Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (45 page)

The best English words we have to express umami are savory, meaty, brothy, and full. But these words don’t do it justice. Describing umami without using the word
umami
would be like trying to describe the taste of salt without using the word
salt
. You could say salt tastes briny, metallic, minerally, stony, or savory, but in reality the Basic Taste salt is none of these things. These words describe flavors that usually occur in tandem with salt. Salt tastes salty and there’s just no other way to describe it accurately. This is also true of the other four Basic Tastes. Bitter tastes bitter. Sweet tastes sweet. Sour tastes sour. And umami tastes . . . umami. The reason we say it tastes meaty or brothy is because umami is the primary taste in meat and broth.

The umami taste is thought to signal protein, since many foods high in umami are proteins. And in fact, malnourished, protein-deprived human research subjects prefer higher levels of umami than those who are well fed. Some scientists still don’t think umami should be considered a Basic Taste. I do, though. It’s something we can clearly detect on our tongue. It’s distinct from the other four Basic Tastes. We have a receptor for it. And it adds crave-ability to foods in a way that other things can’t. That’s enough for me to give it a point on the Taste Star.

Umami makes things taste more delicious, fuller, and rounder. It’s the deep, rich sensory difference between raw meat and cooked meat. Ground beef tastes (hopefully!) fresh and clean. It’s fairly bland unless you doctor it up with condiments that bring it to life, as with steak tartare. But a cooked steak—on its own with nothing more than a char—becomes a succulent treat, oozing with flavor that’s salty, fatty, beefy, and something else. That something else is umami.

Umami is what you’re looking for when you dip steamed rice and briny raw fish into soy sauce at a sushi bar. Not too much, unless you want to be branded An American for your excess. The fermented soy adds a depth of flavor that complements the mild freshness of the fish. If you didn’t mind the horrified looks, you could salt a piece of sushi or sashimi and you’d enhance the flavor of it, but you’d be missing the oomph of umami that soy sauce delivers beyond saltiness.

Umami is what you add when you sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese on your pizza or pasta. Aged Parmesan cheese is packed so full of glutamate that it almost deserves its own category. It adds a richness to Italian food that makes us crave it.

It’s important to note the distinction between umami and salt. Many of the umami-rich ingredients I mentioned above (meat, soy sauce, Parmesan cheese) are also salty. This isn’t necessarily a coincidence. Scientists believe that the sodium part of compounds such as monosodium glutamate, disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate interacts with the glutamate to make things umamier. Regardless of how this happens, it’s important that you differentiate the taste of umami from that of salt. The easiest way to do this is to complete the Isolating Umami exercise in this chapter, which uses the prototypical form of umami: monosodium glutamate (MSG). When I tell people outside the food industry that we’re going to taste MSG plain, they tend to freak out. They worry about getting headaches, a symptom of Chinese restaurant syndrome, an ailment that supposedly follows ingestion of MSG although there is no research that validates this. The way to think about MSG is the same way you think about salt. They’re both out there, you consume them every day, and it would be odd if you ever ate them plain, unless you were doing an exercise from a book on the science of taste.

Also like salt, MSG and the other forms of umami occur naturally in foods. Glutamates are found in all sources of protein including meat, cheese, and poultry, plus certain vegetables such as tomatoes, mushrooms, and soybeans. While salt and umami are two very distinct taste qualities, they enhance each other. Both salt and umami occur naturally in foods and both are refined and used as a seasoning. MSG is used mostly in Asia but also sometimes in the West, mostly without consumers’ or diners’ knowledge.

In 1909, Kikunae Ikeda, a professor in Japan, identified monosodium glutamate as a distinct taste that differed from the other four Basic Tastes and founded a company called Ajinomoto to manufacture and sell MSG as a seasoning. There’s not much difference between buying refined, crystallized salt to shake onto your food and buying MSG to use as a seasoning, but for some reason we demonize MSG. I believe this has something to do with our lack of understanding of umami. At reasonable levels MSG—again, like salt—is not to be feared.

Most cultures eat foods containing glutamate, some more than others. One study measured the average “daily dose” of glutamate consumed by residents of different countries. The average U.S. intake was 550 milligrams of glutamate (per kilogram of food) per day. Contrast this to Asian countries such as Japan
and Korea, where the intake was 1,200 to 1,700 milligrams per day—two to three times that of the United States.

Americans’ ability to detect umami has been proved scientifically to be just as good as that of Japanese subjects, although this research tested detection level, not identification: in other words, people could taste it whether or not they could come up with a word for it or a way to describe it. This testing was done in the 1980s, well before the concept of umami was even starting to make its way to the mainstream. We could detect umami long before we knew what it was.

It wasn’t until 2000 that a scientist identified the receptor on our tongue that responds to it. The fact that this discovery happened within the borders of the United States certainly helped its cause. Americans could finally claim a bit of umami history as their own. The West became increasingly conscious of umami with the rise in popularity of Asian cuisines. But most cultures have been seasoning their food with umami-rich ingredients for thousands of years. Archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites have even found evidence of
garum
, a fermented fish sauce used as a seasoning in the time of Julius Caesar just as Asian cultures use fish sauce today.

