Why Browned Food Tastes So Darn Good

And how this one piece of knowledge can help you take your cooking from good to great.

Do me a favor: Indulge me for a moment and picture a properly seared steak. Make it bright, vivid. Think of the crisp, dark brown crust, the tiny bit of charring round the edges.

Close your eyes, take a sniff. Smell the rich, browned-butter aroma of rendered fats — they linger in the air. Hear the jagged knife tear through the muscle fibers.

Is your mouth watering by now?

There’s something about separating smoky, succulent meat from a bone that can bring the caveman, or cavewoman, out of even the most mannered of diner.

Now, for the sake of science, let’s try this differently: Imagine the same cut of meat, but boiled. It smells and tastes different, doesn’t it?

Many would describe it as gray. Bland. Dull. Call it what you will, but it certainly isn’t appetizing.

I just left you with a bad taste in your mouth.

I don’t know what this says about my writing, but I’m glad we did this thought experiment. I’m also glad that it was what it was — just a picture of the mind— and not a single steak was wasted that day.

We did it to prove a point: That boiled steak, even if cooked in a highly savory broth, cannot possibly rival the mouthwatering flavor of a seared one. If you’ve ever wondered why that is, you’d be surprised to know that no one really had a good answer until the beginning of the 20th century.

Searing meat doesn’t lock the juices in, despite what many a celebrity chef and cookbook author may preach.

In fact, it does just the opposite: To produce that crispy crust, one must dry out the surface of the meat — and cooked, dried-out meat is not any less permeable than raw.

We sear meat not to keep the juices in, but to brown it.

Browning, more than the mere change of color on the surface, ameliorates meat in many, many ways.

We know this thanks to the work of Louis Camille Maillard, the French physician and chemist who first took a stab at explaining browning in a 1912 paper in the Journal of the French Academy of Sciences titled, “Formation of Melanoidins in a Methodical Way.”

When the sugars and proteins found in our food are heated to a high enough temperature, Maillard observed, they break down into their basic components and react, producing a brown pigment called melanoidin that darkens the color of the food’s surface.

He described his findings in his paper, and they went largely unnoticed for a good quarter of a century.

Then suddenly, in the 1950s, food science progressed — and as mid-twentieth-century researchers set out to understand exactly how cooking worked, they kept finding the answer in the Frenchman’s paper.

The Maillard reaction, as it turned out, did more than just color our food brown. It was found that the collision between the sugars and amino acids — the primary constituents of sugar and protein — was so violent, it leads to the formation of hundreds of aroma and flavor compounds on the food’s crust, imparting it with a richness of aroma and a depth of flavor that simply weren’t there before.

This single reaction, the clash of sweetness and strength, was deemed the most important finding in the history of cooking. We all have Louis Camille Maillard to thank for knowing how to cook food that tastes consistently good.

In his 2017 book, “The Science of Cooking,” medical doctor turned food writer Stuart Farrimond puts the minimum required temperature for the Maillard reaction at 284°F, or 140°C.

This temperature tells us two things: One, browning requires relatively high heat. Two, it takes place at temperatures well above the boiling point of water.

It also explains why boiled meat doesn’t taste as good as meat that’s been broiled, deep-fried, grilled, seared, sautéed, or roasted — the temperature is far too low to trigger browning, and much of meat’s flavor is developed by browning.

Cooks around the world have found clever ways to work around this limitation.

The French, par exemple, have created braising — a two-part cooking method in which red meat or poultry is seared in a cocotte, the French cousin of a Dutch oven, before being stewed with vegetables in a broth. Searing browns the meat and ameliorates its flavor. Stewing, on the other hand, cooks it to a high enough internal temperature to melt the collagen in the meat into gelatin and have it turn out fall-apart-tender.

Jewish cooks in Poland found that baking a bagel after boiling it gives it a golden brown crust chock-full of flavor. (Dough starches, which break down into sugar, and gluten, the protein naturally found in barley, oats, rye, spelt, and wheat.)

It’s said that in China, the Southern and Northern Dynasties came up with stir-frying — traditionally done at high heat, which browns the meat and the vegetables and accentuates their flavors — as far back as 1,500 years ago.

Such is the ingenuity of cooking as an art form; for centuries, and in some cases millennia, home cooks have been finding clever ways to work around the limitations inexplicable by cooking as a science.

The latter only caught up with the former in the middle of the 20th century.

The morals of the story: Browning equals flavor.

When you brown the crust on a pizza, you’re making that crust tastier:

The same thing happens to steak, pork chops, chicken breasts, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, asparagus, carrots, onions, loaves of bread, you name it.

And yet, the machinations of browning, particularly in the home kitchen, are very often misunderstood. When cooks first learn about browning, they feel the urge to turn up the heat on all of their cooking.

But too much heat can be counterproductive: In the grand sequence of heat-catalyzed chemical reactions, browning is followed by pyrolysis, the other name of which is burning.

Pyrolysis burns off the volatile aroma and flavor compounds created during the Maillard reaction, leaving our food charred and tasting like coal.

So, if you crank up the stovetop to high, especially if you’re cooking thick cuts of meat or coarsely cut vegetables that need to be cooked through, you risk burning them.

And what is a burnt meal, but a meal left uneaten?

One of the keys to good cooking is to learn how to apply “just the right” amount of heat.

By that, I mean the amount of heat that’ll cook the inside of whatever it is that you’ve got cooking through while browning it — but not burning it — on the outside.

In practical terms, this translates to medium/medium-high heat on the stove and temperatures from 325°F (ca. 160°C) to 375°F (ca. 190°C) in the oven. The grill, that’s a beast of its own. If you stick around, you and I will get into good grilling techniques in the summer.

Another key to good cooking is preheating:

Where dry, high heat is required, preheating your skillet, broiler, oven, or grill to the appropriate temperature is non-negotiable.

A cast iron, carbon steel, or stainless steel pan preheats for 2–3 minutes over medium/medium-high heat. It’s recommended to preheat ovens and grills for 15 minutes to achieve a uniform hot air and for the walls to begin to radiate warmth.

But by far the biggest takeaway about the Maillard reaction is that dry-heating cooking is mostly about developing flavor. That’s best done like love — slowly, tenderly, mindfully; with the spirited touch of a cook who has no place to be but in the middle of where they are.

P.S. Thanks for reading! I post on Medium every week. Get an email whenever I do by going here →