but perhaps one stands out above all others:

Boiling a perfectly nice hunk of meat.

I'll take my steak seared,

my chicken roasted

and my bacon fried to a crisp.

But boiled? Boiling water never gets above 212 degrees.

We're going to need more than that

to trigger what's called the Maillard Reaction:

the chemical roller coaster that both browns meats

and creates so many of the flavor compounds that we find so delicious.

The reaction is named after the French chemist, Louis Camille Maillard

who in 1912, described how sugars and amino acids

will combine to create aromatic compounds

that also happen to pack a lot of flavor.

Since then, other chemists have found that the Maillard Reaction

creates thousands of different flavor compounds.

The specific compounds that you end up with depend on cooking time and temperature

as well as the kinds of sugars and amino acids

that you add to the reaction.

Thiopenes, for example, are sulfur-containing compounds

that have a distinctly meaty quality

whereas oxazoles are oxygen-containing compounds

that have a nutty or sweet taste.

Some Maillard Reaction products don't do much on their own,

but enhance other flavors.

Alapyridaine, for example, makes meats taste meatier,

sweets sweeter and salts saltier.

You may wonder,

"Why have humans evolved to enjoy the particular compounds

"that result when meat meets heat?"

While we can't go back to ask early humans about their taste preferences,

we do know that cooking not only kills potentially harmful microorganisms,

it also makes foods easier to digest

allowing us to get more nutrition out of a meal.

No wonder that the chemical combination of sugar, protein and heat

tastes so delicious.

For Scientific American's Instant Egghead, I'm Michael Moyer.