Maillard Maker

Overview

Food development is an important and persistent part of the modern world, and finding optimal methods of creating food products is necessary as the world's population increases. The Maillard reaction is a chemical process that results in the browning of food. This reaction is present in thousands of food products, but more could be done in industrial production and by home cooks to utilize this reaction. So, in this project, I created different solutions of proteins and honey with alkaline and non-alkaline trials to see if I could speed up the Maillard reaction during the baking process of dinner rolls. I measured the color by taking photos in a controlled environment and using the histogram tool from ImageJ. This showed the darkness of the dinner rolls compared to each other; the darker the dinner roll, the more Maillard reaction. I found that egg whites with baking soda promoted the most Maillard reaction, and trails with baking soda promoted more brown than those without. The dinner rolls that had no baking soda in the protein/honey solution had significantly less browning than the other trials, even the control. I learned that the more alkaline a solution is, the faster the Maillard reaction occurs. I also learned that the protein-to-reducing sugar ratio is important in the creation of the Maillard reaction, as well as the pH of the protein itself.

Competition history

• AJAS 2026 Category not listed

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