scott123

Joe, it sounds like you've got it all worked out, but if you haven't seen the tutorial on Understanding Stovetop Cookware, it's imo, the best place to learn about baking material thermodynamics. That's where I cut my teeth on the subject. It doesn't get into traditional baking stone materials, but the specs on these are pretty widely available, and, once you know the basics, the new numbers just plug right in.

Joe, steel will always have the same conductivity, regardless of the quantity/thickness of steel you might have. As you increase the thickness, you increase the thermal mass, and, as long as your oven shelves can handle it, more thermal mass is better. 16 x 16 x .5 steel plate is 36 lb. and 16 x 16 x .75 is 54 lb. I've come across quite a few oven shelves that would struggle with 54. Not yours obviously, but that's one of the reasons I recommend .5". Another reason is that, as you go thicker, both the price of the plate and the shipping charges increase- pretty dramatically. If you're fine with the extra weight/extra expense, then by all means, go thicker. As far as the overall dimensions go, it seems like a lot of home pizza bakers tend to have this strange fascination with small NY style pizzas- even if they're making them for a group. I can completely understand Neapolitan aficionados baking small pies, but the traditional diameter for NY style pizza is either 16" or 18"- any smaller and it really messes with the aesthetics as well as the cheese to crust proportions. Many NY slice places may have smaller pies on the menu, but no self respecting NYer would ever actually buy one. If you're not hungry enough for a large pie, you get slices. 18" is, imo, where NY style really shines. In a perfect pizza making world, everyone's oven would be at least 18" on all dimensions. Unfortunately a lot of ovens are smaller. Mine is barely 17" on the back wall to door dimension and it makes me very sad that I can't bake 18" pizzas. I generally recommend that people purchase as big a square stone as they can fit in their oven. Since most ovens are wider than deeper, this translates into have a stone touching the back wall and the front door. As long as the door closes, you're good. The gaps on the sides will provide plenty of air flow. When you're working with a peel, a bigger target is always better. It's easier to get a 16" pie on a 17" stone than a 16" one.

Mitch, it sounds like there was some sort of mixup and that we are both on the same page when it comes to balling, but I'm a little confused about the cordierite. Wasn't cordierite out of the running? My apologies for not being clearer, but 1" cordierite is a maybe at 550 (a pretty good maybe), but at 530, it's a definite no go. Here's a list of materials and the minimum temps required to hit that magic 4 minute NY style sweet spot 1/2" steel plate- 475 1 1/2" cordierite (commercial deck oven) 500 1 1/4" soapstone - 525 1" cordierite kiln shelves - 550 1 1/8" split firebrick - 600 1/2" cordierite (with feet/old stone/pampered chef, etc) - 625 1/2" dense quarry tiles* - 625 3/4" fibrament - 625 1/4" porous quarry tiles* - 650 *Quarry tiles can vary in composition (as can firebrick, but that varies less). So... 1" cordierite might give you 5 minutes, maybe, so that will give you an idea of the bump in quality from a faster baked pie, but you're going to want to do some sort of trick. I think the easiest and most suitable oven trick for a tiny temp bump would the to unclip the thermostat and relocate it on the shelf below the stone. That way you can put the stone close to the broiler and broil the heck out of it and the thermostat won't turn the broiler off too quickly. The broiler is very inefficient for the initial whole stone pre-heat, but after the bottom element has preheated the stone to the peak oven temp, as long as the thermostat is not in the line of sight, you can crank the broiler and rev up the stone a few extra degrees. In order to be effective, though, the stone has to be close to the broiler- no farther than 3". That can be kind of tight quarters to work with. Unlclipping the thermostat from it's mount is really simple. And as long as the thermostat is somewhere in the oven, the oven will never get hot enough to burn the house down. It's an easy way to get that 25 or 50 degree bump that you'll need with cordierite.

