why does browning on food, such as grill marks or roasting, taste so good?
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Browning food is known as the [Maillard reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction) – a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that occurs when they are heated.
The resulting compounds from this reaction are varied – far more varied than their inputs. Our bodies find these compounds quite tasty – likley because it was an evolutionary advantage to find them so. Cooking food “unlocks” nutritional value not (easily) available in the raw from, so early humans that found cooked food tastier than raw food had better diets, leading to increased survival.
The Maillard reaction is not ELI5, but as I understand it sugars and amino acids interact at high temperatures to create new molecules that have a stronger flavor. It’s like you are caramelizing the meat, making meat candy.
As a few people have commented, but to dig a little bit deeper – you are describing a very specific type of chemical reaction called “Maillard Reactions” and they are all involved in cooking, but a specific type of cooking.
What they are not – They are not “Enzymatic Browning”, for example an apple being cut and left out turning brown. That’s different.
They are not “all cooking” boiling a stew is not a mallard reaction.
They are specifically what happens when you heat A. Proteins & Amino Acides and B. with sugar, and C. *without water*.
The result in fucking delicious. Browning meat, frying bacon, toasting bread, baking pastries, the creation of caramel, even the color, aroma, and flavor of beer. All Maillard Reactions.
It’s hard to describe what’s happening because it’s a whole family of thousands and thousands of specific chemical reactions, it would be pretty impossible to focus on a single one and analyze it.
Real 5 year old explain.
Sugar is sweet, but caramel is sweeter because we heat it up just to the right temperature that chemistry happens and it tastes even more sugary. You can think of it as the heat cracking open the sugar molecule each sugar can hit more tastebuds. Also, burned food tastes terrible and bitter. But if you have just a little burned food in the same bite as a bunch of super sweet food it tastes even better than just the sweets.
Brown marks on food is the sugars present in that food being heated up to that extra sweet temperature. Some of it gets too hot and becomes burned and bitter, but since it’s only a really small amount that gets burned, it tastes even better, not worse.
Almost every part of our biology was designed to take advantage of something in some way.
A lot of these advantages presented themselves as random mutations or just happen stance changes
Now our taste buds and how we taste is no different and it comes in as two different factors.
The first one is genetic and has to do with the benefits of cooked food. Cooking your food helps to break it down and make more of the nutrients accessible, it also kills micro organisms so your chances of getting sick eating some meat or vegetable that’s cooked goes down.
Now clearly ancient humans didn’t know this and this is where natural selection comes in , those that preferred that cooked taste would end up healthier and live longer meaning they would have more and more kids and over time they would become the dominant population.
Now the second one is a bit more direct , babies tend to have preferences for the food their mother ate during the pregnancy , so that food preference can be carried down through mother to child as well
So to summarize , the reason that cooked flavour tastes so good is because it was evolutionarily beneficial to like that flavour so it was a trait that was dominant , and if your mother liked that flavour she could also pass it on in utero as well
The process that makes grilled and seared meats taste extra yummy is called maillard browning. Whats happenning is the high lepreture fo the cooking surface is taking the fats, sugars amd other carbohydrates that are present on the surface of the meat and gets excreted during cooking and carmalizes those substances.
Similar to how grilled onions become very sweet and tasty when caramelized, the same thing happens for meets when seared or otherwise grilled.
In restaurants, steaks and pork chops are cooked in pans. Little brown bits stick to the bottom, these brown bites are essentially maillard browning thay stick to the cooking surface. They can be declared using wine, stock, vinegar, or water, add a little butter, some salt and pepper to taste and you have some of the best topping sauce thay beats the pants off A1, ketchup, or BBQ sauce.
We have a few meters less of intestine than our closest relatives in the ape world because for about half a million years we let fire predigest our food for us. Man, wouldn’t it suck if we hated food that was predigested by fire?
The same reason caramel tastes so good, it’s just cooked sugars. (Yes, there is sugar in meat).
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