Cool Reactions Of The Week — July 16th
This post originally appeared on our official blog here: https://blog.letseatlabs.com/post/cool-food-reactions-of-the-week-july-16th/
Welcome
This is a new series that we will be publishing each week! As we are back in our learning cycle we have taken it upon ourselves to share the coolest reactions we found during the week!
This week we have decided to dip our toes in the water with a more commonly known mechanism — The Maillard!
Maillard
This reaction is commonly known as the “toast” or “burnt ends” reaction. When you bake bread or grill meat this is one of the primary reactions that forms the “crust” you experience with these foods.
The reaction imparts a sweeter flavor to the food, possibly due to the sugar now being cyclic and containing a nitrogen compound!
Let us look:
First we have a nucleophilic attack of the NH2-R compound against the aldehyde group at the end of the sugar. We then have a molecular rearrangement due to the charged nitrogen compound being unhappy (ignore the backwards arrows!).
After the rearrangement the compounds are in equilibrium with an N+ containing compound. This compound allows for a donation of electrons from a free OH group, which in turn causes another bound rearrangement.
A free water molecule then comes in and donates a proton to the double bond, creating a carbonyl with an extra proton.. The remaining OH group gets to hang around. While the OH group is just hanging around we have an attack on the carbonyl groups’ carbon that contains the double bond to oxygen from the other side of the ring. The OH group that was just hanging around then takes the extra proton that was hanging on this newly formed “ether” in the ring.
After all of this we are left with our final compound and the free water molecule has formed back again!