Cbread, like almost everything else in the breadmaking universe (hydration, yeast, kneading, fermentation time, salt), some conductivity is good, but a lot is counterproductive. Traditional cordierite baking stones have a conductivity of 3 W/(m·K), mild steel is around 50 W/(m·K) and Aluminum is 250 W/(m·K). As it is, a mild steel plate is conductive enough to transfer a small amount of energy to the ambient air when the oven door is opened- enough to lower the temperature of the stone a degree or two. When the ambient air hits aluminum, even thick aluminum, the temperature will plummet.

Mitch, I'm familiar with cleaning cycle hacks. Like I said before, though, while Varasano-ish approaches could end up being a safety hazard, there are ways to squeeze another 50 degrees out of your oven without any threat to the oven or the house. But if you've got the right stone, you can avoid all that silliness completely. 531 degrees is a little tight for soapstone. My oven goes to 560, but I pre-heat my soapstone slab to 530 so my broiler turns on during the bake. If I preheat the oven to 560, my broiler won't kick in and the top doesn't brown sufficiently. I guess you could crack the door, but the pizza will bake unevenly and you'll need to rotate it mid bake. I don't know where Sam got his soapstone from, but if you've got transportation and are willing to cross the Hudson, M. Teixeira (www.soapstones.com) has soapstone remnants for $10/sq. foot. That's the best price for remnants in all of the U.S.- by a very wide margin (I've priced soapstone for countless friends outside of this area). You have to be careful shopping for soapstone, though, as not all varieties are suitable for oven applications. As much as I like soapstone, though, I really think, with a 531 peak temp, you'll be much better off with steel plate. With 1/2" thick steel plate, you might be able to go as low as 475 and achieve a 4 minute bake. This place here seems to have the best prices on steel, although if you found a local metal supplier, you'll save a lot on shipping. http://www.onlinemetalstore.com/items/A36_Hot_Rolled_Steel_Plate.cfm Both soapstone and 1/2 plate are heavy guys. With all that mass they store a ton of energy, but the weight also makes them very expensive to ship. Re; re-balling. Are you certain Varasano recommends it? I found this on his site (bold mine): I just saw a photo of the inside of his Atlanta pizzeria last week and he's still using glad containers for individual dough proofing. As far as Reinhart goes... well... there's no one on this planet that I revere more when it comes to bread knowledge, but with pizza... he just doesn't get it. The bubbles formed during extended fermentation are doughmaking treasure. The last thing you want to do is deflate the dough by re-balling so close to the form. In addition, you activate the gluten and end up with a skin that fights you during forming and a potentially tough crust. Extremely slack doughs (75%+ hydration) sometimes need a little more gluten development on the back end, but even then you want at least 3 hours between the re-ball and the form. This isn't some far out or controversial topic here. Every NY style pizzeria on this planet mixes the dough, balls it, then proofs the dough balls individually. For Reinhart/CI to be unaware of this completely ubiquitous practice shows how clueless/out of touch they really are.

