Published Wednesday, October 28, 2026 at 07:22 AM PT

Burbank · Wednesday, October 28, 2026 · 7:22 AM · 55°F, 87% humidity, wind 1 mph E (gusts 2), 29.40 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 14

Recipe Recommendation

Plank-Smoked Salmon with Finishing Butter gluten-free · pescatarian · low-sugar · smoked · spicy · pairs with: 805

Meat Church’s Grilled Salmon is a full fillet on a cedar plank with smoke rolling over it and butter at the end. It is the one dish on today’s list that doesn’t need a fifteen-minute apology. I’m skipping the cup of maple syrup in the glaze, because candy fish is a crime. The butter stays, because I’m not a monster.

Serves a few, and a single slice is a light-to-moderate plate that still feels like a proper dinner.

Ingredients

  • 1 full salmon fillet
  • Sugar-free BBQ rub with real heat (swap: the original calls for a honey-based rub, so go chili-forward and savory instead)
  • 1/2 stick butter, melted (swap: brush it on plain, with no maple syrup)
  • Cedar grilling planks, or unwaxed butcher paper on a pellet grill
  • Light smoking wood: hickory, pecan, alder or fruit wood

Method

  1. Bring the smoker to 275. Use a lighter wood, since salmon doesn’t want to be beaten up.
  2. Lay the fillet on the planks (at least 2 for a full side) and season it on all sides with the sugar-free rub.
  3. At 115 to 120 internal, which in the video was about 30 minutes in, brush on the melted butter.
  4. Keep cooking until the fish hits 125 internal, then rest it on a plate for 10 minutes. The source says most people pull it at 120 to 125, and 145 is overcooked.

Pairs with: Firestone Walker 805, because a cold, crisp beer cuts the butter and smoke without turning dessert-y.

The Day in Brief

Little Mister, today’s pile of transcripts is a mixed bag. A dead dancer’s dinner plate got eulogized, and a dead magician’s bread pudding got a mediocre review.

Several transcripts are fragments that start mid-sentence and end mid-thought, which is how I feel about most Mondays. I’m not going to pad them, because I don’t invent quotes. Rule of Acquisition #237 says there’s a sucker born every minute and you should be the first to find each one.

Barbecue and Live Fire

The Biscuit Battle

Mad Scientist BBQ ran “Biscuit Battle: Franklin vs Goldee’s vs TMG,” and I love it. Raw biscuit dough is a cheap, honest way to find your hot spots, and nobody can argue with a pale biscuit sitting next to a burnt one. The channel’s own caveat is that this “isn’t the be all end all of barbecue pits,” just one piece of information for people deciding how to run their fires and which pit to buy. He also points out that none of these pits are cheap and it’s “hard earned money.” No price numbers appear in the transcript, so I won’t make any up.

  • Franklin pit: cooks really even.
  • Goldee’s pit: also cooks really even, apart from a little hot spot right in the middle.
  • The Volunteer: he thinks it can cook really even if you adjust the damper, and it has the potential for a ton of great space.

He says his results come from today’s weather, today’s conditions and the wood he was burning, so yours might differ. His advice is to buy a couple of rolls of biscuits and run the test on your own pit. That’s the best barbecue advice of the day: a few bucks of canned dough tells you more than any forum argument. He also admits the “blaring omission” is a Workhorse 1975 that his brother is using for a new barbecue business, so that pit goes unjudged. Valar morghulis, all men must die, and apparently so do untested pits.

Old Fashioned Ribs

The same channel also posted “Old Fashioned Ribs,” where the ribs get an old-fashioned-inspired glaze and the cook makes the cocktail itself as a companion. The ribs are wrapped with nothing added in the wrap and cooked to tenderness. He watches the fat render, and one rack coughs up a “geyser” of juice, which he clearly enjoys. He’s candid that he is “not a bartender” and “not a mixologist,” and that getting wasted before the food is done is not the point, “even though I have done that before. Not proud of it.” That’s the most honest sentence in barbecue this week. The transcript then loops into repeating itself, so I can’t tell you his actual cocktail build. I won’t guess at a recipe.

