What is the difference between bake, grill, and roast?

Baking and roasting both refer to a dry cooking method where hot air conveys heat to the food to cook it. It
is the typical cooking method in a home oven.

With the turkey, above, notice that most of the turkey is exposed directly to the hot air in the oven. Only the
top of the cakes is directly exposed to air, but the air heats the pans as well.
The difference between roasting a turkey and baking a cake is more about what you’re cooking and less
about how you’re cooking it. Typically, roasting refers to cooking meat and baking refers to cooking dough
or batter-based goods. But not always. You roast a whole chicken but bake cut up pieces of a chicken, like
the thighs or breasts. Language is funny.

Grilling, and its sister broiling, are also dry cooking methods, but they rely primarily on radiative heating
rather than hot air. Grilling is usually done over some sort of fire; and yes the air gets hot, but the infrared
radiation from the fire does most of the work.

The hot coals are radiating heat directly to the food on the grill above. This is why you need to turn grilled
foods over during cooking. Only one side is really being cooked, as opposed to roasting, where the food is
cooked evenly all around (pretty much).

Broiling is like grilling turned upside down. The heat comes from above.

With grilling, any fat from the food drips onto the heat source, causing flameups. With broiling, the fat drips
away from the heat and is less likely to flame up.

But…it still definitely can if you are not careful. I had a scary experience recently removing a pan from my
oven. I had let it get too hot and fat was smoking. As it hit the fresh air outside it oven, it burst into flame. I
managed to shove the pan back into the oven, closed the door, turned off the heat, and managed not to set
off my smoke alarms or burn my house down.

You didn’t ask about other cooking methods, but I hope you don’t mind if I talk about a couple of others.

Wet cooking methods probably bring to mind boiling and maybe steaming.
These are usually done on the stovetop or in the microwave (think steaming vegetables). But there is a wet
cooking method you can do in your oven, called braising.
You put food and a water-based liquid in a closed container in your oven. The closed container could be a
vessel with a lid, or it could be foil or parchment paper folded to seal the ingredients inside. Because there is
liquid, the temperature of the food is limited to the boiling point of water. Usually you use a fairly low heat
and a long cooking time.

Also, some dry cooking methods do involve immersing the ingredient in liquid. Just not something water-
based. Frying involves cooking in hot oil. The oil is liquid, but it can get much hotter than the boiling point
of water.
Poaching usually refers to cooking something in water that is much cooler than boiling; but there is also a
technique of oil poaching - cooking in oil that is cooler than the boiling point of water.

And then there is sous vide. Convection ovens. Smoking.