![]() Fortunately, desirable Maillard products have been explored for thousands of years in the kitchen and the results are well-documented in numerous recipes. It is sad, yet understandable, that undesirable occurrences of the Maillard reaction have received more attention in the scientific community than the desirable ones. A review on browning reactions in dehydrated foods, which appeared in the first volume of Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, remains the most-cited paper in that journal’s history. Over time, it became clear to me that the use of baking soda was only one of many ways cooks can and do influence the speed of the Maillard reaction in the kitchen.Įver since the French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard studied the metabolism of urea and kidney illnesses and published his thesis on the actions of glycerin and sugar on amino acids in 1913, the Maillard reaction has been a hot research topic. And the addition of baking soda happens to be a convenient way of doing this. By increasing the pH–making the food less acidic and more alkaline–the Maillard reaction can be sped up. In addition to its complexity, I had noted the pH dependency of the Maillard reaction. As a chemist, I have always found the Maillard reaction to have a deceptive name, camouflaging the fact that a surprisingly large number of reactions occur when a reducing sugar and an amino acid are heated together. Popularly known as the “browning reaction,” the Maillard reaction is the chemical interplay between a reducing sugar (a sugar that under alkaline conditions, forms reactive ketones or aldehydes) and an amino acid (the basic building block of all proteins). The idea of the baking soda addition was not taken out of the blue but based on something I gleaned from the chemistry of the Maillard reaction. By the addition of baking soda, I had changed the outcome of an otherwise trivial and everyday chemical reaction, and the result seemed interesting from a gastronomic perspective! The taste of the browned onions was remarkably sweet and caramel-like, and compared with conventionally browned onions, they were softer–almost a little mushy. And voilí (as Louis-Camille Maillard himself would have said): the color of the onions changed faster than without the baking soda. ![]() I chopped an onion, melted butter in a frying pan, and added the onions together with a pinch of baking soda. Is there a way to speed up the browning of onions? (Photo: Frying onion from Bigstock)Īn idea that struck me once was to add baking soda to browning onions. ![]()
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