Rescues · TO BROIL
Smoking heavily and tasting acrid.
Why it happens
Fat dripping onto the hot pan below and burning. Use a rack over a tray with a little water in it.
Recovering it
A lightly over-browned top can be scraped or simply presented as intended — a dark blister on a gratin is not a fault. Anything genuinely burnt under a broiler is burnt through, because there was never much depth involved. If the middle is cold, cover with foil and move it to a moderate oven; the top has all the colour it needs and now only the interior requires time.
The mechanism
A broiler is a grill turned upside down: almost all the energy arrives as radiation from directly above, and radiant intensity falls off sharply with distance. That relationship is the whole control mechanism — moving a tray from the top shelf to the middle roughly halves the heat reaching it, which is a far more useful adjustment than the on/off dial most broilers offer. Because the energy is so concentrated at the surface and so weak by the time it reaches the interior, broiling cooks the outside far faster than the inside. That makes it excellent for finishing something already cooked, for melting and browning a topping, or for blistering pepper skins, and unreliable for cooking anything thick from raw. There is no thermal buffer, so the window between browned and burnt is measured in seconds.
The full TO BROIL lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.