Plum chutney! It's a favorite in our house. We hope we can make it a favorite in yours, too.

We're making it from scratch in this episode of our podcast. We've got a one-minute cooking tip. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

We're veteran cookbook authors Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, authors of three dozen cookbooks (plus more to come!). We've been contributing editors at EATING WELL and COOKING LIGHT and had food columns in both magazines.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[00:47] Our minute-cooking tip: an easy way to make great hot chocolate with store-bought plain truffles.

[02:24] We’re making plum chutney!

Here's the recipe:

Makes about 8 pints (can be halved). The jars, lids, sealing rings (if using), funnels, and ladles must be sterilized in a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes.

• 8 pounds or 3.65 kilograms of small red plums, preferably Santa Rosa plums, although any juicy, sweet, red plum will do
• 2 1/2 cups or 600 milliliters apple cider vinegar
• 2 1/2 cups or 540 grams demerara sugar
• 2 cups or 400 grams granulated white or caster sugar
• 9 medium garlic cloves, peeled and minced
• One small-hand-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and
• minced (about 1/2 cup)
• 1/2 cup or 60 grams finely chopped crystallized or candied ginger
• 2 tablespoons red pepper flakes
• 1 tablespoon brown mustard seeds
• 1 tablespoon yellow mustard seeds
• 2 teaspoons garam masala
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 cup or 150 grams raisins

1. First, a trick. Pour 16 cups (8 pints or 4 quarts) or 4 1/2 liters of water into a large stock pot. This is how much chutney you’ll make. You need a pot about a third larger than this for boiling. And notice where the water is—you’ll need this mark for later.
2. Pour out the water. Mix the plums, vinegar, and both sugars in the pot.
3. Set the pot over medium-high heat and add the remaining ingredients. Stir constantly until the sugars dissolve. Bring to a boil, stirring often.
4. Reduce the heat to low and simmer slowly, stirring often, until thickened a bit, until the chutney in the pot comes to about that mark where the water was in the first step.
5. Ladle the chutney into eight clean 1-pint or 570-milliliter jars. Either seal, cool for no more than 1 hour, and store in the fridge for up to 1 month or in the freezer for up to 1 year; or seal the jars and water- or steam-can them for 10 minutes.

[16:48] What’s making us happy in food this week: Italian meringue on a cake and smoked beef chuck stew!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast

Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

I'm Mark Skarbrough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written

36 cookbooks, including, uh, the Instant Pot Bible, and the Ultimate Cookbook,

and the Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible.

Bruce has written a couple knitting books, I've written a memoir, we've

ghost written books for celebrities.

He's, uh this is our podcast about food and cooking, which are

parts of the passions of our lives.

We've got a one minute cooking tip about hot chocolate.

It's not quite hot chocolate season yet, but we're going to

push it a little and say it is.

We're going to be making plum chutney during this episode of the podcast.

And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip.

Okay, the world's easiest hot chocolate is, of course, tearing open a packet mix.

Right, that's But, the best, and just as easy, is pouring hot

milk over store bought chocolate

Now

you're talking, wait, let's just stop.

You're talking plain chocolate truffles, not like vanilla centered or creams.

You're just talking plain chocolate CVS

and you buy a little bag Lindt's Lindor truffles,

They come in all sorts of flavors, but without fillings and

without nuts, just like raspberry flavored or vanilla flavored.

Throw two or three of those unwrapped, please, into a mug, pour over your

hot milk and stir it till it's melted.

It's so easy and it's so much better.

Think about it like a bath bomb for your mouth.

oh, no, I don't want to think about it as a bath bomb for my mouth.

That's disgusting.

Does it foam up and do I foam at the lips and all that?

It's disgusting.

You took a nice cooking tip and you made it vile.

Okay, um, that's my favorite word is vile.

By the way, um, uh, the gross.

Okay.

Well, uh, great.

So use a store bought truffles to make yourself a cup of really rich hot

chocolate onto the next segment in which we're actually making plum chutney.

But before we get there, let me say that there's a Facebook.

group called Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

There's a TikTok channel called Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

There's an Instagram feed, called Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

We both are on Facebook ourselves and on Instagram ourselves.

You can find us all over the social media landscape.

We would be glad to connect with you anywhere.

All right, let's head for the kitchen.

We're making plum chutney.

chutney.

Every year, my generous and lovely sister Julie sends boxes of

plums, Santa Rosa plums, from the trees in her backyard California.

Valley.

And, in fact, it is what was making me happy in Food This

Week just a few episodes ago.

And.

This year I think there were about 50 pounds of plums

that came in two shipments.

Let me just say what Julie does in case you didn't

hear it in the last podcast.

They go out, they have these trees, and they produce a ton of plums,

way more than they can ever use.

