Every year around mid-to-late August as the summer starts to end, the aroma of pumpkin and other fall flavors start to sneak in. The drinks arrive first by way of coffee and lattes (and maybe even an ale or cider). Depending on how you feel about that, it is either the best week of the year or too much, too soon.

But luckily, you do not have to trade the grill for the oven overnight. The actual shift from summer to fall takes weeks: a latte first, then a few small changes to what is already in your dinner rotation, and only once the weather really turns do hot meals and baked goods take over.

If you're craving fall flavors or if you'd rather ease into the season, here's our recommended order of how the transition actually should happen in the kitchen, rather than trying to do all at once.

Right now, it's just the fall drinks.

Right now it's probably still warm enough outside that anything hot sounds like a lot, so to kick off the shift into fall, we typically start with flavored drinks. Pumpkin Pie Spice starts the season off with familiar flavors served with coffee, cold brew, or espresso.

Make your cravings easier by using our recipe for Coffee Shop Pumpkin Spice Sauce. It takes just 10 minutes and makes 3 cups, which is enough homemade PSLs to last you a month (or more!) It keeps in the refrigerator for up to 4-6 weeks, so making just 1 batch can save you spending all that time (and money) in the drive-thru.

Stir a spoonful into hot or iced coffee and you've got the drink without the line. And if you want the recipe for the entire drink, we've got that too: Pumpkin Spiced Latte.

But if pumpkin isn't your thing, it's not the only fall flavor of the season. If you would rather skip it, salted caramel, maple, and apple all read as fall just as clearly.

Our recipe for a Salted Caramel Iced Latte stirs our Salted Caramel Spice into hot espresso until it dissolves, then pours over ice with your choice of milk or half and half.

The "salted" flavor lands last rather than upfront, so what you get is deep, buttery sweetness with an edge to it, a completely different fall flavor from cinnamon and nutmeg but just as much the season.

And coffee isn't the only place that pumpkin starts to show up! Pumpkin ales will be on tap at the same breweries still pouring summer lagers, along with pumpkin ciders and fall-flavored stouts. But they're not just at the taproom–they'll appear in the coolers of your grocery stores and supermarkets soon enough.

This is how fall actually starts shows up as we officially 'end' the summer. A menu board update here, a new can in the cooler there, long before the weather agrees. And your kitchen is next!

First, let's use up the last of the summer harvest.

Before any fall flavor gets folded into anything, there is a shorter window closing on its own. Peaches and tomatoes are still at their best, and probably will not be for much longer. This is the last real call for both.

Palisade Peach Spice goes on the last peaches of the season, cinnamon-forward with citrus underneath, already leaning fall even while the fruit is still summer's. Grill the peaches with it and you are cooking two seasons in one dish.

Tomatoes are still going too, and our Salted Caprese Salad recipe is the simplest way to use the good ones while they last, sliced heirloom tomato and fresh mozzarella with basil, finished with a seasoning salt of your choice and a drizzle of balsamic. No cooking at all.

And don't rush to put the grill away!

September grilling is about as easy as it gets, no bundling up, no wind fighting your flame, just good weather that happens to still be around. That does not mean any of this has to disappear once the weather starts to get colder.

Labor Day Weekend tends to mark the unofficial end of grilling season for most people, and we've got the perfect Labor Day grilling guide for it. But honestly, turkeys get smoked well into November, tailgates keep firing up grills through the football season, and plenty of backyard smokers never really go dormant at all.

As it cools down, more dinners move inside, not because grilling stops, but because standing outside stops being the easy choice it was in July.

Black Label Smoked Salt & Pepper is built for exactly that shift. Cold-smoked over whiskey barrel oak and hickory for two days, it carries real smoke flavor into a stovetop dinner with no fire at all, so the flavor you have been grilling with all summer does not disappear just because you are cooking indoors more. We covered the whole process in its own Behind the Seasoning.

Now, let's start cooking with fall flavors.

This is the real thing, not summer produce borrowing a fall spice, but apple, maple, and root vegetables leading on their own. None of it needs the oven running for hours yet.

Apple does not have to mean pie, and it does not have to mean the oven either. Hidden Cove Waldorf Chicken Salad takes poached chicken, diced Granny Smith apple, red grapes, and walnuts, tossed cold in a Nantucket Herb & Citrus dressing and chilled before serving.

