[Sca-cooks] A Question of Spit Roasting....

[Darren Gasser]

sjk3 at cornell.edu wrote:
> I would have thought direct heat would have meant contact between the
> food and heat source, and anything else was indirect.  There isn't
> "nothing" between heat and food in your definition of "direct heat"
> (air isn't nothing), though its true there is nothing solid.

I'm not a veteran of CIA or Escoffier by any means, so don't assume anything
I say is remotely authoritative :)

My understanding of direct vs. indirect is that indirect involves
redistribution of the heat, either through a pan, oven walls, or anything
else that reflects or conducts heat in such a way that the energy is hitting
the food from multiple directions.  Direct heat involves transmission in one
mostly uninterrupted path between source and target.

>Also, the difference (I thought) between broiling and grilling was the
> order of the parts
> involved:
>
> broiling:
> heat
> food
> pan
>
> grilling:
> food
> pan
> heat

Grilling often doesn't involve a pan at all, in the sense a grill grate
doesn't really act much like one.  I don't know if there's a canonical
definition anywhere for these terms, but I've always thought the distinction
was one happens indoors and one outdoors, more or less.

> And I still don't know what to call cooking in an oven as opposed to
> over or beside a fire/coals.

I'll try and remember to get out some of the references tonight and see if
there are more specific terms for this, but most names for techniques are
reliant more on the method of heat transmission and moisture content than
they are on the fuel source.  For example, it's still common in many places
to use a clay or brick oven with wood or coal for fuel, which would tend to
confuse the issue.

-Lorenz