The Art of Broiling

[rooftop1000]

broiler = garlic bread...other than that I wont sit on the kitchen floor to cook

gas stove broiler on the bottom

tracey

[Torrilin]

Rehovot, that's how my broiler is set up. We've got an old (tho not old enough for my taste, has electric ignition) Hotpoint home gas range. The broiler is also gas, so it's fairly powerful and useful within its limits. It *can* get a good sear on meat, tho it's not powerful enough to get a good sear on all sides while leaving the interior rare. I find it works best for searing a beef tritip. It does a wonderful job on toasting bread or making openfaced toasted cheese sandwiches, but you have to watch it like a hawk. If you're not careful, the bread incinerates. It is not tasty or pleasant to have to extinguish your toast before you eat it. I wouldn't try creme brulee in it. I'm a lot more comfortable with the blowtorch method there, because you can see what you're doing.

My biggest concern with it is it can be awkward to get the broiler pan out of the broiler. Make sure you have good quality oven mitts with no holes, because pretty much anything else is risking burns.

As far as the math goes, my broiler's heat source is best modelled as a loop, not a point or a plane, and you can *see* that the squared behavior applies when toasting large quantities of bread. And you don't necessarily have the option of moving the food a given percentage closer with a home broiler. The food may be thick enough that moving it that close causes it to touch the heating element, or the broiler may not have sufficient adjustment options to let you move food that close to it.

Emily

[Sony]

I have an electric stove, so I have a greater range in the ditance from which I can space the rack from the coil. My favorite uses for the broil function are:

-crisping flour tortillas without oil (just leave on one side till brown and flip to do the same on the other side- sometimes it'll get all bubbled, which I just love )

-reheating roast chicken, skin side up, so the skin re-crisps. So long as it's far enough away from the element, it can heat all the way through before the skin incinerates-probably about a good six inches (Sometimes the leftover chicken seems even tastier to me because I can really get the skin good and crunchy all the way around!)

-when I didn't have a toaster (read: no counter space) the broiler because a makeshift toaster (not quite "set it and forget it", but it worked quite well )

[jsolomon]

Actually, a lot of the difference between the professional models and the home use ones are in how the energy is distributed through the electromagnetic spectrum, not how it radiates throughout the spectrum.

See, the thing is, you don't want to waste your energy wasting energy, i.e. you want the photons you emit to do a better job of cooking your meat. The professional models make sure that they do that. Generally, the consumer level broilers are regular burners pressed into dual service, so the engineers choose to not broil nearly so well.

For some more math-based information, check out Wikipedia's article on Blackbody Radiation, the shoehorn of quantum mechanics.

Edited April 24, 2006 by jsolomon (log)