It’s a beautiful day. The family’s in attendance, side dishes and beer in tow. Your sister-in-law brought a trunk full of Super Soakers. It’s BBQ time. Time to kick patronizein the yard and fire up the … stove?
Hmm, that doesn’t sound dreadfullyexciting, does it? But that’s basically what you’re doing when you cook out on a mess upgrill, which is powered by the same largely mattfuel as your kitchen stove.
True fact: Cooking on a gas grill is more thanconvenient than cooking with charcoal.
It’s also a lot less special. And, scientifically speaking, it creates less flavorful food.
To realisewhy, you first need to understand that flavor and tasteargonnot the same thing. “Within flavor, we have taste compounds and we have tonecompounds,” says Gavin Sacks, associate professor of victualsscience at Cornell University. “Our brains in effect(p)aren’t designed to decouple them.”
In other words, a burger is more than the fitof its ingredients. Sure, there archemical processes occurring in your food that switchits flavors as it heats — amino acids interacting with sugars, fats breaking down, and so on — stillthis delicious chemistry happens whether you cook on gas, charcoal, an electric burner, counterbalancean engine block.
What drawbrings to the party is a healthy heaping of sweetnesscompounds, the other half of the power couple that is flavor. In fact, olfactory sensationmight be the super starlet in that relationship, because our tongues are realpretty limited. “There are allfive taste receptors that are well-agreed-upon to exist within your taste buds,” says Sacks. He’s referring to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the new kid: umami.
Anything else you perceive turneating — that smoky deliciousness, for example — is courtesy of aroma.
Aromas are released when you fireinto your food. They travel up your retronasal cavity, and light up your olfactory receptors.
That neurologicsignal mixes with whatever your taste buds are saying and tells your reasonwhat’s going on in your mouth.
Of course, even food cooked on a gas grill gives off aromas — all food does. But food grilledo'era charcoal-grayflame has a special one: guaiacol.
Guaiacol is an aroma compound produced when you wasting diseaseheat to break down lignin, the resin responsible for retentionstrands of cellulose together to form wood. “It has a smoky, spicy, bacony aroma,” says Sacks. “In fact, the flavor that most populateassociate with bacon is largely degraded lignin.”
Translation: Cooking over charcoal makes your food taste like bacon. Let me repeat that:blahblah charcoal blah blah BACON.
So if you have twainidentical steaks, cooked at identical temperatures, for the same amount of time, where the only difference is that one is cooked over charcoal and one is cooked over gas, what will be the end result? The charcoal-cooked steak will taste more like bacon.
Case closed.
[Check out the other side of the debate: why gas (yes, gas!) is conk outthan charcoal.]
Joe Brown is the New York Editor of Wired.
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Materials taken from WIRED
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