Joke. Fame. Mishap

I was in the kitchen, you see, when it all went wrong. I would affirm under oath that it was the Maillard reaction that getting its revenge on me. The pinnacle of contemporary cooking is all based around this pure chemical truth, and yet it remains as elusive in its purest form as it is common in its most basic. Put differently, anyone can grill a piece of chicken, but not even I, experienced and renowned as I was, had yet achieved True Maillard.

It was somewhat of a ruse, I will admit. True Maillard, that is. The actual Maillard reaction is simple enough—heat up proteins and sugars, and they begin to brown. True Maillard, as I had defined it those many years ago, was the concept of cooking food so that every part of it had been browned. It’s not that this couldn’t be done, but the ruse of it was that this was already quite common and I had simply taken advantage of an under-educated journalist. What had started out as a bit of fun had grown, virally, into the new sensation.

My restaurant booked as much business the next weekend as we had done all winter the year before. The joke was really on me. I found myself faced with the task of making everything into a potato-chip thin slice of browned perfection, then plating it so it appeared rare, gourmet, and, dare I say, mysterious. True Maillard. All it really was was the leftover crispy bits that customers used to balk at yet cooks would fight each other for.

The particular batch of steak chips (not steak frites, these particular chips were precisely-sliced wafers of rib-eye) was about to go in the oven, but the oven wasn’t hot. I checked the dials, and they were on full-blast. Had the pilot light gone out? But there were two… too late I realized that I had been sabotaged. As the gas flowing from the oven raced into the room, pooling across the floor, I glanced around in horror. I was surrounded by any number of grills, fry stations, and stoves that all had open flames. We were, after all, in the business of cooking.

My last thought as the explosion threw my adrenaline into full blast and the world slowed down even as it came apart: how much of me could be considered True Maillard once this was all over? I wouldn’t be there to find out.