Kitchen wisdom with memory and bite.
Cooking with Bruce and Mark is a seasoned food show built around cookbook experience, domestic banter, and useful kitchen advice. Episodes move from one-minute tips to bigger conversations about burgers, ketchup, slow cookers, childhood favorites, nostalgia, canning, and the odd ingredient that changes a dish.
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Cooking with Bruce and Mark is a food show with the feel of a long-running kitchen conversation. Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough bring cookbook experience, marital familiarity, and a willingness to admit that taste can be stubbornly personal. It is practical first. It is also sentimental in the best sense. A typical episode may start with a quick tip about stale freezer ice, soy sauce as a salt substitute, keeping children out of the kitchen, or saving olive oil from tins of fish. Then the topic widens. Burger toppings become a way to talk about summer habits. Ketchup opens into food history and language. Slow cookers lead to old appliance design, modern safety standards, cords, outlets, and the way home cooks trust machines on the counter. Nostalgia is a recurring engine here, especially when childhood foods refuse to be improved by adult skill. Canned cherry pie filling, fake banana flavoring, jarred shortcuts, brisket, pot roast, and family doctoring rituals all get treated as evidence, not decoration. Bruce and Mark can be food snobs, and they know it. That self-awareness keeps the show loose. Their advice lands because it comes with examples: allspice in beef stew, cardamom in baking, dried chiles rehydrated into paste, or small-batch canning that lives in the fridge or freezer instead of an industrial setup. Episodes also make room for the process of cookbook writing, including the development of Cold Canning. Interview episodes, such as the conversation with Anne Byrn about Baking in the American South, add a broader culinary-memory thread. The show is not slick food media. It is warmer and more lived-in than that. It works best for listeners who want to cook better while hearing how recipes, trends, family habits, and appetites keep arguing with one another.
Made for: Best for home cooks who enjoy practical tips, cookbook talk, food history, and candid conversation about why people cook and crave what they do. It especially suits listeners who like expertise delivered casually rather than as a lesson.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is the mix of tested cookbook knowledge and personal food memory. Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough can move from a precise cooking fix to a family story or trend argument without losing the usefulness of the advice.
Join us, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, for weekly episodes all about food, cooking, recipes, and maybe a little marital strife on air. After writing thirty-six cookbooks, we've got countless opinions and ideas on ingredients, recipes, the nature of the cookbook-writing business, and much more. If you've got a passion for food, we also hope to up your game once and a while and to make you laugh most of the time. Come along for the ride! There's plenty of room!
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Experienced cookbook writers make cooking technique, food memory, and the business behind recipes equally engaging.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough turn food knowledge into lively kitchen-table conversation, pairing practical advice with opinion, personal history, and affectionate disagreement.
Canned cherry pie filling gets a spirited defense; your food snobbery is invited to respond.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm kitchen conversation about asparagus, inherited senses, and the memories that can make kasha complicated.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough turn food preferences into a warm look at how biology, smell, and memory shape appetite. The asparagus conversation gives the episode its sharpest hook, moving from the claim that everyone produces the smell after eating it, while only people…
A cookbook's path to the shelf runs through proposals, deadlines, crowded kitchens, and brutal edits.
Publishing a cookbook comes across as a long chain of practical decisions, not a neat creative leap. Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough trace the route from shaping an idea and selling it to a publisher through writing the manuscript and enduring edits.
A warm, slightly cautionary tour of slow cookers, kitchen safety, and lemon marmalade.
Slow cookers get a kitchen-table history as Bruce Weinstein and Mark Skrubber trace the appliance's beginnings, its long middle life, and the ways newer models have changed.
Salted poultry and fried rooster parts lead into appetite, memory, and personal limits.
Food curiosity takes a messy, sociable turn as Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough move from a caution about salt in store-bought raw poultry to memories of eating parts of two roosters.
A warm defense of the childhood foods that expertise cannot quite replace.
Childhood favorites hold their ground here, even against serious culinary know-how. Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough return to the tastes that food expertise cannot quite push aside, from the banana flavoring Bruce keeps at home and adds to banana bread to the canned cherry…
Ricotta black-and-whites and amaro pecan pie give American sweets an Italian turn.
Italian baking crosses paths with familiar American sweets as a cookbook author explains two smart adaptations: ricotta cookies turned into black-and-whites, while amaro took the place of bourbon in pecan pie.
Allspice, cardamom, and a family pot roast make small kitchen changes feel useful and personal.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough keep the kitchen advice grounded, starting with a useful caution: produce at farm stands or farmers' markets is not automatically local, especially when it is out of season.
Barbecue talk with smoke, jokes, and no filter.
Real recipes, kitchen memory, practical nerve.
Local food talk with practical flavor.
Kitchen-table conversations that start with food and wander.
Cooking know-how and family life, shared over the counter
Mark’s El Phoenix meat enchilada casserole uses canned red sauce, store-bought tortillas, and shredded pre-bagged cheese.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough interview Renato Poliafito about his new cookbook, Dolce: American Baking with an Italian Accent, and his path from Baked in Red Hook to Ciao Gloria in Brooklyn.
Cooking with Bruce and Mark ties food preferences to genetics, starting with Joanne Cole's University of Colorado School of Medicine research on bitter taste receptors, broccoli, and cauliflower.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough, the hosts of Cooking with Bruce and Mark, lay out the full cookbook-publishing process from idea to Amazon listing.
Bruce and Mark discuss a one-minute cooking tip, nostalgia in food, and what's making them happy in food this week.
Bruce and Mark share a one-minute cooking tip about using a whiteboard to inventory freezer contents, then discuss foods they love and hate.
Bruce and Mark discuss their new cold canning cookbook, share a one-minute cooking tip about having multiple cutting boards and knives, and preview a segment on summer ice cream trends.
Bruce and Mark discuss Thanksgiving cooking, focusing on the turkey and a tip for keeping gravy warm using a thermos.
Bruce and Mark introduce their podcast, share a one-minute cooking tip about using soy sauce instead of salt, and preview an interview with cookbook author Ann Burn.
Bruce and Mark discuss their new canning book, share a tip to refresh ice in ice makers, and preview a segment on hamburger toppers.
Bruce and Mark discuss a one-minute cooking tip about supporting food content creators and preview a segment on the history of ketchup.
Bruce and Mark introduce their new cookbook and share a cooking tip from Kenji Lopez-Alt about using rehydrated dried chilies for more flavor.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough explore the history and evolution of slow cookers, from their origins in 19th-century Jewish Sabbath traditions in Lithuania to modern safety concerns.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough share secret ingredients to elevate common dishes.
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough use "Cooking with Bruce and Mark" to compare the weirdest foods they have eaten, from Mintz's Deli in New York to lutefisk suppers in Madison, Wisconsin.