Chuds BBQ and the Smoky Osso Buco

Chuds BBQ (“Smoky, Tender, Beefy, Delicious!”) made smoky osso buco from beef shanks. His pitch is practical: it’s good for the colder months, about 90 percent of the cook is hands-off in the oven, and shanks are “pretty inexpensive,” so it won’t break the bank. He calls the shank a “super gelatinous cut like a beef cheek or a short rib.” It comes off the pit technically cooked but still “incredibly tough,” because all that collagen hasn’t given up yet. Collagen is a diva and it keeps its own schedule.

Winter Grilling, Courtesy of allthingsbbq

allthingsbbq’s “Don’t Let Winter End Your BBQ Season!” is half advice and half shop window for Yoder Smokers pellet grills.

  • Covers: Yoder-branded covers have a performance fabric outside and a protective layer inside, which keeps condensation and moisture down, keeps rain out and stops snow melting through. They recommend pulling the cover off occasionally to let air reach the grill if you’re not cooking often.
  • Connectivity: Wi-fi and Bluetooth through the Fireboard app let you go out once to put the food on, then monitor and change temps from inside, and only go back out to collect it.
  • Cold smoking: Spring and fall are good for this. You use a smoke generator and the grill’s fans on cheeses and other things that would melt at higher temperatures.

I’d like to point out that “stay inside while the robot cooks” is also my whole philosophy of life.

Recipes and Technique

Sam the Cooking Guy Goes to Halloween

In “Sam as Rachael Ray,” he sprints through a sandwich: grilled cheese, turkey, roasted red pepper and pesto. He jokes that he’s “getting faster” because he has “the other 17 shows to shoot today.” After a break the sandwich becomes a Mediterranean turkey grilled cheese Monte Cristo. He explains that a Monte Cristo is a sandwich with turkey or chicken that is “dipped in egg, sort of as a batter” and then cooked. He forgot the EVOO and then claimed credit for EVOO entering the Oxford Dictionary. I can’t verify that, and neither can he.

“Sam the Cooking Guy as Martha Stewart” is the better cooking. It’s a sherry cream mushroom crab filling spooned into a puffed disc, topped with cilantro and fresh cracked black pepper. The “puff” is the star (“It’s all about the puff”). The disc breaks in character, he swears in a Martha voice, and he lands on “this is a f***ing good thing.” The mix of a filling that’s warm and creamy and a shell that’s crisp and airy is good technique.

Brussels Sprouts and Yams

“Shaved Brussels Sprouts” is a salad done two different ways. It’s pitched as not like “the little stinky things that somebody’s boiled in a pot.” Shaving them thin is the right call, because it keeps them away from the sulfurous boiled-cabbage fate and turns them into something you’d actually choose. Fixtures Living, a kitchen, bath and outdoor retailer, sponsors the episode and gets a long thank-you with its San Diego, Costa Mesa and Rancho Mirage locations named.

“Yam BrĂ»lĂ©e” is mostly a Thanksgiving sign-off in the transcript, but the leftover ideas are the useful part. Form stuffing into a patty and use it in place of the English muffin, with turkey, an egg and gravy over the top. He also lists stuffing turkey tacos, toasted sandwiches and paninis. His rule: as long as you leave with turkey, gravy and stuffing, you’ll be fine. You could build a week of meals out of that, or a new personality.

Matty Matheson, the Greatest Hits

MATTY MATHESON’s “You Picked Matty’s Best Recipes of ALL Time” is a viewer-voted clip show, and the transcript is a firehose. There’s a soup where he adds fresh nutmeg to cheese because he wants it at the end, then argues that “this isn’t nutmeg soup.” There’s garlic croutons rubbed with a fresh clove rather than cheesy garlic bread, an “Italian dressing” he calls fire, and a linguine Alfredo with broccoli and Parmesan served with cutlets. I can’t map each dish to a specific recipe from the fragments, so I won’t try. He is loud, he swears constantly, and he keeps selling “you can make this at home.” That’s the right pitch, and I respect it.

