea and we didn't back up up 'cause we were afraid of canning. Bruce is an inveterate canner and cans all summer long. Mm-hmm. We backed up from the idea 'cause we thought, well isn't this market completely saturated by bulk canning at other big homesteader cookbooks?
It is. And so what happens then is Mark and I have to take this idea that's thrown down on the table that we are not afraid of.
Why don't you guys write a canning book?
Yeah. Okay. So, and if you've seen any of our TikTok videos, you know that I never say no. And you do whatever they want. But you do it in a way that you want. So we had to sit back and think, well, how can we write a book about canning that's not like every other book out there, but that will still be something that will last and be around forever.
As you can see, this process does in fact take months by the time you develop ideas and we pass all our ideas. Through our agent before we ever go to this lunch and she s out what she doesn't like. Then we go to the lunch, then we all talk. Then this idea, let's say canning comes up and we've gotta go back and this is gonna take us six weeks, two months. Mm-hmm. To think through this idea, to jot down a million notes and think it through to figure out how to write.
And let me just say, you may not know this part of the process to ultimately write a 40 to 50 page. Business proposal. Mm-hmm. Pitching the idea and how it will sell.
And the book itself has 425 recipes. Yeah. So we also in that proposal, have to create a working recipe list. Right. So what do we imagine is going to be in this book? And this is after we've now convinced our publisher editor that the kind of canning book we wanna do is all small batch and you don't have to use hot water processing. That was the key, right? That was the idea for us that no one has really. Done that.
The old name for this is refrigerator canning, and we wanted to expand the book beyond what refrigerator canning, because refrigerator, canning sounds like blueberry jam and peach jam and pickle, apricot preserves, pickles, and maybe pickles. Yep. But it doesn't sound like the full range of ketchups and mustards and sauces and barbecue sauces.
And. All this stuff that we wanted to put in the book, 'cause we wanted to make it anything that you can make in a small batch, put it in a jar and keep it in the fridge. Or better yet, the freezer, the fridge for two to three months or the freezer for a year or more until you're ready to eat it. And indeed, you can put blueberry jam. Or ketchup in the freezer for a year.
So as we came up with the recipe list, our inspiration came from so many places. And one of my favorite jam makers, is from Maine. Mm-hmm. And that's nervous. Nelly. We've talked about her about that. I probably thought he was
gonna say Stonewall Kitchen, didn't you? But No.
Okay, well, we'll talk about that in a minute. Uh, Stonewall Kitchen makes jams. Yep. But nervous Nelly makes. Incredible jams. It does that taste like fruit. They're not that sweet. They're great
flavors. You've actually been to her factory. It's actually her home. Yeah, her home where she ships everything out of from her own kitchen.
And we've talked about her before on this podcast, and people have gone and bought jams that said they know about her through. So her hot tomato chutney is mm-hmm. Absolutely. Ex. And her raspberry. Just her raspberry jam. And maybe it's the raspberry. She's growing. 'cause she does grow most of her own fruit. Yeah. It's truly amazing. So we were thinking about all the delicious things we had from her. And then when it comes to Stonewall Kitchen, well we wrote their first cookbook. We did.
And so we had a lot of experience cooking with condiments. We did. And we wanted to try and bring that experience to this whole process. Yeah. And also the other one that is. In my memory from even before I knew Mark was a jam maker that's at the Union Square Farmer's Market in New York, and she'd been there, like I said, 30 years ago. We were, we just saw
her there.
We were just in New York a week ago and they were still there. She was selling some of the same amazing flavors. It was bets. Farmhouse. It was really good stuff. So the inspiration for a lot of recipes came from our experiences with these people. Yes,
it's true. But I wanna come back to what I said before, since we're talking about how this book got formed. We are not, as you probably know, social media influencers. Yes. Do we have a TikTok challenge? Yes. Do we have cooking with Bruce and Mark? Right. Do we have a Facebook page? Of course. Do we have an Instagram page? Of course you have to in today's publishing marketplace, but we're not big influencers, and so because we're not big influencers, we still have to write cookbook proposals.
If I were an influencer with 200,000 followers two years ago. A publisher would just approach me and say, uh, just we want a book named after your TikTok channel, or named after, uh, whatever you're doing, like the baking yester yearbook, which is great. His channel is very amazing and funny and interesting and all that stuff, but he doesn't have to write a proposal. We still have to write. Business proposals for our books and submit them.