Truffle Parm Apple Grilled Cheese is the stovetop version, fig jam and Black Truffle Parmesan Seasoning with thin apple slices pressed panini-style until the cheese goes fully molten, five minutes at the stove and nothing more.

And one dish that quietly ties together everything this section is about: Maple Roasted Root Vegetables and Quinoa Salad tosses roasted sweet potato and parsnip with quinoa, kale, diced green apple, and dried cranberries, all dressed in a Dijon and maple vinaigrette. Apple, cranberry, root vegetables, and maple in one bowl, served warm or at room temperature rather than straight off a hot pan.

Sweet Potato Salad with Curry Mango Dressing pan-fries sweet potato coins until golden, then piles them over lettuce with blueberries, macadamia nuts, and a mango-curry dressing blended fresh, sweet potato leading the way with a little brightness left over from summer.

Moving into warmer meals as the weather cools:

This is further down the road than the last section, once the mornings actually have some bite to them and hot food and drink both start sounding good again instead of like a lot. Everything from here on is meant to be eaten warm.

Start with the ones you are already craving.

Award-Winning Chili earns its name through sheer depth of seasoning. Eight separate spices go in, cumin and coriander for warmth, smoked Spanish paprika and Mexican oregano for backbone, roasted garlic and toasted onion beneath all of it, with cayenne and Hatch green chile powder left to your own tolerance. Fire-roasted tomatoes and two kinds of beans simmer down for forty-five minutes until the whole pot thickens.

Pumpkin Turkey Chili takes the opposite approach, and it is the more interesting pot of the two. Ground turkey stands in for beef, salsa verde and Hatch green chile push it toward the tomatillo end of the spectrum, and pumpkin puree thickens everything into something silkier than a red chili ever manages. Three beans, black, garbanzo, and great northern, and the spices go in twice, half worked into the raw turkey and half added to the pot, so the seasoning sits both inside the meat and throughout the broth.

Pikes Peak Pot Roast requires just ten minutes of actual attention. A four-pound roast goes into the slow cooker over carrots, onions, and diced tomatoes, gets a coating of salt-free Pikes Peak Butcher's Rub, and then you leave. Ten hours later the beef pulls apart against a fork and the vegetables have collapsed into the sauce.

Classic Chicken Noodle Soup with Poultry Seasoning is the bowl everyone reaches for the first genuinely cold day, and two details separate it from the version most people make. Two full tablespoons of sage-forward Poultry Seasoning go in with the aromatics rather than the broth, blooming in the fat before any liquid arrives. Then lemon juice at the very end, which is what keeps a long-simmered soup from tasting muddy.

Slow Cooker Spiced Pumpkin Soup is the one to make when people are coming over. Prosciutto crisps in the pan first and gets set aside for the garnish, then pumpkin puree, chicken stock, nutmeg, and white Sarawak pepper spend up to eight hours in the slow cooker. Cream and Parmigiano-Reggiano go in at the end, and the crisped prosciutto goes back on top.

Split Pea Soup is the least fussy thing in this section and possibly the most satisfying and underrated. Onion, carrot, and celery soften in oil, then split peas and a tablespoon of Poultry Seasoning simmer partially covered for forty minutes until the peas break down entirely. Diced ham and fresh parsley go in at the end. Fifty minutes, one pot, six servings.

More fall soups worth trying when you want something different.

Golden Beet and Parsnip Soup catches both vegetables at their absolute peak, golden beets bringing earthy sweetness without staining everything crimson the way red beets would.

Cumin Carrot Soup proves how far two ingredients can go. Carrots turn genuinely sweet once they cook down, and cumin adds a toasted, almost smoky warmth that has nothing to do with heat.

Vegan Corn and Mushroom Chowder sits exactly on the seam between seasons. The last of the sweet corn carries summer, while Four Mushroom Umami Blend, built from shiitake, portobello, oyster, and white button, supplies a savory depth that would ordinarily require an hour of browning fresh mushrooms.

Red Thai Curry Alfredo with Udon Noodles and Seared Shrimp is the most indulgent bowl on the page. Coconut milk and Red Thai Curry reduce with bell pepper and garlic until the sauce clings the way an alfredo does, then thick udon noodles get folded in and seared shrimp go on top.

Autumn vegetables and fall-flavored side dishes.

