Butter Chicken

The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes

• The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
• The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
• Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
• The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
• What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.

Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.

Charring over open flame 31 recipes

• The surface met the fiercest heat available (flame, a broiler, or bare hot metal) with nothing between them, and it shows as true blistering and blackening rather than gentle, even browning.
• The char matches the surface’s fate: where it will be eaten, black sits in patches over deep colour with every face having had its turn, and where the skin is to be peeled away, it may go to an even black, because the char there works on the flesh below and then leaves with the skin.
• It smells of smoke and toasted surface with no acrid edge that stings the nose: acrid means it went past, and acrid does not cook out.
• Just under the char it is cooked (softened, steaming, collapsed, or puffed, whichever the dish wants) because the flame did the surface and the trapped heat did the rest.
• A taste carries the smoke without mouthfuls of ash: the black that flakes away is a seasoning, not a layer.

Where it goes wrong It was left on one face too long or held too close, so one side carbonised to ash while the rest stayed raw, and the smell turned acrid, which follows the dish through every later step and cannot be seasoned away.