Mitch, although the recipe you're working with has given you good results up until now, as far as pizza recipes go, it leaves a lot to be desired. While 40-70 seconds total processing time is pushing the gluten development envelope for cold fermented dough and balling just prior to forming is a massive pizzamaking no no, the true Achilles heel of this recipe is the extended baking time/one size fits all thermodynamics. Magazines like CI and authors like Reinhart perpetuate this belief that anyone can make great pizza with any equipment as long as they have the right recipe. This is complete and utter garbage. Variations in stone thickness/materials/thermal mass/conductivity all produce different baking times. A 10 minute pizza will never have the oven spring of a 4 minute pie. No offense, but a 7.5 minute pie might, on the outside look mouthwatering and the crumb might appear relatively open, but it won't be as open as if it were baked for 4 minutes. Time is the enemy to good oven spring/great pizza. I spoke with Andrew Janigian, the author of the CI piece, about thermodynamics while he was researching the article, and, while he agreed with what I was saying, his hands were basically tied by editors that wanted to appeal to the widest number of readers. Since mediocre pizza, like mediocre sex, is still pretty good, I'm sure there are scores of CI readers that are happy with the results they're seeing from this recipe. I am deeply saddened, though, that CI, with their, imo, smarter than average membership, had the opportunity to push the pizzamaking knowledge envelope further than it's ever gone in a mainstream publication, but, instead, catered to a very small percentage of their readership who are uncomfortable ordering merchandise online or going through the trouble of finding hard to source materials locally. Anyway, back to your oven spring issue. Basically you're using an equipment-agnostic process that isn't optimized for volume and adding an anti-oven spring ingredient. The bran in the whole wheat has sharp edges that slice through the gluten framework whenever the dough is manipulated, which, in turn, produces a denser end product. I've never tested this myself personally, but I believe that whole wheat flour with a finer grind will produce a crust with bigger voids. I would give a coffee/spice grinder a shot, making sure to monitor the temperature closely so as to not overheat the flour. If you can, going with a higher protein flour should also help a little bit. If, say, you're using 12%ish flour (KABF), then track down some 14% protein from a restaurant supplier. And, although more protein helps, the type of protein matters. Imo, vital wheat gluten is not the solution to your problem. VWG is damaged gluten and never achieves the full extensibility of the virgin product. It will give you increased chewiness, if that's what you're looking for, but I wouldn't depend on it for volume. This may not be something you want to hear during a cleanse, but bromated flour is a proven oven spring enhancer. The parts per million in which it's added to flour and parts per billion that end up in the final product make it harmless, though. The added volume may not be all that dramatic with bromated flour, but when you're working with whole wheat, every little bit helps. Higher protein bread flour, bromate and a more finely ground WW flour are just a drop in the oven spring bucket when compared to the effects of improved oven thermodynamics. When water converts to steam, it expands 1600 times. The goal with pizza is to generate as much steam expansion in the shortest time possible with high heat and thick, conductive materials. If you really want to send your crust soaring (with or without WW), get a thicker more conductive stone and trim that baking time to as far as the style will take it (about 3-4 minutes for NY style). Sam Kinsey turned me on to soapstone a couple years back. From a perspective of conductivity and thermal mass, 1.25" soapstone slab completely conquers every stone in the retail market. Preheated to 550, it has no problem pumping out a 3 minute pizza. It can be hard to track down and expensive, though, and doesn't really provide enough conductivity for weaker (<525) ovens, so I've taken to recommending 1/2" steel plate. I've seen some half decent Heston Blumenthal inspired cast iron pan pies produced, but the gauge is just too thin to store enough energy. 1/2" steel plate is a cast iron pan pushed up to 11 There's also oven tricks and mods, and while those have quite a few devoted fans, I tend to feel a bit safer trimming bake times with thick conductive stones. Cordierite is the stone of choice for most commercial pizza ovens, and, while the 5/8" or less cordierite you see in retail baking stones (pampered chef, old stone, etc.) is pretty much worthless at 550 or below, as you increase the thickness to 1" your chances improve dramatically at hitting that magic 4 minute bake time mark. 1" cordierite kiln shelves can be found at local and online ceramic suppliers. Even if 1" cordierite doesn't doesn't quite cut it, you're still talking about a substantially easier oven mod. It's a lot easier/safer pushing an oven 50 degrees above it's peak temp than a 150 or more degree shove. Summing up, I recommend Balling BEFORE fermentation Kneading for less time (maybe 40 seconds total, not 40-70) 14% bread flour (All Trumps is the pizzeria favorite) Bromated flour Finer grind of WW flour but, most importantly, I highly recommend a thicker more conductive stone. In the land of the best NY style pies, it's a race against the clock- a race with no more formidable of an ally than the right stone- and no more formidable of an enemy than the wrong one.

