Why does grilled food taste good

Inosinate : tastes like the hearty taste found in meat and fish. It is found in muscle fibers of animals mostly, but can be artificially created from tapioca starch.

This expensive flavor enhancer is known as kisodium salt or inosinic acid. Guanylate : similar to the earthy taste of dried mushrooms. It is only ever used in conjunction with Inosinate or Glutamate. Another flavor enhancer that is produced from fish, seaweed, and yeast. Umami is great, but when two umami compounds come together it is known as an umami-bomb or u-bomb; a complex flavor explosion. Add umami to your next barbecue, with a little feast, and you have a recipe for insane flavor that goes beyond just good.

Try one of these umami leaden recipes. Those striations of fat melt when heated. Instead, those particles are being absorbed by the fat, which is what creates the aroma and taste in meat. This fat is also oxidizing during the grilling process, which brings out even more delicious aroma. So where does that smokey grilled flavor come from if it is not the flavor of charcoal?

Vaporization occurs when food juices hit a hot surface. Essentially, the more smoky vaporization the better. When you cook a steak in a pan you get a golden brown exterior from the Maillard reaction , flavor compounds develop and intensify. We get sear marks from both the pan and the cooking grids. The steak cooks and tenderizes as intermuscular fats break down in both cases for juicy results!

That smoky flavor from drippings that have come in contact with a ripping hot surface. That ripping hot surface can be called a lot of things. In our most primitive example, red hot charcoal would be that hot surface.

Juices fall onto the charcoal and vaporize into water vapor and smoke packed with flavor, with charcoal wood smoke and its unique burnt wood flavor is present too. In your grill, these briquettes will burn cleaner and more evenly without those volatile compounds. See that uniform glow? And no smoke? Even better. Those drippings are full of fats and oils and sugars and proteins that vaporize and rise back up into the meat whence they came. The briquettes themselves are just middlemen, not the flavor-makers.

So if you have two identical 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. Check out the other side of the debate : why gas yes, gas!

True fact: Cooking on a gas grill is more convenient than cooking with charcoal. Previously, he was deputy editor at WIRED, overseeing strategy and day-to-day operations for the website.