How do bake and broil settings differ?

Kitchen ovens typically have two settings: bake and broil. What's the difference between the two? Explore the science behind baking and broiling in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com
where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question.
In a kitchen oven, what's the difference between the bake
setting and the broil setting? Baking and broiling are completely

(00:23):
different ways to cook food. In baking, you're trying to
heat food by surrounding the food with hot air. In broiling,
you're trying to heat food using infrared radiation. Infrared radiation,
especially at close range, has a tendency to char things,
which is great when you're trying to cook steaks, while
hot air does not have that tendency, which is great

(00:46):
for cakes. In a normal kitchen oven, what most people
are interested in is baking things like cakes or biscuits.
In the ideal case, what baking means is immersing the
object to be cooked in an environment of still hot air.
So if you're baking a cake in the direction say

(01:06):
bake at three fifty degrees for twenty minutes, then ideally
you would place the cake in a box or an
oven that contains still air at a constant temperature of
three fifty degrees. There would be little or no infrared
radiation to brown or char at the top of the cake. This,
by the way, is why you preheat an oven. The

(01:28):
idea is to get all of the air in the
oven up to the proper temperature so the burner doesn't
have to come on very often or for very long.
That keeps the infrared radiation from the burner to a minimum.
That also explains why only the lower burner comes on
during baking. The radiation that does get generated by the
burner hits the pan rather than the top of the cake.

(01:51):
When you want to grill a steak, what you should
use is a barbecue grill outside. A barbecue grill cooks
with infrared radiation je rated by hot coals beneath the food.
If you don't have a barbecue, or if it's raining outside,
you can broil the steak in your oven. When you
set the oven on its broil setting, the oven turns

(02:12):
on its top burner and leaves it on. This creates
lots of infrared radiation above the food, so you put
your steak in a broiling pan to catch the juice,
and then place the steak very close to the top burner. Normally,
you'll leave the door of the oven slightly open while
you're broiling. The broiling burner is an upside down barbecue

(02:34):
with the burner replacing the coals. Broiling generally creates a
huge mess inside the oven from all the splattering, as
well as tons of smoke outside the oven and therefore
in your kitchen, which is why most people use the
grill outside instead of the ovens broiler. Be sure to
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(02:57):
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