Two major forces drive MSG fears. Xenophobia and puritanism. Historically, xenophobia was the bigger player. The Chinese restaurateur has always been fiercely stigmatized/marginalized, all the way back to their incredibly humble beginnings in mining camps in the old west. This stigma runs deep. Even today, when Chinese restaurants are brought up, people still joke about being surreptitiously fed dog and cat. The MSG 'syndrome' is just another facet of this malevolence. Throughout the last 50 years, a person may have gorged themselves with glutamate rich foods like tomatoes and cheese to no ill effect, but the Chinese restaurant meal was vilified because of it's (at the time) exotic and foreign perception. These days, thankfully, Chinese restaurant food is as American as apple pie. Goodbye (for the most part) xenophobia and hello, again, puritanical guilt and issues with pleasure. Quick, what's your favorite food? Ten bucks says that you just pictured something with glutamates. Open up an American high school yearbook and you will see a steady chorus of 'favorite food: pizza.' We don't just like umami, for those that approach food without hangups, we worship it. It's a huge part of the framework of mouthwatering foods that make us roll our eyes in the back of our head in semi-orgasmic bliss. Why wouldn't the puritanically influenced feel threatened by something so powerful? If it feels good, it must be bad. Look at the kind of verbiage you see with anti-MSG rhetoric. MSG isn't just bad for you, it's satanic. You're killing puppies by eating MSG. You're stealing from your grandmother. This hatred is nothing new. If you swap out MSG with alcohol, the vitriol reads a lot like a pre-prohibition temperance speech. The puritans have been fighting pleasure since washing up on these shores, and, if we let them, they'll be fighting it on board the starship enterprise. They live to rain on your parade. Puritanical MSG enmity also ties in with the new religion- environmentalism. While global warming 'sinners' are busy buying carbon credits to assuage their gaian guilt, any food with a scientific sounding name can be demonized as being 'unnatural.' Forget the fact that glutamates are perfectly natural (and even synthesized in our own bodies), for the neo-hippy putting on their pious earth revering visage, processed food is the new devil. Can you have too much of a good thing? Of course. They can keep creating cooler and cooler Dorito's by amping up the MSG from now until the cows come home, but it's not going to make them any tastier. It's an enhancer- it can't create deliciousness if there's nothing present to enhance. It's also, I think, important to look at the quantities of glutamates that make the foods we love so delicious and try to work within those parameters when doling out the MSG ourselves. Much like salt, there's a pretty fine line between just enough and too much. Reach for the smidgeon/pinch/dash measuring spoons, not the 1/4 teaspoon and up implements. Bottom line- Enjoy food. Enjoy life. And if anyone tells you that something is bad, please, take it with a huge grain of salt. And a smaller grain of msg

A gobi without onions is like a day without sunshine

http://www.amazon.com/Create-Indoor-Fountain-Compact-Reliable/dp/B001V6SAWM This adds more complexity and cost to the equation, but, something like this would certainly help with the egg issue.

No recipe here, but I do have a few observations relating to some of the better Aloo Gobi's I've had. Moisture Level I've had relatively dry aloo gobi's and relatively wet ones. I would say, without a doubt, that, if done well, the drier version wins every time. The potatoes really should have crisp edges (like french fries) and, with a wetter version, the potatoes tend to take on a boiled quality. Since dryer AGs are (imo) superior, I would think that the initial deep fry is the way to go. I'm guessing that your deep fry recipe, correct with the deep fry aspect, probably veered off path with the treatment of the onions. Which brings us to: Onion Coloration As with most great Punjabi cuisine, the onions should be well caramelized. Not simmered or fried, but slowly sweat in a thin layer with plenty of ghee or oil. The end result should be golden brown, and if the onion breaks down to a point where it's just a paste, that's fine too. Fat Some of the best aloo gobi's I've come across were on buffets. They were on a wide flat heated frying pan and would slowly sizzle for hours. This would take the potatoes and give them brown crunchy bits and it would take the onion spice mixture and give you little brown clumps of heaven. In order to fry, it would take a lot of fat, especially with cauliflower, since cauliflower, as it cooks, absorbs a ton of fat. And the cauliflower should cook. There's no al dente in good aloo gobi. Time Lastly, if you are going with deep fried veggies and separately caramelized onions/ginger, then once everything is combined, you're going to need some time to allow the flavors to permeate. I think a very low oven (perhaps 150) will give that slow sizzle I talked about earlier. If you want to add fresh cilantro and/or a pinch of garam masala, I'd do that before serving.