And then believe it or not, I submit the business proposal to our agent. She rewrites it, gives it back to me with all her comments. I then rewrite it from that point, then it goes to our publisher. He rewrites it with all of his comments. Doesn't really rewrite, writes a lot of comments. It's so glamorous, isn't it? It's so glamor. It's totally glamor, glamorous. It goes.
Back then to me, I then rewrite it again, and now he's ready to present it to the marketing team and to his boss, the CEO and all that kind of stuff. He's ready now to present and say, I want to acquire this book. So it takes a long time to make a proposal happen. And again, we thought we had come up with this kind of wild idea, cold canning that wasn't.
Like any other canning book, but allowed us to blow out long beyond canning because when, again, when I say canning, you probably think grape jelly or strawberry preserved or stuff like that. And they're in there and they, they are in there. But so, uh, a range of conserves, which are lower sugar, fruit and concoctions, usually with nuts in them. Chutney, relishes. We make pickles, we make refrigerator fermented kimchi and refrigerated, uh, fermented sauerkrauts.
It takes longer to ferment in the refrigerator, but it is so much safer in the end to do this,
and they're so delicious and they
are. So delicious. And this is the other thing that we loved about this coal canning idea and how we pitched it, is that when you can for shelf stability, so you're gonna make something to sit on a shelf for a year like my grandmother used to, you have to adjust the pH and you have to be very careful that all of this is absolutely perfect to avoid botulism and other horrible things that can kill you. In cold canning. You don't have to do any of that.
Nope. We didn't have to worry about the pH of a single thing. 'cause going straight from the stove into the fridge or into the freezer. No. Yep. Steam canner. No pressure canner. Mm-hmm. No difficult ceiling of the bottles. Nothing. You screw the lid on a bowl of bottle and stick it in your freezer and you're essentially done an amazingly quick process to make three jars, let's say, of strawberry preserves.
One of the things I learned in, in writing this was the variety globally of chili sauces,
right
of chi from chili crisps to sandals. There's kind of West
African chili
sauces in there. Yep. To salsa matcha. And I was not that familiar with salsa matcha when we started this. This Texas boy is, yeah, I wasn't, and I was. Undo by it. So it was so much fun for me to learn a new technique, a new style of chili sauce, to create five or six variations using different dried chilies, different seeds, different nuts, different dried fruits in it. And I had so much fun writing this book,
right. And I think that that's. All how this book came about. It's gonna be out in July. If you wanna see us making one of these chili crisps, that's a Chinese condiment of dried chilies in a billion aromatics. We're gonna make it on am Northwest Morning television. Um, probably it will have. Aired about a week after this podcast, episode drops, and you can check out AM Northwest from Portland, Oregon.
They have a YouTube channel with all of their segments on it, and you can watch us make this chili crisp on air with them, right? Right from our own kitchen. We do this once a month with them and we shoot the whole thing. We don't shoot it. It's live in the studio. We do it live with two iPhones and
Zoom.
Zoom and the host in Portland, Oregon. So you can see us make a chili crisp there. You got to the YouTube channel am Northwest and, uh, see us make this chili crisp there. That is a recipe from the book. So that's a little introduction to what's coming out in July. You can tell we're super excited about it because it really is an interesting and new venture for us.
We've moved away from air fryers and instant pots, and we've moved into something that we feel is incredibly creative, both for us and maybe for the people who might buy this book. Okay, so that's all that we can say about the new book. At this point, we probably banged on enough about it to let it go, but let's say that it would be great if you signed up for our newsletter.
We have a newsletter that is, uh, sometimes directed toward this podcast, sometimes, uh, it's other things beyond this podcast, lifestyle stuff, stuff about our life in New England, et cetera. You can find that on our website, Bruce and mark.com, or cooking with Bruce and mark.com. By the way, you cannot sign up for this newsletter anywhere but there on the landing page of our website, I cannot capture your email from social media, from Instagram, from Facebook, et cetera.
Just remember, it's really bad, even in dms to post your email address on social media. It's capturable. At that point by bots and by others who are, let's say, nefarious intent. Okay. That's enough for this bit.
