Page 143 - Turkey Book from Meathead

and stick your arm in there. You can do this. It won’t burn your hair o. Now touch the metal grates. When you get back from the hospital you will understand that, although the air and the grates were both 200°F, they held and delivered vastly dierent levels of energy.
Infrared is altogether dierent. Stand under a tree on a sunny 90°F day. Sweaty hot, but the shade protects you from the ultraviolet radiation (UV). Now step into the sun. It burns! Although UV and IR are dierent wavelengths, they are both forms of radiation. When you place food directly above hot coals or gas flames, you are subjecting it to IR. It is like putting it in the sun. Hot! You can put a thermometer there but it is misleading because IR is best measured in calories, not degrees of temperature. We refer to IR as Warp 10, a dumb Star Trek reference.
Then there is smoke, which we think of as a spice or flavoring element. Some of it comes from charcoal (gas has no flavor), but when charcoal is fully engaged it doesn’t produce a lot of smoke. Some of it comes from vaporized drippings of juices, fat, and spices. But the most flavor comes from burning wood. We’ll discuss this in more detail below.
Once you understand these basics of heat transference you can use them to your advantage. And you thought you left physics behind in high school. To learn more about the chemistry of what happens inside the meat when it is cooking, read Meathead’s article on basic meat science.