The curiosity that fueled the experiments in Mr. McGee's first book is undiminished after 20 years, and his approach to cooking is still skeptical. He tries to take as little as possible for granted, asking at each step: Why am I doing this? Is there a better way? All this questioning has yielded conclusions, some more useful than others, and many of them heretical in culinary circles.

For example, although brining the turkey is now part of the Thanksgiving ritual for many cooks, Mr. McGee does not do it. "The bird does become juicier, but it's just absorbing tap water, not the true juices that make a bird flavorful," he said. "And the drippings become so salty that you can't use them." He says that his own experiments with turkey, though far from complete, show that drying the bird out, rather than infusing it with water, is more likely to make it flavorful and juicy with crisp skin. He unwraps his turkey a day or two before cooking, letting it air-dry in the refrigerator, and then cooks it at high temperature.

After our 13-pound bird had roasted for only an hour and half, the readings from four temperature probes attached to a Fluke 50 lab thermometer showed that the meat was perfectly done both in the thigh and the breast. "White meat and dark meat are completely different kinds of muscles in both birds and animals," Mr. McGee said. "White muscles store energy for sudden, rapid movements and dark ones for slow, sustained ones. That's why chickens, who only fly for a few seconds when they're startled, have white breasts, and ducks, who fly for long periods, have red ones."

But the skin was only golden, not as brown and crisp as we wanted. "Crispness is a matter of heating and dehydrating the proteins," Mr. McGee said, as he fired up an industrial-size blowtorch and began methodically stroking its blue flame over the turkey. Dissatisfied with the slow results, he switched to a heat gun, whose red-hot coils seemed to give a more concentrated heat. The skin turned from gold to clear and then to bronze, the juices visibly running out of it and through the turkey. "Caramelized has become a popular word since I wrote the first book," he said. "But everything browned is not caramelized."

Caramelization, he explained, is what happens to sugar -- simple sucrose molecules -- exposed to high heat. But the browning that takes place in savory foods like onions, potatoes, celery and turkey skin is a "Maillard reaction," the explosive meeting of a carbohydrate molecule (which may or may not be a sugar) and an amino acid in a hot, dry environment.

Maillard reactions take place when coffee or cocoa beans are roasted or when a bread crust turns brown. Mr. McGee said: "Maillard reactions contribute even more to the pleasures of eating than caramelization does. But of course it doesn't sound as good on a menu."

The alluring scent of Maillard reactions filled the kitchen as Mr. McGee's pie crust began to brown. Although it is almost impossible to do anything truly new in the kitchen -- as Mr. McGee notes, it often turns out that even the most complex flavor combinations were routinely used by Roman cooks -- his pie crust method seems revolutionary. "The goal of pie crust is to create thin, even layers of fat and flour," he said. "That's what makes them flaky. But the usual method isn't really optimal for that."