Joe, I've worked with vital wheat gluten for many years and I've come to the conclusion that it's pretty much useless. If you think about it, when you overknead dough and it goes lumpy and slack, there's really nothing you can do to repair the gluten. VWG is the same way. It's made by kneading dough, washing out the starch and then drying/chopping up what's left. This is about as damaged as you can get. It's still kind of rubbery, so it's great for adding chewiness to breads, but, for acquiring the attribute that means the most- volume, I don't think it's all that functional. I think your best bet is to purchase every local flour you can get your hands on and, using the same recipe/hydration every time, make dough with them. Take notes on what makes wet dough and what makes dry/stiff doughs. The one that absorbs the most water will be the winner. Also, for reference, see how the winner fares against the imported expensive stuff. If you're lucky, the disparity won't be too great. Also, try aging the local flour for a few months and see if that gives you better gluten development.

BadRabbit, do you still have the box/packing materials for the stone? If so, I would definitely bring it back. A good pizza stone is dependent on two qualities- thickness/thermal mass and conductivity. There's no material on the planet that could store enough heat to bake a puffy pizza crust with only a thickness of 1/4" or 3/8". Oven thermodynamics are, by a massive margin, the most important aspect of creating great pizza at home. You can have the best pizza recipe on the planet, but if your stone/oven doesn't have the properties to pump out a pie in less than 5 minutes, the crust will be dense and lack oven spring. It won't be inedible, but it will never stand up to the quality of pizza that you find at the nation's best pizzerias- and with the right stone/oven, it can. As far as getting great, 5 minutes or less pizza from a 500 degree oven... that's an especially difficult task. A great baking stone, such as soapstone, can make up for an oven's shortcomings, but that's pushing it. If you really want the best pizza possible, I'd consider one of two routes. 1. 1/2" steel plate. Heston Blumenthal is a big proponent of cast iron, but the ~1/8" thick inverted pans he recommends just don't have the necessary thermal mass. 1/2" is as thin as you'll want to go. Steel plate, though, will give you the necessary conductivity for a quick bake time at a low temp. It's so conductive, you might be able to get away with a 475 degree bake. 2. Oven mods. There's a lot of tried and true methods for safely pushing your peak oven temp a little bit higher. While I feel that the cut-the-lock oven cleaning cycle hackers are shortening the lives of their ovens by consistently exposing the internal wiring to radically intense temperatures, a bump of 100 degrees is harmless. With 600 degrees at your disposal, you can work with inexpensive, readily available cordierite kiln shelves. You can pick up a 17" x 17" x 1" cordierite kiln shelf for about $50 shipped.

Well, hydration and protein content play the largest role in gluten durability (imo), but fat's a fairly major player as well. Fat coats the protein molecules and prevents them from bonding, which, in turn mitigates gluten development. With a very high fat pastry dough, it might not even be possible to knead it long enough to inflict any palpable damage on the gluten. It's far better to use very weak pastry flour and methods that prevent gluten from forming in the first place (ice water, minimal handling, rests).