The arsenal of umami implements includes Parmesan cheese, Worcestershire sauce, bacon, Vegemite, mushrooms, tomato ketchup, anchovies (the source of umami in a Caesar salad), and Maggi sauce.

David Chang is the chef-owner of Momofuku, Ssäm, and Ko restaurants in New York City. Years ago he noticed that Italians and Spanish lauded their own domestic hams while they ignored equally artisanal southern American cured pork legs. Chang’s reverent treatment of Virginia hams at Momofuku Ssäm is worthy of a patriotic culinary medal. Beyond ham (which is loaded with glutamate), his food is decidedly influenced by Asia. More recently he saw another parallel, this time between soy sauce, the reigning king of umami in Asia, and Maggi sauce, which is used in Europe. When he opened his restaurant Má Pêche, he put a bottle of Maggi sauce on each table, a move so clever and lacking pretension that I liked the restaurant even before my food arrived. Born in Switzerland “to bring added taste to meals,” Maggi today is owned by Nestlé and sold around the world. It has the same thin viscosity as soy sauce and delivers the same deep, rich flavor of umami. But while soy sauce gets its oomph from the brewing process,
Maggi unabashedly lists as ingredients disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate: two of the three pure forms of umami on Earth.

We are exposed to the taste of umami well before we’re conscious of it, or of anything, really. Human breast milk is high in umami, far higher than cow’s milk. But our first experience with umami is in utero—amniotic fluid contains glutamates. We’re literally floating in umami until we enter the world.

Source: International Glutamate Information Service

When the large protein molecules in foods are broken down into smaller molecules, they become more flavorful and develop umami. This breakdown is usually a result of cooking, fermenting, drying, or aging. Imagine sucking on a huge cherry tomato that’s two inches in diameter. You’ll get very little of the taste of it while it’s whole. You don’t really know how it savors until you chew it down into smaller pieces, when the intense tomatoey flavor is released. This is a good analogy for when meat is raw or cheeses are young: their protein molecules are big and stingy with their flavor. When meat is aged and cooked, or when cheese is aged, the protein breaks down into smaller pieces. The smaller the pieces, the more flavor they offer up.

When I first discovered that there was a huge selection of aged cheeses on the market beyond Parmesan, I went a bit nuts and I bought a huge half-wheel of three-year-old aged Gouda from a local cheese shop for a dinner party. This cheese was a deep, dark, almost orange color, with crystalline crunchies in it. Over the three years it had been aging, the big protein molecules had been breaking down into smaller, more flavorful ones. These crystals were amino
acid clusters indicating age and, as a result, huge umami taste. It was an intense, concentrated cheese that tasted so savory it was almost meaty. The lesson I had not yet learned about food that’s really high in umami is that a little bit goes a long way. Instead of eating huge hunks as you do with younger cheeses such as mozzarella, my dinner party guests ate tiny shards of it, commenting on the amazingly deep flavor. A year later I still had a huge piece of the Gouda on hand. Each time I entertained, I served richer and richer pieces of it as it continued to age, until I eventually burned myself—and my immediate circle of friends—out on my then-four-year-old aged Gouda.

The vast majority of the cheese that’s sold in the United States is semisoft, young varieties such as mozzarella and cheddar. Cheese develops umami as it ages, so these young cheeses are like children: a mere glimmer of what they could become in their maturity. As a result, we eat pizzas and tacos and sandwiches with cheese that provides very little taste beyond salt and of course a
fatty mouthfeel. If we were to swap some of that low-flavor, nubile cheese for an umami-rich veteran, we could get away with using a lot less of it. This would be a win-win solution for the diner: you’d ingest fewer calories that deliver more sensory input.

An interesting and confounding thing about umami is that humans love—crave—foods that are high in umami, yet we don’t really enjoy the taste of it on its own. When you do the Isolating Umami exercise you’ll notice that the taste of pure umami in water isn’t exactly yummy. In fact, it’s a bit odd.

Even though it’s an odd sensory experience on its own, when umami occurs naturally in a food (or is added unnaturally), it functions as the beer goggles of taste. When you ingest umami-rich molecules, everything you eat with them becomes more beautiful: meaty, salty, flavorful, delicious. To describe one of the sensory effects of umami, Shizuko Yamaguchi of the Ajinomoto Company uses the word
mouthfulness
, which, although a mouthful, says exactly what it means. Umami makes the flavor of what’s in your mouth feel full of depth. It fills your mouth with more of the flavor of the food it accompanies. Some people refer to this mouth-filling sensation as
round
, as in
That Parmesan cheese has a nice, round flavor.

Research has proved that humans prefer soup with more glutamate over soup with less, all other tastes and flavors being equal. Other research has shown that adding umami to foods (via MSG in that particular experiment) can make them more palatable to frail, elderly patients who are at a below-average weight, and help them put on weight. It increased the flow of saliva, which is compromised in many elderly people and is important for getting the full flavor from foods. And it somehow also improved immune function, possibly by making the food taste better and making the eaters happier and, as a result, healthier.