Sweet Roasted Root Vegetables is the same carrots, parsnips, turnips, and fingerlings from the salad earlier, now served hot from the pan with either Palisade Peach Spice or Park Hill Maple & Spice. The technique matters more than the seasoning: covered for twenty-five minutes so everything steams tender, then uncovered so the edges finally take on color.

Roasted Delicata Squash with Apple & Onion Sauce is the most composed dish in this section. Delicata roasts skin-on, no peeling required, while apples and onions reduce separately with Four Mushroom Umami Blend into a sauce that lands somewhere between savory and sweet. Pomegranate seeds scattered over the top cut through all of it.

Maple-Glazed Brussels Sprouts with Bacon & Walnut Oil goes into the oven twice. The sprouts roast bare for twenty-five minutes, then get a glaze of maple, butter, and walnut oil and return until the sugars catch and darken at the edges. Bacon lands on top last so it stays crisp.

Scalloped Potatoes with Four Mushroom Umami Blend tastes like it took far more effort than it did, and Mushroom Asparagus Risotto with Roasted Veggies works that same mushroom depth into a risotto, where the slow addition of stock gives the flavor time to concentrate.

Peachy BBQ Baked Beans belong at a September cookout and a November dinner table equally, with real apple and cinnamon doing the work that brown sugar alone usually attempts.

And now for the main course.

Instant Pot Roast Chicken compresses a Sunday dinner into a weeknight, and the pressure cooker does something an oven cannot, keeping the bird from drying out while it cooks through in a fraction of the time.

Poultry Seasoning is sage-forward and salt-free, and its name does it a disservice. Sage is resinous enough to survive a long roast without turning to hay, which is why the blend holds up on a Tuesday chicken as readily as a holiday turkey. We went behind the seasoning on the rest of what it does.

Cornbread Stuffing deserves better than one appearance a year, and this version explains why. The vegetable base alone cooks thirty minutes, onion, celery, both bell peppers, and green onion softening with sage, thyme, cayenne, and smoked Spanish paprika. Broth whisked with eggs gets folded gently into cubed cornbread so it holds its shape, then it bakes covered for an hour under chopped pecans before the foil comes off to brown the top.

Two more for the table

Pork Tenderloin with Apple and Onion Pan Sauce is the pork dish this season actually calls for. Apple and onion cook down in the pan drippings into a sauce that turns sweet and savory at once, no barbecue glaze standing in for real fall flavor.

Pearl Street Cedar Plank Salmon is lighter than anything else here. The soaked cedar plank smolders under the fish, smoking it gently from below while the flesh stays moist, one of the last dinners genuinely worth firing up the grill for.

And something warm to drink

Mulled Apple Cider finally makes sense. Fresh cider and a spice bag, gently heated, nothing more required, and the smell reaches the rest of the house long before anyone sits down to eat.

And when you're ready for fall baking:

Fall baking arrives last, once the oven running for an afternoon sounds like a feature rather than a problem. Quick breads, galettes, crisps under butter-crumb toppings, the kind of cooking that scents an entire house.

Pumpkin Spice Bread is where to begin, and one step separates it from every box mix. The pumpkin puree cooks down with Pumpkin Pie Spice and salt until it reduces by half, roughly eight minutes on the stove, concentrating the flavor and driving off water that would otherwise leave the crumb heavy. Two dense loaves emerge under a brown sugar and walnut streusel.

Salted Caramel Apple Galette is a free-form tart, which makes it far more forgiving than pie, no crimped edges to fuss over. Apples tossed with Pumpkin Pie Spice bake under puff pastry, then salted caramel sauce and a crunch of Whiskey Barrel Smoked Sugar and Salt finish it. Apple and Brie Galette runs the same idea somewhere more savory.

Baked Apples barely counts as baking and delivers most of the payoff regardless, while Cranberry Pear Crumble pairs tart cranberry against soft, sweet pear so neither fruit has to carry the dish alone.

Two things worth keeping on hand by this point. Pure Maple Sugar substitutes for brown sugar and caramelizes more aggressively, which is exactly what a crisp topping wants. Natural Maple Extract carries more maple into a batter with a few drops than syrup manages by the quarter cup, and without thinning anything out. Maple has enough range to deserve its own post, which is coming.

Move from summer to fall whenever you're ready.

Nobody checks the calendar before making any of this, and nobody is asking you to leap straight to pie.

The weather arrives on its own schedule. Meet the season wherever it currently suits you.

Shop all fall flavors →