The broiler: heat from above

On the Path of Study: Semester 2: Stocks, Soups & the Simmer, Semester 9: Seafood Mastery

From the Lexicon, Salamander, Broiler & Top-Down Fire

Heat from above: the finisher's station. The SALAMANDER (the pro's open-fronted overhead broiler, named for the fire-myth lizard): gratins bronzed to order, French onion soup's lid (the cheese-pull economy), glazes flashed, plates crisped and reheated seconds before the pass: it runs all service because top-down radiant heat finishes without re-cooking from below. The home BROILER is the same physics behind a worse door: preheat it seriously, rack close, food watched like a rival (the distance-and-attention tool: everything happens in 90-second windows), and use it for the technique wing's brûlée-adjacent jobs: melting, browning meringue, blistering peppers, finishing casseroles, faux-tandoor naan on a screaming steel. The mindset shift that unlocks it: the broiler is not an oven setting; it is an upside-down grill, and once you cook TO it (thin cuts, close racks, flipped once) it becomes the fastest cooking appliance in the house.

Read it in the Lexicon →

How to tell it is going right

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.

This technique, on camera Search films of the broiler: heat from above