Charred & Scruffed: Bold New Techniques for Explosive Flavor on and Off the Grill

“The best grilling book on the market.”
—GQ

With Charred & Scruffed, bestselling cookbook author and acclaimed chef Adam Perry Lang employs his extensive culinary background to refine and concentrate the flavors and textures of barbecue and reimagine its possibilities.

Adam's new techniques, from roughing up meat and vegetables ("scruffing") to cooking directly on hot coals ("clinching") to constantly turning and moving the meat while cooking ("hot potato"), produce crust formation and layers of flavor, while his board dressings and finishing salts build upon delicious meat juices, and his "fork finishers"—like cranberry, hatch chile, and mango "spackles"—provide an intensely flavorful, concentrated end note.

Meanwhile, side dishes such as Creamed Spinach with Steeped and Smoked Garlic Confit, Scruffed Carbonara Potatoes, and Charred Radicchio with Sweet-and-Sticky Balsamic and Bacon, far from afterthoughts, provide exciting contrast and synergy with the "mains."

Peter Kaminsky is the author and coauthor of many books, including Pig Perfect, Culinary Intelligence, and Green Fire, Seven Fires, and Mallmann on Fire (with Francis Mallmann). He is a longtime contributor to Food & Wine and a former columnist for the New York Times and New York magazine. He was managing editor of National Lampoon. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


After Adam Perry Lang graduated with distinction from the Culinary Institute of America and worked his way through the kitchens of top‑rated French restaurants including Le Cirque and Daniel in New York City and Restaurant Guy Savoy in France, he left his pursuit of reviewers’ stars to open his first restaurant, Daisy May’s BBQ in New York City, and became a pioneer in urban barbecue. His first book, Serious Barbecue, was a New York Times bestseller. Lang lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is the chef/owner of APL, a contemporary steak house.