The explosion of cooking TV shows has given us a whole new lexicon to draw from. Who ever dared to pronounce difficult words like "caramelization of sugars" or "Maillard reaction" a decade ago? Nobody . Today, however, they seem obvious: anyone after a couple of hours in front of a barbecue immediately feels George Locatelli and starts spouting strange sentences like the ones above. Next time it happens, especially if that guy is you, don't make a fool of yourself: caramelization and the Maillard reaction are two different things!

The most important chemical reaction in all of cooking is certainly the Maillard reaction . If a food turns brown when cooked, it is almost always due to this reaction, which occurs at high temperatures, between 140°C and 180°C, between the amino acids of proteins and sugars. You can see it in action when you fry chips, when you cook bread, a cake, or our lovely steak.

In caramelization, there is the formation of caramel-like aromatic compounds obtained by the splitting of water molecules in sugar at very high temperatures; in the Maillard reaction, on the other hand, a series of phenomena occur that lead to the interaction between sugars and proteins during cooking, giving rise to the brown chemical compounds that give color to foods such as grilled steak or bread crust.

Sugar in meat? Absolutely!

Beef contains enough sugars for this reaction to occur. Other meats, however, are poorer and therefore, sometimes, they are added directly during cooking or a marinade is used: wine, for example, contains sugar, as does lemon.

It must be said, however, that not all sugars are willing to react with amino acids: only those that chemists call “reducing” (a reducing substance is the chemical opposite of an oxidizing substance). Unfortunately, good old common sugar, sucrose, is not part of this category. However, in the presence of acids (and a marinade is always acidic) sucrose splits into its two components: glucose and fructose. These sugars, unlike sucrose, can react in the Maillard reaction.

Louis-Camille Maillard was not a chef, nor a chemist interested in food. He was instead a doctor interested in cellular metabolism and studied how amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can react with sugars present in cells. In cooking, these reactions are extremely important to create, for example, the typical flavor of roast meat. “Create” because the molecules responsible for the flavor of a good Florentine steak cooked to perfection do not exist in the meat before cooking! It is the Maillard reaction that forms several hundred small odorous molecules, responsible for many culinary delights.

The details of this reaction are not yet fully known, especially because depending on the temperature at which the reaction occurs, and the type of sugars and amino acids involved, different compounds are formed, which then impart a different taste to food. This enormous variability, still studied by chemists, is unknowingly exploited by chefs to obtain dishes with different tastes and aromas.

The resulting set of molecules always has a brown/tawny color, which can be observed on the surface of a perfectly cooked steak.

A necessary condition for the Maillard reaction to occur quickly is that the temperature reaches at least 140 °C. This means that browning can only occur on the surface of the meat: internally there is always water that prevents it from exceeding 100 °C.

For the reaction to occur, however, the surface of the pan must be hot enough. A common mistake when cooking a steak in a pan is to cook it when the temperature is still too low. Adding the piece of meat lowers the temperature even further, and instead of a steak we end up with the proverbial unappetizing shoe sole.

Now, if you have made a nice steak with a perfect, dry and crunchy crust, you can certainly say that the Maillard reaction was successful!

Remove the meat from the grill - or the oven - and you are ready to slice it. Wait a moment, though, before you dig in the knife! Think about it: before cooking, the water contained in the meat was trapped in the fibrils, those tiny formations that make up the tissue of the meat. During cooking, these contract and shorten. Some of the water contained in them is now free to flow in the microspace created thanks to the fact that the proteins that make up the meat have caramelized on the surface with the Maillard reaction and coagulated just below. By now we understand that the higher the temperature, the more juices are released . If you now slice the meat, all that water released but still contained between the fibers will be released, forming a puddle of juices that will end up on the cutting board or on the plate.

If this happens to you, you should immediately save what you can and collect those liquids and serve them on the meat so that they are partially reabsorbed, or, at the very least… go ahead and mop it up! But To limit this inconvenience, just let the meat rest after cooking placing it on a already hot plate and covering it with aluminum foil, pricked with a toothpick . In this way you will limit the release of liquids from the meat thanks to the rest and at the same time you will preserve the crust obtained with the Maillard reaction.

We hope that this article on the Maillard reaction has been useful to you and that it has helped you understand how this natural process works.

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