An Introduction to the Maillard Reaction
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If you plan on cooking tonight, chances are you'll be using the Maillard reaction to transform your raw ingredients into a better sensory experience.

Why YSK: When you cook meat, any water on the surface must first evaporate before much browning can occur. You want to get as much of a Maillard reaction as possible in the limited cooking time you have before the meat reaches the correct internal temperature. Removing the moisture first means that the heat of the cooking surface isn’t wasted on evaporation and can instead interact with the meat to form the complex sugars and proteins of the Maillard reaction.

  • Lvxferre
    4·
    1 year ago

    Letting it reach room temp contributes little to nothing, in comparison with patting it dry, because of a few details:

    • Maillard reaction happens around ~150°C, so above the boiling point of water (100°C)
    • If there’s liquid water, it’ll snip all available heat from the surroundings, when boiling, before the temperature rises up again. This means no Maillard until the water is gone.
    • It takes 1cal to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C. It’s a relatively small amount of heat, even for something like 25°C room temp vs. 5°C fridge temp.
    • It takes 540cal to transform 1g of 100°C liquid water into 1g of 100°C steam. It’s a lot.

    So if you don’t wait until your beef reaches room temperature before cooking it, you’re losing, like, 20cal per gram of beef to unnecessarily raise its temperature. However if you don’t pat your beef dry, each gram of water soaking there will be stealing 75cal to rise its own temperature to 100°C, plus 540cal to steam off. And since browning is a surface reaction and the offending water is mostly on the outside the difference is fairly big, as you aren’t comparing the whole chunk of beef with the outside water - you’re only comparing the surface beef with the water.

    (I hope that this is clear, I’m damn convoluted to explain stuff.)