If I put a chicken in the over for way too long and it is now a black lump of coal. If I look it under a microscope is it still chicken? Can I use it on my next barbeceu instead of regular coal? LoL.
Is a burned chicken or any kind of food such as bread or meat or vegetables (burned to a crisp) similar to a burned piece of wood?
In: Chemistry
Three basic things are happening, depending on what you are cooking of course.
1) Volatiles are driven away. Volatile, in science speak, are chemicals that will leave what they are in and go into the air – they are smells essentially. You can encourage them to leave more quickly via heating. This is part of what something foods don’t taste the same after boiling or heating for a long time. Their flavors literally flew away.
2) Combustion – if your food is literally ‘a black lump of coal’ you entered the realm of combustion – literally burning. It’s different from coal or charcoal though. Charcoal isn’t just ‘burned stuff’, it’s actually not burned at all! Because charcoal is produced without oxygen, what happens is *the volatiles* are driven off and you are left with ‘burnable stuff’. What you’re cook has burned though so it’s “post burning”. It’s as burned as can be.
3) Milliard Reactions. Ok, these are the really interesting ones. When you cook food you are often entering the world of a class of chemistry called “Milliard Reactions” which are a result of proteins, sugars, and fats being heated up a lot *without burning* and *with low water*. These reactions produce extremely aromatic compounds *that are fucking delicious*. Think – baking bread, frying bacon, Cajun roux, fresh chocolate chip cookies, steak on the grill, roast coffee beans, fried peppers and onions, Guinness Beer, Bourbon. In each of those examples you are getting flavors produced as a result of milliard reactions and they are HUGELY important to what we’d all just call ‘tasty food’.
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