AweSTEM ebooks: Pizza Pizzazz
This post was originally posted on www.awestem.org. It is intended to engage middle-school readers in a STEM topic.
Pizza Pizzazz: Where does food get its deliciousness?
What do pizza, burgers, apple pie, and French fries all have in common? They are very popular and delicious foods! If you cooked any of these foods differently, they would have a very different taste. Imagine if you cooked a pizza by boiling it in water. Would it still have the same yummy melted cheese and crispy crust? Probably not. This is because the Maillard Reaction would not have occurred.
Mmm... Hot Cross Buns get their golden brown color from the Maillard reaction. (S. Soni)
This chemical reaction happens between amino acids and simple sugars and produces a diverse range of complex (and mouthwatering!) molecules. The Maillard reaction (pronounced my-YAR) gives bread, meat, and many other foods their typical brown color.
You may have noticed that bread baking, steak searing, and potatoes being fried don’t taste or even smell the same. This is because the Maillard reaction takes simple sugars and amino acids and rearranges them into ring-shaped molecules, which become rearranged again into different molecules, and again and again until unique flavors and aromas are created. Each combination of amino acids and sugars in various foods, as well as how long you cook them, will give you distinct tastes.
It’s one of the most common reactions in cooking and it only happens within a certain temperature range — higher than the boiling point of water and lower than the burning point of the food you’re cooking.
The Maillard Reaction can also occur outside of the kitchen. Did you know it is one of the chemical reactions that make sunless tanners work?
All photos by S. Soni.