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The greater the surface-to-mass ratio, the quicker the cooking. In other words, something the shape of your arm is going to cook faster than something the shape of your head.

HOW MUCH HEAT?

Roasting is a bit like deep-frying in that it’s about even heating. The difference is that hot fat delivers heat via highly efficient conduction, while roasting depends on radiant heat and convection, both of which are relatively inefficient modes of heat transfer. This means that roasting is a relatively slow process, which is why it’s better suited to large, dense items that require longer to cook through than thinner cuts.

Tortoiselike though it may generally be, there’s still fast roasting and slow roasting. And which one you decide to use depends on the target food and your taste. Consider the cross section of your average hunk of beef—say, an eye of round roast—cooked in a 500° F oven (see illustrations). Like the growth rings of a tree, the roast shows us its thermal history. The outer crust, exposed for the longest time to the high heat has seared to a dark-brown and flavorful crust. As for the interior, we were hoping for medium-rare, and yet a great majority of the meat is well above that temperature; only the inner core is where we wanted it. We’re understandably disappointed. To heck with this roasting business, we say.

Roast Cutaways

But think about the heat for a minute. Cooking anything is a matter of bringing two environments into equilibrium with each other, right? And those outer layers of the meat are going to reach this equilibrium quicker than the inner portions, right? So if we want the majority of the inner mass to reach a certain temperature (medium-rare), we need to work with a lower temperature to begin with. If the oven temp is 200° F the roast will take longer to cook, but a higher percentage of the meat will be done to our liking. But if, like me, you’re in it for the caramelized crust, this method will leave you cold. Oh sure, there will be some crustiness, but nothing to set you raging. To heck with this roasting business.

But wait: you can have your crust and pink meat too. Simply expose the roast to different temperatures at different stages of the cooking process. Here are two potential strategies for roasting beef and lamb.

Start the roast in a 500° F oven, and once a crust has formed, drop the temperature to 200° F and cook until done. This is a variation on the method most often seen in cookbooks. The instructions usually begin with “sear meat on all sides over high heat.” As far as I’m concerned that’s an added step that neither the cook nor the to-be-cooked needs. If the oven’s hot enough, the sear will happen on its own. The only problem here is that meats that meet high heat right from the get-go tend to lose more moisture than those that heated up slowly, which leads us to:

300° F is the minimum temp recommended by the USDA. I still stand by 200° for culinary reasons, but read cleanliness is Next to...before you do.

Start the roast in a 200° F oven, and once the interior hits 10° below your target temperature, remove and cover lightly with foil. Crank the heat up, and when the oven reaches 500° F place the roast back in the oven and cook until a golden brown, delicious crust has formed.

Roasts don’t care about time. They’re not trying to catch a train. So forget the clock and use your thermometer. Traditional meat thermometers are hard to read, and their spikelike probes are better suited to pitching tents. Get yourself a digital thermometer with a probe that attaches with a length of wire. Stick this into the roast (see illustration, opposite) and set the thermometer’s alarm to go off at the target temperature. No mysteries, no weight/time calculations.

MY SEARCH FOR A PERFECT PLACE TO ROAST

Let me get something off my chest: you can’t roast in a grill. You can cook a roast (noun) in a grill via indirect heat, but I still don’t consider it roasting because roasting requires even heat from all directions, which no grill can do. The real