The Key Ingredient

Sheri visits an heirloom watermelon patch in Virginia with food historian Debra Freeman and journalist Joshua Fitzwater. She shares her recipe for a watermelon salad and a fascinating way to make watermelon rind pickles and slaw. Rock star chef Cheetie Kumar mixes up a refreshing watermelon and cucumber cooler cocktail, and Sheri demonstrates the most approachable way to cut up a watermelon.

Sheri shares peach recipes, including peach sorbet and fresh peach and summer vegetable salad with basil-lemonade dressing. She stops at peach stands on her way to the coast and reunites with Cheryl Day, cookbook author and founder of Southern Restaurants for Racial Justice, who shows how she bakes her prized peach hand pies. Sheri also shares a tip to prevent peeled peaches from turning brown.

Sheri explores delicious ways to enjoy crab, including deviled crab and warm crab dip with crostini. She then catches crabs off a Charleston river dock with Tia Clark of Casual Crabbing, and Charlotte chefs Oscar Johnson and Daryl Cooper cook one of their favorite crab recipes with her. Sheri also explains the differences between various types of crab meat and their best culinary uses.

Host Sheri Castle is busy as a bee as she prepares honey-roasted peanut crispy rice treats and honey-glazed chicken thighs, plus offers a tip on reviving the crystallized honey in your pantry. She dons a bee suit with beekeeper Mary Garrison to learn why pollinators are so vital, and then makes a spiced honey cake pie with award-winning baker Camille Cogswell.

Sheri hunts for morels deep in the forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains with foraging experts Natalie Dechiara and Luke Gilbert. She then visits the home of farm-to-table pioneer John Fleer to use the morels (aka merkels) in a savory pie. In the kitchen, Sheri shares recipes for double mushroom soup and buttery sauteed mushrooms on toast, plus a tip for cleaning and keeping store-bought mushrooms.

Sheri offers a new take on collards with recipes for green curry and coconut creamed collards as well as collard salad with bacon dressing. She shares how to use every part of the leaf and explores an amazing range of collard varieties with Utopian Seed Project’s Chris Smith. Sheri then meets Glenn and Dorsey Hunt of the Lumbee Tribe at a street festival and makes their famous collard sandwiches.

Sheri Castle visits a farmers market to explore sweet potatoes of all shapes, colors and sizes. She then heads to the kitchen to share her favorite recipes for sweet potato casserole and twice-baked sweet potatoes. Asheville-based chef J Chong demonstrates a twist on Cantonese cuisine with her sweet potato and pork dumplings, and Sheri shares how to create the perfect sweet potato puree.