Umami

Growing up, most of us learn that there are four kinds of tastes: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. But as a cook and a lover of food I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that there is another taste that helps me enjoy so much of the savoury food I love.

As early as the late 1800,s the famous French chef, Escoffler, thought there was a fifth taste, which he believed was at the centre of his success. Over in Japan, they were paying attention to a fifth taste as well, and in the 1900’s Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda pinpointed it. As he sipped his seaweed soup. It wasn’t salt or sweet or bitter or sour at work on his tongue or in his brain. It was something altogether new. Something yummy. And that’s how the naming of the fifth taste Umami – Japanese for pleasant savory taste – came to be.

Technically, umami comes from glutamates and ribo-nucleo-tides, which occur naturally in many foods. When glutamate breaks down – when you cook meat, or when cheese ages, or when a tomato ripens in the sun — it becomes L-glutamate, and that’s when flavour start to pop. And when the glutimates and ribo-nucleo-tides combine, they enhance each other giving more depth and breath to the flavour.

The complex flavours of certain foods – the rich, savory, unique taste that cannot simply be categorized as sweet, or sour, or salty, or bitter… that’s umami. Think about the intensified taste in a sun dried tomato. Or the richness of soybeans fermented into miso, or the pungency of dried shiitake mushrooms… that’s umami. My favourite of all cheeses – Parmigiano Reggiano – is considered by some to be the most umami of all western ingredients. That’s probably why it works it’s way into so many of my recipes.