Before we start, I should point out I’m using the word “grill” in the British sense - a heating element at the top of the oven which radiates heat vertically downwards to cook food from above (said food is usually on a “grill tray” - a wire rack resting in a metal tray, allowing fat to run off). I think Americans would call this as a “broiler”.
Right, now we’ve sorted the terminology, here’s the question
Every electric grill I’ve ever used in the past has had settings for high, medium and low. Recipes (and packet foods) always state whether you should set the grill to high, medium or low. The “HML” system is pretty standardised.
Except on my oven, of course. Here’s a pic of the control panel (there are no other controls out of shot). The leftmost control is the “mode” dial; setting this to the last position activates the grill. So far, so good. However, there is no setting for grill temperature in the familiar HML way - instead, the temperature dial on the right is used to set the temperature in absoute degrees.
What I can’t find out is what settings on the temperature dial equate to high, medium and low for the purpose of following a recipe. RTFM, right? Well yeah - the manual helpfully states that I should set the dial “to the desired temperature” when grilling. Thanks for that.
I’ve coped so far by always setting the dial to 200C on the not very scientific principle that it’s in the middle of the dial, more or less, and hoping for the best. This seems to work OK, but it would be nice to be more accurate. So - are these things standardised? Does a medium setting always equal a particular temperature?
Electric broilers in this country default to the maximum temperature, which will be labelled as 500F but it’s really full power to the heating element. Real temperature control would be based on oven temperature not the element temperature, when the broiler does have temperature control it’s using some arbitrary reduction in power to the element to achieve that, certainly nothing consistent. When you begin to reduce the temperature in the broiler you don’t have any general guidelines, oven to oven the temperature of the element and amount of infra-red produced varies greatly. It’s much more practical to change the distance you are cooking instead of controlling the broiler temperature. I would suggest using the broiler at full heat and place your broiling pan in the middle rack of the oven for medium temperature.
I’ve only seen either one broil setting, or High and Low, what mine has. Pretty much every cookbook I’ve seen does not specify a temperature, and my informal tests suggest that the High setting is the default that the cookbooks expect.
As for the temperature, are you certain that the right control actually does anything while broil is on? For example, my toaster oven AFAIK only has one temperature under the toast setting, no matter how high or low you set the dial.
Also, I checked out a Electrolux manual (not yours), and all they specify for the “grill” setting is “Max” temperature, suggesting it’s probably not user adjustable. The one I looked at does have a “Fast Grilling” and a “Turbo Grilling” setting, where specific temperatures are specified.
By looking at both dials, it looks to me like the only position on the left ‘Mode’ dial that would allow a temperature adjustment is the second position since it has what looks to me to be the same symbol as the right ‘Temp’ dial.
The symbol on the right is °C. It’s hard to see what’s on the left but it looks different, presumably a “bake” symbol (can’t tell what lower left is either; lower right is probably the convection setting).
