Food Chemistry & Maillard-Hodge Reactions
Maillard reactions seem like a good way to start a food blog. While it is well known that cooked food undergoes a color and flavor change, the chemical reactions that occur are not.
Enter Louis-Camille Maillard.
About a hundred years ago, he published the first paper describing what reactions take place between carbohydrates and amino acids at elevated temperatures. We owe our understanding of roasted coffee, soy sauce, beer, bread, and the host of other things that we put in our bodies (and occur naturally within) to this guy. Unfortunately, these reactions are also responsible for creating acrylamides and furans in burnt or processed foods. When these reactions occur in the body or are ingested, they lead to diabetes, cataracts, and cancer. Despite these unfavorable products, we have gained much of our subjective appreciation of food thanks to these everyday reactions.
The reactions produce hundreds of different products (and can be complicated to follow), but a lot of this work was simplified in 1953 by John E. Hodge (who shares my brother's birthday).
Post WWII, the Dept. of Agriculture funded Hodge's work in order to create more palatable food with a longer shelf life on an industrial scale. Where Maillard had simply discovered it, Hodge understood and described. Since then, scientists have elaborated on these reactions, testing for variable pH, moisture content, and temperature in order to create the ideal flavors in our processed "foods."
According to Hodge, the general maillard reaction happens as such:
A carbonyl group of a sugar reacts with an amino group on a protein, producing water and an unstable glycosylamine.
The glycosylamine undergoes Amadori arrangements to create aminoketose componds
These compounds are then polymerized, rearranged, ameliorated, and converted into thousands of products.
These products produce aromas, pigments, textures, and hunger. I only bring this up because of course we can continue to enjoy food as long as it is available, but understanding the mechanisms behind it might make our food even tastier. For me, this aids my understanding of gluten, and as a baker, my life is somewhat held together by these tiny fibers of protein and starch granules.
Here's a picture of my brother.
Also, here's a real nice song: