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🔥 Smoke: combustion chemistry and what it deposits

The flavour on bacon is not the fire. It is what failed to burn: phenols, carbonyls, acids — and a few things you did not order.

5
lessons
~20 min
to learn
🔬 Science
subject
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. The cloud that is not fireTreat kitchen smoke as the leftover of incomplete, oxygen-starved combustion — gases, vapours and particles — not as heat made visible.A clean fire is carbon dioxide and water. Dinner-smoke is a smoulder Montazeri condenses on purpose. Soot is the solid end of that cloud.
  2. Three polymers, three weathersGive cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin each a product and a temperature window, using Yang's bands and Montazeri's assignments.Hemicellulose donates acid first. Cellulose donates carbonyls. Lignin donates phenols all afternoon. Sawdust is just a more even log.
  3. What lands on the foodTreat deposition as condensation onto a wet, fatty surface, and assign flavour, colour and tang to phenols, carbonyls and acids.JECFA's three families do the tasting. Phenols like fat. Carbonyls brown protein. Acids are hemicellulose, bottled. The centre of the ham is not smoked.
  4. The fire you should not wantSeparate flavourful wood smoke from PAH made by hot incomplete combustion and by fat dripping onto flame, and keep conifer resin off the list.EFSA: process heat and hotter smoking raise PAH. OSU: conifers can taste bitter. A bottle can wash PAH out. USDA's 225–300°F chamber is not the wood's temperature.
  5. The pink that is not smokeSplit bark from pink, cold condensation from hot smoking, and leave the reader with a rind to smell plus an open question about whose PAH they are eating.Pink is myoglobin holding NO or CO. Bark is condensate. Cold fish condenses better. Tonight, smell the three families. Nobody has finished the backyard PAH split.

Questions this course answers

Kitchen smoke, as Montazeri generates it, is best described as which of these?

Montazeri: liquid smokes come from condensing wood smoke produced by smouldering chips or sawdust under limited oxygen. Complete combustion would be CO₂ and water.

Match each wood polymer to what Montazeri and Yang say it donates when it pyrolyses

Montazeri assigns the products. Yang assigns the windows. The three plants do not open together.

Put Yang's pyrolysis queue in the order the big weight losses actually arrive

Lignin starts earliest and finishes last. Hemicellulose then cellulose are the two sharp peaks.

Complete JECFA's trio of major smoke-flavouring principles

WHO/JECFA: carboxylic acids, compounds with carbonyl groups, and phenolic compounds. Those three families do the tasting.

Montazeri measured the pH of full-strength Code 10-Poly. What pH did they report?

Code 10-Poly was pH 2.3 and 10.3 percent acetic acid. The refined 1291 had climbed to 5.7. The tang is not a fault. It is hemicellulose, bottled.

In your own words, why can fat dripping onto flame deposit more PAH on food than the wood smoke itself?

EFSA treats high-temperature cooking and smoking as process sources of PAH, and higher smoking temperatures as higher PAH. The drip is a second generator aimed at the steak.

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