Chefs and Restaurants

Sam’s fifth clip is “Mike Isabella and His Crazy Good Cauliflower.” The recipe is mostly cut off, so what’s left is the kitchen talk. Isabella, introduced as being from Top Chef season six, tells Sam that young cooks “put a little salt on things” and get smacked in the head, because you have to “shower” your food with seasoning from high up so it spreads evenly instead of clumping.

He admits he has thrown plates and food in a kitchen and fired people on the spot, about three times, when the cook had an attitude or sent out bad work in the middle of service. A promo for the San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival also appears, with tickets still available for the Saturday grand tasting and a cookbook signing from 1 to 1:30.

Food Travel and Culture

The one real cultural item today is from Beers & Bars, whose “IVE - LOOKS CAN KILL REACTION” is a K-pop reaction video. One comment mentions that a drink called “Looks Can Kill” was featured and that a brand let the group change the name for marketing, like a phone company letting you put your own video on its phone. Past that, the hosts are figuring out who’s who in the K-pop world and wondering whether the video is AI.

Food History

Fred Astaire’s Very Plain Table

The Immigrant Table ran “30 Peculiar Meals Fred Astaire Ate Behind the Walls of His Beverly Hills Estate.” The narration is lovely and a little precious. His table was plain on purpose because plainness was control, and control was the one luxury he trusted. He drank orange juice with an egg beaten into it, made his own onion soup when the house was asleep, and ended the day with a bowl of set milk. One plate is a dish served cold and alone, “no sauce, no salad, no color of any kind,” with watercress brought to the table “like flowers.” The channel points out that watercress grows in shallow beds of moving water and was a crop of the old English counties, cut with the stems still wet and rushed to market.

The thesis is that a man who made dancing look like weather ate dinner that hid nothing, and that the dish is either good or it isn’t, down to the care in the cooking. Raw egg in orange juice is the one detail I find peculiar, and I’ll leave it to the man who earned the right.

Houdini’s Bread and Butter Custard

Tasting History with Max Miller closed out “The Mysterious Death of Harry Houdini” with a bread and butter custard. The hook is the Halloween sĂ©ance tradition of trying to contact Houdini, and the joke that a secret code needed to be as long as an entire recipe. The pudding comes out with a layer of moist bread on the bottom and custard on top. It’s “not the prettiest of desserts but it smells really good.” He tastes it and calls it “simple but delicious,” and the verdict is that vanilla would give it more depth because right now it’s “sweet eggy custard.” The recipe is also missing the Bing cherries that Houdini’s wife Bess reportedly wanted, which he left out.

The best fact is from the congressional hearings on House Resolution 8989. Asked by Representative William Hammer where he was born, Houdini replied “I was born in Wisconsin in 1874.” The host says that makes it known that Houdini, “seeker of truth,” lied to Congress. The transcript cuts off before the full punchline, but the setup suggests Houdini was born elsewhere. An escape artist who lied under oath is the most on-brand thing I’ve ever heard. Memento mori, but with a pudding.

Drinks

The only real cocktail content is the old fashioned from Mad Scientist BBQ, where a drink and a glaze share a theme, which is a smart idea since a bourbon-style glaze on ribs wants a matching glass. No whiskey distilling, no gin, no brewing. Beers & Bars gave us a K-pop reaction and nothing to drink, which is a hell of a thing for a channel with “Beers” in the title. Nobody tell the brewers.

Closing

It costs a few dollars and tells you what a pricey pit won’t. And if you do bake Houdini’s custard, add the vanilla. A man who lied to Congress can survive a note from a stranger.

Sources

Videos

Recipe