There are a lot of sins that a cook can commit in the kitchen
but perhaps one stands out above all others:
Boiling a perfectly nice hunk of meat.
I'll take my steak seared,
my chicken roasted
and my bacon fried to a crisp.
But boiled? Boiling water never gets above 212 degrees.
We're going to need more than that
to trigger what's called the Maillard Reaction:
the chemical roller coaster that both browns meats
and creates so many of the flavor compounds that we find so delicious.
The reaction is named after the French chemist, Louis Camille Maillard
who in 1912, described how sugars and amino acids
will combine to create aromatic compounds
that also happen to pack a lot of flavor.
Since then, other chemists have found that the Maillard Reaction
creates thousands of different flavor compounds.
The specific compounds that you end up with depend on cooking time and temperature
as well as the kinds of sugars and amino acids
that you add to the reaction.
Thiopenes, for example, are sulfur-containing compounds
that have a distinctly meaty quality
whereas oxazoles are oxygen-containing compounds
that have a nutty or sweet taste.
Some Maillard Reaction products don't do much on their own,
but enhance other flavors.
Alapyridaine, for example, makes meats taste meatier,
sweets sweeter and salts saltier.
You may wonder,
"Why have humans evolved to enjoy the particular compounds
"that result when meat meets heat?"
While we can't go back to ask early humans about their taste preferences,
we do know that cooking not only kills potentially harmful microorganisms,
it also makes foods easier to digest
allowing us to get more nutrition out of a meal.
No wonder that the chemical combination of sugar, protein and heat
tastes so delicious.
For Scientific American's Instant Egghead, I'm Michael Moyer.