And so she gets one of those priority mailing boxes where it's a fixed rate.

You just pay a price for the box, and that's the cost to mail it.

And she jams them.

I mean to overflowing with plums and just sticks it in the mail.

So a couple of days later, it shows up this priority box with a million plums.

And it's probably illegal in 48

states, but okay, we

get it.

And there's all the plums and then Bruce has to do something with it.

So today we're going to make chutney.

And if you've been listening, you know, we are working on a canning book.

We have turned that into our publisher.

It's full of jams and jellies and chili crisps pickles and chutneys

chutney.

So if you don't know chutney, chutney is, uh, usually, uh, fruit jam like mixture.

Now, let me say that when we say what we're about to say, we are talking

about British versions of chutney.

There are chutneys from India that are dry, that are powdery,

that are various amalgams.

But in the UK tradition of chutney, they are like a slightly less

sweet jam that includes vinegar.

Lots of different aromatic spices.

Yes.

Does this exist in India?

Of course.

But the UK kind of this and re crafted it for British tastes.

And the sugar that's added in most of these British style of chutneys are

what gives chutneys like this a long shelf life, even in the fridge, like a mango

chutney, which most people know about.

And as Mark said, sometimes you can go to India and other countries

where there are fresh chutneys, a cilantro chutney, a coconut

chutney, and they're made to fresh.

They're not made to, to be stored and they're more sauce like and dip like.

what

we're going to do today is make chutney, and we're going to start with.

eight pounds or three point six five kilograms of Santa Rosa plums.

Now we're using exceptionally small ones because that's what Julie's

tree produced in California.

But I suppose you could use larger ones.

You're just going to have to cut them down into small bite

sized bits when you pit them.

We're making Eight pints of finished chutney.

That's about

four and a half liters.

And you get about one pint of chutney out of every pound

of plums, kind of how it works.

And we have already I should say I, the chef, have already stood here

for an hour before we recorded this, pitting these plums, there were a lot.

Mm to

kind of I'm the writer in the pair.

I don't have to do this kind of crap.

So here's a trick I want to show you.

So if you want to make sure your pot is big enough to fit all this, you

know, you're gonna have eight pints of finished chutney when it's done.

So I have poured eight pints of water into my stock pot to make sure it came up to

no more than two thirds of the way up.

Okay.

Because as.

Boils that's going to roil up a bit, and I don't want it to go higher.

So you can use that, that's a trick that you can use to see where

I say that chef here, who is so chefy ruined the stove the other

day, making lemon marmalade because it boiled over his pot wasn't big enough.

So, uh, that required a lot of cleaning has now ruined a burner.

just learn from his mistakes measure your pot.

So we're going to take all these ponds that Bruce has pitted and cut.

These are so small.

He literally cut them in half.

But again, if you have larger.

Plums.

And by the way, you don't have to use red Santa Rosa plums.

You can use any kind of plum for this.

Red Santa Rosa plums are particularly sweet and red.

Plums in general are sweet, but just you can use almost any

plum for this, but don't use it.

So-called Italian prune

Oh, the skin and yellow insides.

Dry

and have a very dry texture and you need a lot of moisture.

For a good shun

need a juicy plum.

You really do.

So we're dumping in.

All of those plums into the stockpot and now what I love about this

recipe, it is a dump and cook.

We are just going to go one ingredient after the other, dumping

them in on top of the plums.

we're going to start with two and a half cups or 515 grams of Demerara sugar.

You can also use dark brown sugar.

Let me say that

if you use dark brown sugar, weigh it, don't measure it.

So 515 grams of it.

And I'm going to put in two cups or 400 grams of granulated white

sugar, or you can use caster sugar.

If you use caster sugar, only go by weight 400 grams, not by volume.

I'm going to go back to the Demerara sugar for a

second and say, look for it.

Try and find rather than dark brown sugar.

You know, in U.

S., the way sugar is produced, all the molasses is taken out, and then to create

brown sugar, they add some back in.

Demerara

sugar is actually less refined.

It's not, nothing is added back in.

And it's granulated.

It has such a complex caramelly flavor that should Look for it.

I order mine online.

I get it from Amazon.

It's

Enough of the sermon.

So we're moving on.

I'm pushing this on.

Enough with the sermons.

right.

Two and a half cups of cider vinegar

Okay.

No, stop that.

The writer is going to stop you.

Two and a half cups or 600 milliliters of what?

Cider.

Apple cider

What kind of cider?

Apple cider

What other cider vinegars are there?

We

are clear.

The writer insists on clarity.

So, on top of this, I'm going to add the aromatics.

I'm going to start with nine medium cloves of garlic, and they have been peeled.

Just to tell you, um, I really carefully peeled these because what I'm going to

do with them and what I am sitting here doing with them is I'm thinly slicing

them.

