Charred & Scruffed / Adam Perry Lang, Peter Kaminsky,

Gabrielle Hamilton is the author of Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.

At my restaurant we've now cooked pretty extensively from Perry Lang's Charred and Scruffed and read it from cover to cover. And while I would consider all of us experienced meat cookers, every cook here has been pretty radically enlightened by it.

Charred and Scruffed is a game-changer. It blows open the whole over-saturated category of grilling and will change your meat cooking forever, whether you're a beginner or a hardy veteran of cooking meat with fire and smoke. In this book, Perry Lang teaches you to be an active griller--to abandon the idea and aesthetic of the rigid, perfect, crosshatched grill mark like you find at an Outback or Wendy's--and to instead really move the meat around the grill in a way that it builds up more and more surface area, getting as much char and flavor on every micro-inch of its surface as possible. He prepares the meats by opening them up, either by hand--kind of pulling apart rib roasts or cracking the backs of chickens and stabbing the birds repeatedly (!)--or by cutting shallow, diamond-hatch scoring into the surface of leaner cuts to create more places for crust and char to form, thus letting more flavor develop. And creating more surfaces for the seasoning salts, herby and acidic bastes, and unbelievably delicious and sensible board sauces made right on the cutting board with the juices of the meats themselves, to adhere and cling to. Why no one has thought of the board sauce is a mystery and an example of Adam Perry Lang's genius. After basting the meat frequently throughout its cooking time with a basting brush made of a bunch of herbs--both beautiful and purposeful--you finely mince the tip end of the herb baster brush--which has softened in the heat and released the herbs' fragrant oils--and stir that right into the juices from the rested grilled meat. It is a stroke of brilliance. Utterly freaking delicious and simple and smart.

I first caught on to the obsessive genius of Adam Perry Lang and his relationship to meat over ten years ago when I wrote a piece about him for Saveur magazine. At the time he was the chef at Robert's Steakhouse on the west side of Manhattan, which served the best meat in New York City. Everyone who came to know it agreed that it blew the city's famed steakhouses out of the water. At the time Adam was aging meat weeks and even months longer than anyone, anywhere. His walk-ins had an elaborate setup of thermometers, fans, humidifiers and stainless steel metro shelving--and a fastidious date and time labeling system as well. He rotated huge racks of beef, attending to the temperature, humidity and velocity, as he called it, of cool air circulating in the room with a near mania. He was obsessively sourcing meat, flying out to see growers and buyers and packers throughout the Midwest and Texas to understand everything he could about grass and grain and corn. At the same time, just to give you a sense of his energy, he had opened Daisy May Bar B Que and was competing on the national barbecue circuit. And winning!

All this to say, there is no single person or team working with meat today who knows more or who has more to share and to learn from.

This book is suited for professionals and amateurs alike, men and women, from back yard pit masters to fire-escape kettle-grillers, for dads whose favorite weekend activity is centered around the Weber to die hards who will find themselves shoveling a path to the grill deep in winter just to cook from its pages.