QUESTION: A lot of recipes begin with preheating a pan to various temperatures, such as low, medium low, medium, medium high, etc. Also, most grilling recipes I see request the same range of temperatures. How do you determine the heat of a preheated frying pan or grill? Is preheating a saute pan really necessary? By the way, I enjoyed preparing your pear recipe the other week. — Christian M.

</B>ANSWER: When it comes to preheating a pan for a recipe, learning how to gauge the correct heat can be tricky. An easy way to tell if you have your pan too hot is if it starts smoking as soon as you add your oil or fat. Then, when you add your food product, it immediately sears, burns, and catches on fire. We call that "too high," in the business.First, let's answer your question about why we preheat pans. Actually, we do it for a lot of reasons — some which aren't as important as they were in the old days. A long time ago (I know most of you think I am speaking from memory), most pans were made of cast iron, which is very porous. The trick was to heat the pans on the stove to close the "pores." This effectively turned them into almost non-stick pans so that, after oil was added, food that was cooked would not act like it was glued to the bottom.Another thing is that most pans have hot spots so heat is not universally distributed as the pan is heating up. This uneven allocation of heat factors in even more with electric stoves. One exception are copper pans, which are great conductors of heat. But the price of copper is almost as high as gasoline, so I'm going to guess that those people whose kitchens are lined with copper pans also have personal chefs who use them and don't need my advice. For the rest of you, preheating your pans will allow the heat to disperse throughout the bottom and not just in one single area — a hot spot. We all know what happens when we have hot spots: one part of our dish gets beyond crispy, OK it's burnt, and the other part may be underdone.When a recipe calls for medium high or high heat, it is asking you to sear the product in a very hot pan very quickly. If you start with a cold pan, your food will release its natural juices before it gets hot. By the time the pan heats up your food will boil in its own juice, which makes for a very tough, colorless dish. This is why 95 percent of all recipes have you cook over high heat in a hot pan. The main reason a recipe would tell you to begin with a cold pan, is for the purpose of rendering fat. A good example of this would be cooking a boneless skin-on duck breast. We all know that duck skin is very fatty, so by putting it into a cold pan it will naturally render fat as the pan heats up. If we put the duck breast into a hot pan, it would sear the pores and keep the fat in.Now let's talk about heating up a grill. When you are cooking with wood or charcoal, you always want to burn down to the embers before you add your food; and a gas grill should be on high heat for at least 10 to 15 minutes with the lid down. This will not only get your grill nice and hot, it will sanitize the grill grates. Then adjust to the desired heat for the food you are cooking.Here is a rule of thumb to determine how hot your grill is, assuming you haven't already burned your thumb off. Time out for our lawyers though. We are not as serious as the Lazer Yo-Yo Company whose disclaimers included "1. To prevent choking, don't put yo-yo into mouth. 2. Don't tie the string around neck to play in a rough way." Instead, Christian, we have the following disclaimer from the law firm of Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe: Use your head, and be careful!!Anyway, if you can hold your hand two inches over a grill for two seconds, this is high heat. Three seconds for medium-high, four seconds for medium, and five seconds for low. This same method applies for testing the heat of a saute pan, but you add three seconds per level of temperature. You want to get as close to the pan as possible without touching it. Because even a pan that's on low heat is "still on the heat." Here's another tip. Years ago, while speaking with a Fire Chief, he explained to me that the best way to handle a fire was to remove things from its environment: remove the heat, remove the fuel, and remove the oxygen. Now, we also remove the Chef as well.