Your hands are gonna smell so

I know.

I'm making really thin little paper thin slices clove.

And while I'm doing this, why don't you talk about the

So the ginger started off as a little small hand shaped piece, you

know, with fingers that shoot off Yep.

And by the time I peeled it and then I minced it, I have

half a cup of fresh garlic.

ginger.

Right, and if you don't know, if your ginger is really super fresh,

you can peel it with the edge of a spoon turned upside down.

So if you're looking for fresh ginger, just look for the thinnest, juiciest.

I'm going to use a word people hate, moistest covering on the ginger.

It should

not be wrinkly.

No.

but in supermarket, it mostly is.

In Asian supermarkets, it never

They need to be.

Plump it needs to look like you just had a filler injection.

not old and

Okay, so I'm gonna get off that we're gonna talk not only

adding fresh ginger We're also using candy ginger or sometimes called

ginger

and we're gonna use a half a cup of it chopped up So that's

if if you don't want to go a half a cup of chopped candied ginger.

It's 57 grams.

So if you want to weigh it,

but you still have to chop it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You got it into little bits, can weigh it before you chop

the caramelized taste of this candy ginger.

So having the fresh ginger and the candy ginger Really is a great combination.

And now the dry spices have to go in here.

I and I have two nice rounded tablespoons of red chili flakes.

And these are the kind I put on pizza, you know, nothing special.

And then we need mustard seeds.

And I like using both brown and yellow, a tablespoon of each.

And for that little sort of East Indian flavor, we have a couple

of teaspoons of garam masala.

And teaspoon of salt.

You're right.

And let me just say that we're using kosher salt because we prefer kosher

salt, especially in preserved condiments.

You can use table salt, but kosher salt is better.

And let me also say that if you like a saltier chutney, which is

a thing, you can double the amount and put two teaspoons of salt in

it.

Um, a teaspoon is kind of a little bit abstemious, a little bit.

Um, the right word, a little bit cheap,

ha

but you can put more in.

We're just trying to keep the salt content down.

Now, the whole thing here is really easy.

What we're going to do is turn on the flame and then we're

going to bring this to a boil.

And I'm going to stir it with a big heavy wooden spoon because

I need to get all this mixed up and this is a lot, this is going

to take a while to come to a boil.

Okay,

let me, let me give a little finesse here as writer.

Okay, what you want to do is you don't want to turn your

flame on high, like medium high.

So not high because of the amount of sugar and the ability, uh, its ability

to stick and burn with all the fruit.

So let's say medium high.

And then really, especially at the front.

As the juices get going, you really, as Bruce says, need to stir and a bigger

spoon is better and you stir and stir.

And you'll see after a minute or two as we're doing this, it's,

um, starting already to kind of mush together and mush up.

The more liquid you get out, the less frequently you have to stir it.

So maybe all the time for the first minute or so, and then a little bit

less, and you'll just see, it'll start.

It will slowly taper off, right, over time.

It will.

You always need to stir it.

Yeah.

And then as it comes near the end, and it'll take about 30 minutes

of simmering and bubbling, you're going to have to stir it almost all

the time to keep it from sticking.

So you're going to go back to a constant stir at the end, and it will

be thick and it will smell spectacular.

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Okay, so we're back, and it's actually been a while.

It's cooled off.

It's all sitting here in bottles on the counter, and it looks nice.

Oh, it's gorgeous.

It's purple and

going to make eight jars of this.

Now let me tell you, if you don't want to pressure can this, or you don't want

to can it in a traditional way, Um, you can, in fact, put this in clean, make sure

they're really clean, clean hot water, cleaned jars with lids and all that.

And then once it cools off, you can store those in the freezer.

And

yeah, and it'll do fine in the freezer.

You thaw it back out in your fridge and you know what, it's really nice to make a

lot of them because you can give them away frozen and then either someone can choose

to put it in their freezer and store it.

It'll stay about six months in the freezer.

That's USDA guidelines.

So about, let's go with their guidelines about six months in the freezer.

And then they can take it out anytime they want and thaw it and use it

or they can thaw it right there on the spot and, and start using it.

So it's nice to keep a batch there for house gifts.

Okay.

the question we get all the time is, how do you use it?

Like, what do you,

well,

you know, what do you do with chutney?

You can put it on top of curries.

You could just dip bread in it.

You eat it with

it to chicken salad.

You can add it to tuna salad you can add it to turkey salad.

Any kind of mayonnaise based salad.

You can add it to for a real bump of flavor.

Uh, Bruce eats a lot of chutney on baked potatoes.

Oh, I do.

I

Um, so there's another way to use it.

It's even good with butter on baked potatoes, which is really the truth.

It's a great thing.

If you thin it.

out with a little hot water.

