Imagine cooking a big breakfast of sausage toast and coffee; then a big dinner of steak or chicken for the main course a portion of grilled vegetables and a glass of dark beer on the side. It may be hard to imagine in words but when you see all these dishes laid out in front of you you’ll notice that they’re all largely the same brown color. This is no coincidence and if you want to learn how to cook better there’s some nutritional science behind it that can help.
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 Certified Angus Beef ® | 2021-05-04 15:52:08 |  76,044 Views |
Why does steak turn brown?
The phenomenon at play here is called the Maillard reaction. It’s a chemical reaction where the compounds in your food change their properties. You see these reactions every time you eat steak and beer which brown in the same way. The short version is that the proteins and sugars in the food change when exposed to enough heat and the end result is a brown pigment and a “toasted” smell and taste that we associate with cooked food. Cooking food is the most important thing because it kills bacteria but the Maillard reaction is why cooked food tastes better.
Let’s dig a little deeper: Proteins (which are made up of amino acids) and sugars are common in the foods we eat. When exposed to temperatures of 285 degrees Fahrenheit or higher and little moisture the sugars and amino acids react with each other and rearrange themselves into new complex compounds. In addition to changing color they create new flavors in the food ranging from nutty to cooked or even burnt.
There are a lot of different small chemical reactions happening during the Maillard reaction. The process is more commonly called browning which you’ve probably heard before. It can transform reddish raw beef into the darker colored foods we recognize as safe to eat — we’ve likely evolved to think that brown foods smell and taste better than raw foods. The Maillard reaction also marks a major difference between dark beer and light beer. When making darker beers like stouts brewers roast the malt (the grain used to make beer) at higher temperatures resulting in a darker colored wort (the extracted sugary liquid that’s boiled and fermented into beer). A heavily roasted wort gives the beer a deep brown color and a much bolder flavor than light ales.