Kneading develops gluten, but, if kneaded excessively, kneading will break gluten down. As gluten breaks down, it will release trapped water, the dough will go slack and lose it's ability to keep it's shape. The torn gluten will result in a wet, lumpy dough, that, if baked, will have minimal volume. Damaged gluten is the kiss of death for great bread. The protein content of a flour, though, greatly impacts it's kneading durability. Stronger bread flours will break down far slower than weaker flours. Hydration also plays a role. When kneaded, wetter doughs stress the gluten less, resulting in slower gluten development at the start and slower gluten fragmentation as time passes. For instance, a 75% hydration 14% protein flour dough can easily handle 20 minutes of aggressive kneading without showing much signs of wear, while a 10% protein all purpose flour with 55% water will be pretty much be trashed in the same time. Just because strong bread flours break down slowly, though, doesn't mean that you want to knead them without care. Their water holding ability will peak in as little as 10 minutes of kneading. Once you've reached peak absorption, further kneading is only detrimental to final loaf volume and oven spring. If you're cold fermenting (recommended), which is a kneading equivalent in itself, you'll want to dial back that initial kneading time dramatically. This is why no knead breads are so successful at achieving great volume.

I use Frank's Red Hot Sauce for making chicken wings. For the most part, I love the flavor, but it has a tiny bit too much heat and too much salt. Is there any Mexican hot sauce that tastes like Frank's but with less salt?

The damage to dairy products caused by freezing is irreversible. Expanding ice crystals damage the protein framework and some of the emulsion is lost. It can't be re-emsulified. It's similar to the damage one finds with freezing meat. Once the cells are ruptured and the meat gives up some of it's water, there's no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Frozen cream will always be impaired. There are mitigating factors, though, that dictate the extent of the impairment. Stabilizers, such as gums, will lower the freezing point and decrease ice crystal size. Ice crystal size can also be kept in check with faster freezing. Context plays a large role in detecting impairment. Consuming the cream straight, in, say, something like strawberries and cream, will make the impairment much more noticeable than in ganache. I would venture to say that unless you told your average person that the cream had been frozen, most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference. At the same time, though, most people will freeze a beautiful rib eye steak without blinking an eye. As far as shelf life goes, any loss in emulsion results in greater water activity, and water activity hastens spoilage. Ganache tends to be pretty sturdy stuff, though, so I don't think the loss in shelf life will be that dramatic. And, I'm not sure if this helps you, but, as long as a container hasn't been opened, cream, especially the organic brands of cream which are usually ultra pasteurized, will last far longer than it's expiration date. I frequently have opened cartons of cream spoil within weeks- long before the expiration date, while unopened cartons are flawless two months (and longer) past the date.

+1 Even though canned pumpkin is a bit of a crap shoot, it's far less of a gamble than processing a whole pumpkin yourself. With fresh pumpkins, you really have to know your stuff AND you have to get lucky or you're talking serious flavor deprivation. With canned pumpkin, the flavor is usually there. As far as the recipe goes, don't be stingy with the fat. There's lots of variations on pumpkin bread, but, the best, by far is when it's treated like pound cake. In other words, if a recipe doesn't have a pound of butter (or at least a half a cup), find another.

Since there are no authoritative sources on Kimchi and other lactic acid fermented foods such as Indian pickles, anecdotal information is a lot better than none. This isn't like a restaurateur requesting information about the bacteria danger zone in an online forum. The government publishes scores of data relating to the danger zone. This is a subject without any governmental guidelines whatsoever. Ask any Korean about the safety of Kimchi and they'd laugh in your face. There also seems to be a very long safety record for Indian pickles. Garlic pickles might be a concern, depending on how they're made, but telling people only to refer to government literature and not ask other chefs about it is incredibly shortsighted in my opinion. Yes, it does. This page here does an excellent job of summing up the safety of Kimchi: http://www.eatingoffthefoodgrid.com/a/hm_kimchi.htm Lactobacillus grows naturally on cabbage leaves, making cabbage especially suitable for error proof fermentation. Garlic, though, is a different story- garlic minus air plus room temp- hello botulism. Could you post your recipe?

