What Is Broiling?
Broiling is cooking with direct, high heat from above in your oven. The broiler element heats to 500-550°F, cooking food quickly through radiant heat. It's like an upside-down grill. Use it for melting cheese, browning casserole tops, cooking thin cuts of meat, and adding char to vegetables. Food is placed 3-6 inches from the element.
Key Takeaways
- While baking surrounds food with moderate heat, broiling blasts heat from a single direction—the top.
- Watch food constantly under the broiler—it goes from perfect to burnt in seconds.
- Don't use glass pans under the broiler—they can shatter from intense heat.
Explanation
While baking surrounds food with moderate heat, broiling blasts heat from a single direction—the top. The intense radiant heat cooks the surface quickly, creating browning and char without heating the entire oven or cooking food through slowly. It's the fastest way to brown or caramelize surfaces.
Most ovens have a dedicated broiler element at the top of the oven cavity. Some have a separate broiler drawer below the main oven. Set the oven to "broil" (not a temperature), position the oven rack based on desired intensity, and leave the oven door slightly ajar if your oven manual recommends it (varies by model).
Broiling works best for: finishing dishes (melting cheese, browning bread crumb toppings), cooking thin steaks and fish fillets, charring peppers and tomatoes, and making quick toast. It's too intense for thick cuts that need to cook through—they'd burn outside before cooking inside.
Rack position controls the intensity of broiling. Placing food 2-3 inches from the element gives maximum sear for quick-cooking items like thin fish fillets (3-5 minutes per side) or melting cheese on French onion soup (2-3 minutes). Moving the rack to 5-6 inches from the element reduces intensity, allowing thicker items like 1-inch steaks to develop a crust while cooking to medium-rare (about 6-8 minutes per side). Most ovens only have high and low broil settings, so rack placement is your primary control for fine-tuning.
Broiling differs from grilling in more than just direction. Grills cook from below with convective heat rising through grates, allowing fat to drip away and creating smoke flavor. Broilers cook from above with purely radiant heat, and fat collects in the pan below. This makes broiling cleaner and more predictable, but it does not produce the smoky char that direct flame grilling provides. In British English, what Americans call broiling is actually called grilling, which adds to the confusion.
Things to Know
- Watch food constantly under the broiler—it goes from perfect to burnt in seconds.
- Don't use glass pans under the broiler—they can shatter from intense heat.
- Position fatty foods lower to reduce splatter and smoke.
- Broiler pans have slotted tops to drain fat away from heat, reducing smoke.
- Convection broil (available in some ovens) adds fan-circulated air to the radiant heat, cooking about 25% faster and more evenly than standard broil.