Includes index.

As an award-winning cookbook author, food writer, and online culinary expert, Michael Ruhlman has developed a reputation for providing lucid, no-nonsense cooking advice as sharp as a good chef's knife. In this first in a new series of books focusing on cooking methods, Ruhlman explores one of the most fundamental cooking techniques- roasting. Humankind has been roasting for millennia. The term originally referred to cooking over an open fire, usually on some kind of spit, and has evolved to describe cooking of meat or vegetables or even fruit in an oven, a "dry heat" (and usually high-heat) method of making things irresistibly appetizing.