system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does soy sauce get its black colour? I have heard that its because of millard reactions, but can someone explain in detail about the mechanism at such low temps?
gpt
The Maillard reaction isn't just a single reaction, it's a whole bunch of things that can happen between sugars and amino acids, leading to a wide variety of complex products. While it is mostly known from cooking and baking, such reactions can also happen at lower temperatures. They soy sauce fermentation process provides a quite fertile ground for it, since the microorganisms doing the fermentation provide a lot of secreted enzymes that break down the available proteins and carbohydrates, enabling the resulting monomers to react with each other.