Radiant Broiler: Fill & Download for Free

Red hot iron is about 700 degrees Centigrade, which is nearly 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. That is damned hot.The iron grid on even 100,000 BTU grills (char-broilers) never gets red hot. They’ll sear a steak in nothing flat, but a proper Pittsburgh/Black & Blue? That requires red hot iron.Back when I worked the station for a living, if an order for a black-and-blue came back, I’d tell the wait staff that it would be a while, but if the diner really wanted it, that it could be done, just that it would take a while.The salamander (a type of radiant broiler) got emptied of other dishes, turned all of the way up, and an iron pan was placed inside. Eventually it got to a dull cherry red (which is at the bottom level of acceptability for the method) and I could then sear the steak appropriately (as ordered). Honestly, it was a pain in the ass and meant dedicating a high-volume and high-value cooker (the salamander) to a single item (things like finishing steaks, broiling fish, and others had to find other ways to get cooked) for the time it took to get that iron glowing and then a few minutes to return it back to its regularly scheduled programming.It’s difficult because kitchens are not foundries. They’ve got heat sources, but that particular order requires another level of heat entirely. Some kitchens may have the hardware, many may not.You might be able to get away with a steak dipped in clarified butter and then charred from the resulting flare-up on a char-broiler or a salamander, but the resulting char is different. Some folks can tell the difference between beef charcoal with or without butter tones.

Cooking a steak “at a temperature” confuses a few ideas in the physics of cooking.But I think the important distinction here is to separate the physics of conduction cooking (a pan or griddle), convection cooking (a regular oven), and radiant cooking (a grill or broiler). This steakhouse looks like it uses a broiler, which is a kind of radiant cooking. The amount of cooking power is only vaguely related to the measurable temperature of anything.For example, a gas flame burns at up to 3,500°F, but most of that energy goes into heating exhaust gasses that dissipate. Very little radiant heat is delivered by that dim blue flame. The simple fact that you can hold your hand a few inches to the side of a propane torch flame demonstrates this.Glowing charcoal maxes out at roughly 1500°F LOWER than the temperature of a gas torch / grill / broiler flame—but can deliver around double the radiant energy.The infrared heating elements in a commercial infra red broiler work more like glowing coals than like fire; they’re designed to efficiently translate the power input to radiant heat that will be absorbed by food.But there’s no simple temperature measurement that will tell you the power density of that radiant heat source. The relevant number will be something along the lines of watts per square centimeter.The extremely high radiant energy of a commercial broiler is mostly useful for expediency. You don’t need it to cook a good steak. Steakhouses use it for kicking out big fat steaks all day long; they need an efficient, assembly line approach.It’s not likely done this way at most Michelin-starred restaurants. Chef Alain Ducasse, for example, uses a pan method, which has the potential to make a better steak than you’ll get at a steakhouse that advertises in airline magazines. But the process takes over 30 minutes, so chef will be asking you for some serious money.If you’re cooking at home, though, or if steak is a smaller part of your menu, you can forgo commercial IR broiler. There are many ways to make a delicious steak, if you’re starting with delicious steak.Edited to add: a couple of people have mentioned cooking steak sous-vide, which involve a much longer, gentler cook, typically at around 1–2°F higher than your desired internal coking temperature of the meat. This would be followed by a quick, high-heat sear, which gives you nice Maillard reaction browning on the outside, or even a bit of a crust, without overcooking the interior.This is my preferred method, especially if I’ve got very high quality meat, and can get get it cut to my specifications—1.5″ thick is about ideal.In this case, having a lot of heat for the final browning is helpful. A commercial IR broiler will do the trick, but so will a heavy pan or griddle (preheated screaming hot, with generous amounts of refined oil thrown in right before the meat), or even a charcoal grill (get the coals hot enough to incinerate anything that’s left on for over 3 minutes). Some chefs actually use a deep fryer (no breading!)I think a pan or griddle or pro broiler are the easiest. If you don’t have a lot of BTUs at your disposal, there are two tricks that can get you a nice sear without overcooking anything: one is to pre-sear the meat in addition to post-searing it. This means lightly brown it before the sous-vide cook, and then finish searing it after. You’ll find the 2nd sear goes much faster. Some blind taste testing done at The International Culinary Center's Tech 'N Stuff Blog found this to produce slightly superior flavor as well. Another is to brush the meat right before the final sear with a Maiilard reaction enhancer. This is 1:5 ratio (by weight) of baking soda and dextrose. If you don’t have dextrose, you can use any reducing sugar, including fructose, honey, glucose syrup, or corn syrup. Table sugar won’t work. If you use this, the meat will brown VERY quickly, and you can burn the exterior if you’re not careful.

Most restaurants that sell a fair few steaks will use grills, griddles, broilers etc. instead of pans for searing, and finish the meat in an oven, Hold-o-Mat or something like that.Apart from that, we'll use whatever the restaurant has available. Cast iron is relatively rare around these parts, mainly because it tends to be fairly expensive and quite heavy.Wrought iron / forged steel is fairly common, and works perfectly well on a powerful enough burner. Heavy-ish (usually coated or lined in some way) cast aluminium and stainless steel are pretty common. Both work absolutely adequately if they're maintained properly.Thing is, for searing a steak, the thing that matters is getting lots of heat into the meat quickly. On a fairly aenemic burner, like most household ranges have, a heavy pan is important because it stores a fair bit of heat. On a full-grown commercial range, the burner can pump enough energy into the pan to make that fairly unimportant.If you want to sear lots of steaks, you'll want something with a lot more heat capacity than even a large, heavy, cast-iron pan. Like, say, a 3–8KW, 4cm strong electric griddle / plancha. Or something that emits a metric shit-tonne of radiant heat, like a broiler or grill.