Uncertain About Umami

Meat has it. Mushrooms have it. Tomato paste adds a burst of it.

Umami in the pantry

But what exactly is “umami,” the cryptic Japanese word used to describe food and taste experiences? The start of soup and stew season seems the right time to get ourselves into a tzimmes over this elusive quality.

“Umami" has grown in usage over the past five years. There was even a short-lived restaurant in Chagrin Falls called Umami. I contend that people stayed away because they had no idea what the name meant.

The dictionary definition of umami is “a category of taste in food (besides sweet, sour, salt, and bitter), corresponding to the flavor of glutamates, especially monosodium glutamate.”

Please. We all know what sweet, sour, salty, and bitter each tastes like. But glutamates? Get real.

Digging, I learned that umami is a savory taste described as brothy or meaty. Look for it in tomatoes, fish sauce, seaweed, green tea, and shitake mushrooms. I do not see how fish sauce and green tea can have anything in common. Or seaweed and tomatoes.

Kikunae Ikeda

Confused yet? Here’s more: Scientists have debated whether umami is a basic taste since Kikunae Ikeda first discovered it in 1908. In 1985, at the first Umami International Symposium in Hawaii, umami was acknowledged as the scientific term describing this taste of glutamates and nucleotides. 

Nucleotides? (And why was this symposium held in Hawaii?)

Nobuyuki Sakai, Ph.D., president of the Japan-headquartered Society for Research on Umami Taste, gives a short history of the umami movement on the Society’s website. 

All this talk about umami has only made it a more complex stew. I have but a vague sense of umami despite all the noise surrounding it. It is a tempest in a pot of green tea.

Perhaps my paternal grandmother was an umami pioneer in the 1970s, when she seasoned everything with Lawry’s, a flavoring that today's cooks avoid because it contains high levels of sodium and MSG. Naturally, it was the essence of umami.

I’d like to know your thoughts on umami—is it a genuine taste sensation or a myth? Does it deserve equal billing with easy-to-discern categories like sweet, salty, bitter, and sour? 

Have a cup of green tea and let me know in the comments below.

--

Don't go anonymous: Please type your name after your comments. It's as simple as that.