First of all, I've frozen regular chocolate chip cookies in the past and eaten them straight from the freezer and they weren't really frozen solid. I don't think the measures you take need to be too drastic to obtain a softer product. The smaller the molecule, the better it is at depressing the freezing point. Monosaccharides (glucose, fructose) are superior in this regard to disaccharides. Invert sugar isn't completely inverted. In order to maximize the freezing point depression in your cookies, you should invert the sugars completely and replace the sugar in the recipe with equal parts glucose and fructose (by weight, since the crystal sizes vary). You can create a chewier end product with slightly more freezing point depression by subbing some of the fructose with glucose. Just remember to use about twice as much glucose as it's half as sweet. The other adjustment I'd make would be to slightly increase the salt. The salt will help with freezing point depression, and, since taste buds have problems detecting flavors of cold/frozen foods, the salt should help in this regard. The one area that's going to prove especially difficult is the chocolate chips. There's really very little that you can do to prevent them from tasting waxy and flavorless when frozen. You could try making something like a glucose/fructose and/or alcohol enhanced ganache and use that for chips, but I'm not really sure how it's going to bake. Ice cream manufacturers seem to have cracked the frozen yet flavorful chocolate code (such as Ben and Jerry's coffee heath bar crunch), but that's some seriously daunting chemistry there.

I agree. To me, ice cream is science while these guys are sort of mad scientists/tinkerers. If you had the head of Breyer's R&D give a talk to every chef/food personality on the planet, I don't think there would be a single person who'd understand what he/she was talking about. Same thing for the head of R&D at Pepperidge Farm bread. Bread is unbelievably technically complex.

I treat all raw meat like hazardous waste. If the USDA can show me irrefutable proof that the supermarket chicken I'm buying was packed under pristine conditions, then sure, I'd stop rinsing chicken. Until then, though, I rinse.

Complete and utter hooey. There's no oil/food based coating on the planet that will survive 419 C (786 F). I wonder why

I make a lot of pizza at home, and, although I adore it, it's too hot to put on the oven and I'm still tracking down equipment for an outdoor pizza solution. In the meantime, I'd like to hit the road and have a great slice or two. And, it's got to be NY. Sure, I'll make it to A Mano and/or Ah'Pizz eventually and Star Tavern looks interesting, but that's not what I'm looking for now. I'm looking for that quintessential NY slice- done well. If I could find a place that did a cold fermented dough, that would be really nice, but I think that might be a bit of a pipe dream. Morris County preferably, but if it's highway accessible (such as off 80 in Clifton), I'll do that as well.

Iron frying pan (1/8" thick) heated to 600 deg. Distance from english muffin: 1" Duration: 4 minutes There you have it. Browning. And this was with just the heat of the 1/8" pan. No heat coming from the bottom oven burner OR heat coming from a pre-heated hearth. I was putting my hand above the frying pan every minute or so and noticed that it lost a lot of it's punch pretty quickly. That lost of heat won't happen as quickly with a 1/2" steel slab. With a 1/2" steel slab, a bottom burner at full blast and a stone hearth heated to the same temp, I expect more than enough browning/charring for my needs.

But doesn't heat impact temperature? A body's ability to emit radiation depends entirely on it's surface temperature. It's surface temperature, in turn, is 'fed' by the energy stored in it's core traveling to it's cooler exterior- it's heat capacity. If, for instance, you take a little piece of steel and a larger piece of steel, ten times it's weight (with about the same surface area), and heat both until glowing red, when the heat is turned off, the larger piece will glow longer. That longer glow relates to it's greater heat capacity, does it not? Even though, at 550 deg. f., the glow of the steel and brick isn't visible to the naked eye, it's still there. The steel should glow brighter for a shorter period of time than the firebrick, because it's surface temp will be bolstered by energy flowing faster from the core to the exterior. I know that as materials glow red, their radiative output increases dramatically, but I don't think it's that far fetched to theorize the possibility that sub glowing materials of sufficient heat and conductivity might put off enough radiation to brown bread. Let's say, for the sake of argument, I had a cube of aluminum weighing a ton that I was able to heat to 550. Could I toast a piece of bread 2" away? Being aluminum, it's going to lose heat very quickly, but, assuming I move incredibly fast to get the bread in place, would it toast? If one can store heat in thick materials for conductive purposes, can't one also store heat for radiative purposes as well?