I’ve heard some loose definitions of “umami” on cooking TV shows and found that I could never really describe it other than saying it is that feeling you get when you eat a great juicy cheeseburger with curly fries. I don’t even know if that is correct, but it is basically when something is really yummy.
Umami comes about when protein-rich foods such as meats, cheese, and mushrooms break down during cooking, aging, fermenting, or sun drying and produce L-glutamate. Glutamates are the salts from glutamic acids and since 2002, scientists have proven that humans do have taste receptors for L-glutamate. So it is essentially that yummy taste when something is really flavorful in a non-sweet, sour, bitter or salty way. That is umami.
Umami was first discovered by French chef Auguste Escoffier in the late 1800s when he figured out for the first time how to make veal stock in Paris. This was a surprising new sauce back then that made everything taste really good but didn’t fit neatly into the standard four tastes. A little later in Japan, a chemist by the name of Kikunae Ikeda was tasting some seaweed broth and he discovered the same thing: a yummy taste that wasn’t one of the four tastes. So he called it ‘umami’ which is the Japanese word roughly meaning yummy or deliciousness. Eventually, he narrowed the chemical compound down to monosodium glutamate and helped bring MSG into our culinary world through a Japanese food company. Thanks for that one Ikeda. Of course, I would still love to get my umami through veal stock instead of MSG, but they both have the same roots.
So what is umami: It is the fifth taste. It is that tasty feeling that isn’t sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. It is still really hard to describe. It’s that cheeseburger pictured above.
If you want to know more, you can listen to an NPR story on this subject from 2007 or read a book on it called Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. There are also several books out on the subject now which you can find on Amazon.