¶ What's making us happy in food this week? Hard cider and fresh, local eggs!
Let's move on to what's making us happy in food this week.
Roxbury Russett Hard cider.
Oh, right.
We were recently in the smack dab middle of Pennsylvania, and if you
listen to us, you heard about our road trip to Gettysburg
and they grow a lot of apples there. It's a, a big sixth largest apple growing region in the country.
That cracked me up when he said that it's the sixth largest. I was like. Not the largest or next largest, but the sixth that was. So instead of just saying it's one of the largest, you had to like quantify it. Yeah. Sixth largest apple growing regions.
So we'd been out to dinner and we ordered a bottle actually of Arkansas, black apples hard cider with dinner. And we love Arkansas. Black apples, we can get them here in New England. We can, but we love that cider so much that it's made by Plowman's Cider that we found. They had a store of tap room, a tasting room in downtown Gettysburg. So we went in and we bought like a case of the Arkansas Black. We bought out,
we bought out the last of last year's supply. Then
we saw on their shelf. There were six bottles of Roxberry Russett cider. Now we love Roxbury, Russett apples too, and he said they only made a few cases this year. That's all that was left, so we tasted it. We loved it once again, and we bought
them. We bought out their yearly supply. They have to wait until the fall and apples come in to make any more cider. I don't know if you know this, but a hard cider is quite a thing. Oh yeah. The kids are totally into it. If you go to Asheville, North Carolina, you'll see CEAs everywhere downtown and then. All out in the mountains around Asheville. You could spend days going from cidery to cidery. They, they're like wineries. Mm-hmm. You go in, you get small tastes of each of the ciders.
They make, they often have food available. They have patios, beautiful places to sit and drink the cider. They, it's a, it's a really fun thing to do around Asheville is to make a cider tour. We should do that sometime. We should put together a whole cider tour around Asheville, North Carolina. Okay. With other
people. People pay us to go. Sure.
People pay us. How about we just all get a group of people and go, but sure people pay us. We could put together a cider tour of North Carolina around Asheville. That sounds like a lot of fun. Okay, so what's making me happy in food this week? And it's a bit of a surprise. It's eggs. Now I know this is kind of funny, but, uh, eggs are a source of political and social discontent right now in the United States, but
social discontent over eggs.
It well, it is and it's quite the issue. And I don't wanna get into politics right now, but I just wanna tell you that in our part of New England. Eggs are still $5 a dozen from local farms. Mm-hmm. Organic.
You see the chickens running around the yard. It's really nice. In
fact, recently around us in New England, the egg producers, these are all small local farms, began an egg war, and so you could. See some of them cross at the five on their signs and put four because they were on an egg pricing war with each other. So we actually go to an organic farm and buy two to three dozen eggs at a time, at $5 each. It's kind, it's amazing. Now I wanna tell you that these eggs are not fully washed, not at all washed, don't have chicken.
Um, stuff on them, and they still have little pieces of hay stuck on them, so you do have to wash them before you cook them. And because they're not washed, they'll actually stay longer. It's a whole thing about the coating on the shelf. They can even
stay at room temperature. Yeah, like
they do in Europe, they can, because you keep this coating on the shell that is washed off in industrial production, but we don't, uh, I have to say, we bring 'em home and put 'em right in the fridge, but the local eggs are so tasty. They're so beautiful to look at. In the pan, they have a gorgeous, dark yellow, or even orange color. They are extraordinary. Easy dinners. Uh, we just had a dinner the other night of I had an omelet and Bruce had a couple of fried eggs and that was dinner.
Uh, I know we usually do these elaborate meals and I had an omelet and we had fried eggs and toast and that was dinner. But eggs make me very happy, and I'm glad that we live in a world, part of the world where in fact, eggs are not a source of political or social contention, but rather an egg war amongst the producers to reduce the price. So that's our podcast for this week. Thanks for listening into us. We appreciate your support. If you can rate this podcast, that would be great.
If you can write a review of it, that would be greater. We appreciate your support because we are otherwise unsupported, except through your listens, likes, and comments.
And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food. So go to our Facebook group, as Mark said, cooking with Bruce and Mark and tell us there what's making you happy in food this week. Because we want to know, and if it sounds really delicious, we may try it and talk about it here on cooking with Bruce and Mark.