So take some of this chutney and some hot water, thin it out, and it can

make a barbecue glaze for the grill.

Once you've cooked your chicken breasts or your pork chops or whatever you're

cooking, you can use the glaze for the last few minutes on the grill.

Or you can even spoon it on top of some nice, long basmati rice

and literally just have rice and

It's a perfectly delicious meal.

It's a perfectly delicious meal and it's a little spicy, but not much.

So, um, we're going to, we're tasting it and we spoons out and,

uh, we're not eating with anything.

We're eating it on its own.

Now,

Right off the spoon,

Yeah.

If you've ever, I want to say if you've ever had mango chutney

from the store, it's sometimes a little sharp and bitter and gross.

And I will admit that store brand, uh, mango chutney is sometimes not the best.

This is very different.

like a Savory plum

Yeah,

the problem with the store bought stuff is it's sometimes so sweet.

Yeah.

And this is

Sweet and bitter at the same time.

And this is so well balanced.

The sugar and the vinegar and the spices are creating so much flavor

that what I want with this right now is to slather this on a turkey sandwich.

Like, this is like,

Also good on burgers.

Yeah.

Get rid of ketchup cranberry sauce make this your

go to condiment on everything.

Yeah,

good on roast turkey, just like cranberry sauce.

It's good on roast chicken.

, let me also say that we eat it a lot on rice and dal.

You want to explain that?

What's dal?

, bruce: the word doll is just a lentil and there are lots of kinds

of lentils and dolls out there.

And I love to make Chana doll, which is a chickpea lentil and I

like them 'cause they're texture.

They're a bit

crunchy,

They're a little grainy.

Right.

a little graininess and I make a nice long grain rice.

We spoon doll over that, the Chana doll, and then dollop

the chutney on top of that.

And you could even put some yogurt on top of that, a sprinkle

of chopped nuts and cilantro.

And it's a really lovely vegetarian dinner.

Yes, it is.

And of course, we also have it with curries.

Really having chutney in the house is just having a ton of stuff to

do with it, which is really nice.

Before we get to the last segment of this podcast, the traditional last segment,

what's making us have any food this week, let me say that we have a newsletter.

It goes out about once a month.

As you well know, it's a little delayed.

It hasn't come out in a bad amount, uh, because, uh, I've been dealing

with, uh, my own life and my mother's health declines and all that and

we're not really, uh, strict about when the newsletter comes out.

It does do with our lives.

It has recipes on it.

Um, all that kind of stuff.

If you want to sign up for that, you can find it on our website,

cookingwithbruceandmark or bruceandmark.

com.

There's a sign up right on the splash page.

You can then sign up for the email and again, the service provider MailChimp,

nor I, neither of us actually, can capture your email or your name and

you can unsubscribe at any time.

Okay.

All right.

Off to what's making us happy in food this week,

Italian meringue.

probably over

the last five years has made me happy in food this week before, but we

have some friends whose two grandsons had birthdays this past month and one was 13

Okay.

they both asked to make cake with Italian meringue.

And it's just, in

These are sophisticated children.

are.

An Italian meringue, in case you don't know, is where you beat

the egg whites to soft peak.

Then you cook a sugar syrup to 250 degrees and slowly drizzle that in

while the egg whites are beating.

So you're cooking the egg whites.

It comes out so smooth and rich and dense and silky like melted marshmallows.

like, it's like, gushy marshmallows.

And

then you toast the top of it with a blowtorch, and fact, one of the boys asked

me, he was helping me stack wood, because we had two cords of wood delivered,

and when I said, how much do you want to be paid, he thought about being paid

an Italian meringue, but he opted for

Yeah, I would take the money to, , better choice kid.

, yeah, that's, , it is amazing.

, this Italian meringue Bruce has made it on trifles.

You can find those pictures of the trifles on our social media fees.

He's made it on birthday cakes.

, what's making me happy in food this week is, , I was in St.

Louis again, dealing with my mom in her health decline.

And when I came home, Bruce had made a bunch of food.

And one of the things he did is he smoked, yes, smoked a chuck roast

and then turned it into a smoked.

Chuck Roast stew that you smoke this Chuck Roast and then you

made this Southwestern style

with chilies and tomatoes beans.

and bacon

nice thing to come home.

Whenever I go away, Bruce goes into overdrive cooking.

So I came home to like gnocchi with sugo and I came home to this stew.

I came up to all this food because he.

Just goes into hyperdrive cooking when I'm away.

He cooks all the time, but when I'm away, he really goes into hyperdrive cooking.

And that smoked chuck roast stew, I'd never had such a thing.

I'd never thought actually about smoking a chuck roast before.

So, there you go.

I'd never had anything like it.

And it was super tasty.

I think we had it for what, two meals?

We

We did.

So, , what a great thing that was.

Okay.

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