We would never tell you to burn your food. No one likes that. We wouldn’t hand you an ear of corn that crumbled to black dust when you touched it or a chicken wing that resembled a lump of coal more than it did anything edible. Burned food is no good. But we will tell you to char your food. We like charred food a whole lot.
But what’s the difference between burned and charred? It seems like we’re talking about the same thing, right? Very dark color on the exterior of a vegetable, fruit, or protein. That’s charred? Or burnt? It could be either! What differentiates the two is how far you take this flavor-building process.
Let's start with burnt. When you burn a piece of food, you're allowing the proteins and sugars within it to go past the point of caramelization to a fully-blackened, carbonized state. Burned food is, by definition, overwhelmingly bitter—the other flavors present will be unpleasantly overshadowed by acridness. You know how sometimes you forget to set a timer and only remember that you have cookies in the oven when your smoke alarm starts going off? Yeah: That's burnt. The subtle flavors of butter and sugar and chocolate and whatever else you put in them is barely detectable over the intense sharpness of their burned bottoms. No good!