We were always taught at school how there were only 4 tastes our taste buds could distinguish: sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness, but nobody ever told us about the fifth taste that the Japanese can perfectly identify, Umami, which can be translated as “pleasant savoury taste”.
Most areas of the tongue’s taste buds can detect Umami, while other tastes like sweetness are concentrated in specific points and bitterness is felt more in the back of the tongue. And some estimate that it’s recognised by more than 50% of the tongue’s taste buds.
Discovering Umami.
Umami was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda, a scientist and chemistry professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. The word Umami actually comes from two words, “umai”, meaning delicious and “mi”, which can be translated as taste.
Discovered in 1908, Ikeda’s new taste stimulated the throat and the back of the mouth and also helped with salivation. This amino acid glutamate, also known simply as glutamate, is responsible for enhancing the pleasant taste of many foods.
Ikeda discovered that glutamate was responsible for the intense flavour of the broth from Kombu kelp (seaweed) and was able to synthesise the salt called monosodium glutamate from large quantities of the seaweed, which was marketed by the Ajinomoto company years later and sold under the same trade name.
The component obtained dramatically increases appetite by about 40%, enhancing the flavour and aroma of the dishes with the Umami taste. It’s widely used in pre-cooked foods as an additive or enhancer, but here we’re more interested in talking about natural Umami.
Scientists debated for several decades about whether it was a basic taste and eventually officially accepted Umami as the fifth taste when they discovered specific receptors in the tongue that were activated by detecting the new and unusual flavour.
The UMAMI taste in food.
Some internationally recognised foods known for their delicious taste contain a large dose of Umami, including cured meat, seafood , some fish like bonito, and vegetables like tomatoes, asparagus and mushrooms. Umami is also found in fermented foods such as cheese, beer and soy sauce.
Umami is present in many dishes worldwide, and it’s precisely what gives many of them that gourmet character or what adds that strong, particular taste, and generates so much “addiction” and the desire to repeat the taste of the food over and over again. This is what happens with delicacies like Serrano ham, cheeses and wines that are sought-after all over the world. So it’s easy to see how we can travel around the globe with Umami as it’s found in an endless amount of gourmet dishes in many destinations.
By using these foods to season others, we also give them that touch of umami flavour-enhancer. One example is when we use shavings of ham or bone and add it to grated cheese.
Although we may not be able to clearly identify the Umami taste in some foods, it’s now increasingly common to use it when cooking to add more flavour. The figures speak for themselves, 40 years ago MSG production stood at 200,000 tonnes per annum, today it’s 3 million tonnes.
