Why food goes from almost done to overdone so quickly on the grill - Modernist Cuisine

Why food goes from almost done to overdone so quickly on the grill

MCMay 16, 2013

BY W. WAYT GIBBS
Associated Press

Ever tried toasting hamburger buns on a grill? It takes uncanny timing to achieve an even medium brown across the buns. Typically, they remain white for what seems like far too long. Then it’s as if time accelerates, and they blow past toasted to burnt in the time it takes to flip the burgers.

Barbeque_Hamburger Cutaway_VQ6B8473 With LAYERS

The same phenomenon is at work when you toast a marshmallow over a campfire: wait and turn, wait and turn… then brown, black and — poof! — it’s aflame. The problem is perhaps most acute when cooking shiny-skinned fish on a grill or under a broiler. Once the skin turns from silver to brown, the heat pours into the fillet, and the window of opportunity for perfect doneness slams shut with amazing speed.

Anytime you cook light-colored food with high heat, inattention is a recipe for disaster. But the physics here is pretty simple, and once you understand it you can use several methods to improve your odds of making that perfectly toasted bun, golden half-melted marshmallow, or juicy grilled fillet.

At high temperatures — about 400 F (200 C) and up — a substantial part of the heat that reaches the food arrives in the form of infrared light waves rather than via hot air or steam. The higher the temperature, the bigger the part that radiant heat plays in cooking. But this form of heat interacts with color in a profound way.

The bottom of a hamburger bun looks white because it reflects most of the visible light that hits it, and the same is true for infrared heat rays. There is a reason that white cars are popular in Phoenix — they stay cooler in the sunshine, which is full of infrared radiation.

A silvery, mirror-like fish skin is even more reflective than a white car. About 90 percent of the radiant heat striking it simply bounces away. Because only around 10 percent of the energy sinks in and warms the fish, cooking initially creeps along slowly but steadily.

That changes rapidly, however, as soon as the food gets hot enough to brown. It’s like changing from a white shirt to a black shirt on a sunny summer day. As the food darkens, that 10 percent of energy absorbed rises by leaps and bounds, and the temperature at the surface of the food soars.

So browning accelerates, which increases heat absorption, which boosts the temperature; it’s a vicious circle. By the time you can get a spatula under the fillet to flip it over, it may be almost black, reflecting just 10 percent of the heat and sucking in 90 percent.

There are at least three ways around this problem. The simplest is to stare, hawk-like, at the food and lower or remove the heat as soon as browning starts. That works fine for marshmallows but is not always practical in the kitchen or backyard barbecue.

In some cases, you can darken the color of the food at the start, for example by slathering it with a dark sauce or searing it in a very hot skillet before putting it on the grill. This is a way to make a fish steak cook more like a beef steak, which is fairly dark even when raw and so doesn’t experience such a dramatic shift in heat absorption. This method generally shortens the cooking time.

Finally, try piling other ingredients, such as sliced onions or zucchini, between the food and the coals or the broiler element to moderate the intensity of the radiant heat. Cooking times will lengthen — and you may end up having to toss out the sacrificial buffer ingredients if they get charred — but that window of opportunity will stay open longer.

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Photo credit: Ryan Matthew Smith / Modernist Cuisine, LLC


5 Responses to “Why food goes from almost done to overdone so quickly on the grill”

  1. John Trustman

    Why chefs are taught “high heat to sear, low heat to cook”. It’s only a problem for the newbs on the grill… It’s like VB folks, just ‘cuz yo can doesn’t mean you should.

  2. Chris Hubing

    I am just a simple foodie, but I built a Sous Vide machine from components I already had. It never disappoints. I’ve done lobster, chicken wings, rib eye, t-bone, salmon, pork ribs and mahi mahi each at the temps prescribed by Modernist Cuisine and for their respective times. Then, finished the food as they recommended… amazing results. And the unattended cooking time (especially in the case of something like ribs) is a real win. Well, I amend that statement, the real win is the amazing results. I’m a Sous Vide convert.

  3. Steve D

    Interesting. I’ve observed that food tends to brown quickly after it starts to go golden, but I always assumed it was due to moisture loss (that is, the water content keeps the temperature pegged at 100C, once it starts to brown, that moisture is gone.)