Steven Raichlen's Project Fire

While propane offers convenience and charcoal burns hot, wood is the ultimate fuel. Delivering both heat and taste, wood smoke contains more than a thousand flavor-producing compounds. From wood-grilled bruschetta with fire-blistered tomatoes to swordfish with raisin chimichurri, today's show brings you the primal campfire pleasure of grilling over a wood fire.

Today's show is all about brisket, complete with failproof methods for smoking it right every time. From not so traditional Texas barbecue and a distinctive bacon-smoked brisket flat to an electrifying Vietnamese brisket salad. You'll even learn how to make breakfast-worthy Tex-Mex brisket tacos.

Steinhatchee, Florida, population 1500, perches on the north shore of the historic Steinhatchee River where it joins the Gulf of Mexico. What better place to tape a show on the spirited seafood-rich grilling of the Gulf Coast? From Louisiana, with its blackened redfish that we'll prepare "on the half shell", to the Florida shrimp boil, deconstructed and flame-charred on the grill.

Today, we're grilling green with vegetables we love to cook over live fire, like asparagus, corn, and mushrooms, and with foods that are less likely candidates for grilling. This show celebrates meatless grilling in all its verdant glory. From a new egg salad with grilled fresh hearts of palm, to a queso fresco pizza you grill directly over the fire, no pizza stone required.

The first is a secret and hyper-flavorful steak cut from a hog's belly with a Catalan grilled vegetable sauce called romesco. The second features the most delectable part of a rib roast reborn as a steak, and you're about to learn how to grill it with bourbon. I'll also show you how to grill a brisket steak fragrant with sizzling shallot sage butter.

Today's show takes you back. To a time when our ancestors did their grilling in the fireplace, or on fire-heated stones around the campfire and directly on the embers. I call it primal grilling. We're talking ember-grilled bread and ember-roasted vegetable salad, chicken grilled in midair hanging over a smoky wood fire, and amaretti-stuffed pears grilled on primordial slabs of salt.

In today's show, Tex meets Mex as we explore how American barbecue techniques can enhance three classic Mexican dishes: snapper en pipian, in a grilled vegetable and pumpkin seed sauce; pork shoulder pibil, smoke-roasted in banana leaves in the style of the Yucatan, and a Project Fire first: a dessert quesadilla lavished with bananas and dulce de leche.

Cornell chicken was created by a Cornell University poultry scientist and today served in upstate New York and just about nowhere else on the planet. And then there's the sweet, smoky barbecued salmon enjoyed in Anchorage, Alaska. And finally, Baltimore pit beef, crusty on the outside, rare inside, with plenty of horseradish to pump up the heat. It's all the best BBQ you've never heard of.

In this show a Project Fire first: the grilled mojito cocktail. We explore how my home state of Florida re-imagines three tailgate classics. Get ready for pork shooters stuffed with shrimp, cheese and Andouille sausage followed by Miami wings blasted with fire water. And luscious, smoky hamburgers like you've never experienced. The secret? Lace them with chopped barbecued brisket.

The majestic beef shoulder becomes a Texas barbecued beef clod. As for lamb shoulder, Moroccans cook it in a fire-heated underground clay oven to make their legendary mechoui. This show explores the richest, meatiest, most flavorful cut you find in the meat department: the shoulder. Today, on Project Fire we shoulder on.

Long before there was modern fusion cuisine, people cooked Chino-Latino. Get ready for tangerine teriyaki chicken, butter rum grilled plantains, smoky baby back ribs with guava barbecue sauce, and Korean brisket tacos. And here's the shocker: the brisket grills from start to finish in less than three minutes.

Miami is the southernmost metropolis in the continental United States. Our Miami Spice menu begins with Florida lobster grilled with rum butter baste and mango salsa, then plate-burying island spice beef plate ribs. Our grand finale? Turkey adobo with garlicky mojo de ajo.

Steak. It's every carnivore's dream and every griller's triumph. It's easy to grill, but you can spend a lifetime perfecting the fine points. Now this epic meat is about to receive the Raichlen treatment in a show that looks back on how steak has evolved through three iconic TV series: Primal Grill, Project Smoke, and Project Fire.