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It’s beautiful day. The family attends, with dishes and beer. Your brother-in-law brought a trunk full of Super Soakers. It’s barbecue time. Time to go back in the yard and light the stove …
Hmm, that doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But that’s basically what you’re doing when you’re cooking on a gas grill that feeds on the same tasteless fuel from the kitchen sink.
In fact, cooking on a gas grill is more convenient than cooking with charcoal.
It is also much less so. And, scientifically speaking, it produces foods with little flavor.
To understand why, you must first understand that taste and taste they are not the same thing. “Inside the flavor, we have compound flavors and we have compound smells,” he says Gavin Sacks, A researcher in food science at Cornell University. “Our brains are not designed to separate them.”
In other words, a burger is more than the sum of its ingredients. Sure, as your food heats up, there are chemical processes that change flavors — amino acids that interact with sugars, fats are crushed, etc. — but this sweet chemistry happens with gas, coal, an electric burner, an engine block.
What coal brings to the party includes a wide range of compound odors, the other half of which is a strong pair of flavor. In fact, the smell could be the star of that relationship, because our languages are quite limited. “There are only five well-agreed tasting receptors within the taste buds,” says Sacks. He is referring to the sweet, salty, sour, bitter and new umami, umami.
Anything else you notice when you’re eating — that sweet smokyness, for example — is the kindness of the smell.
When you bite the food, the odors are released. They travel up your retinal cavity and ignite receptive odors. This neurological signal is confused with what your taste buds say and it explains what is going on in your brain in your mouth.
Of course, grilled foods also emit odors, as do all foods. But the grilled food on charcoal has a special one: guaiacol.
Guaiacol is a compound aroma created when you use heat to crush lignin, the resin responsible for the formation of wood in cellulose chains. “Smoky, it hurts, bacon the smell, “says Sacks.” In fact, the taste that most people associate with bacon is largely degraded lignin. “
Translation: Cooking with charcoal gives it a bacon-like taste. Let me repeat: blah blah blah coal blah blah BACON.
So if you have two identical chops cooked at the same temperature for the same amount of time, one side cooked with charcoal and the other cooked with gas, what will be the end result? The charcoal-cooked steak will look like bacon.
The case has been closed.
Look the other side of the discussion: why gas (yes, gas!) is better than coal.
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