TRENDS: Umami, The Fifth Taste
| The weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal devoted a lot of space to an article called “A New Taste Sensation,” umami. This was news two years ago when Anna Kasabian and David Kasabian wrote their seminal book on the topic, The Fifth Taste: Cooking with Umami. It was the talk of gastronomy circles, and THE NIBBLE wrote a long article on umami. But, like sous vide and Gewürtztraminer, it didn’t trickle down to most fine food enthusiasts—it’s just a bit too east of mainstream. We have often thought about teaching a course on umami, because the fifth taste is not as easy to understand as the other four: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Want to taste sweet? Sugar is unmistakable, and you can find that same taste in baked goods, fruit and other sweet substances. The same with salt, the sourness of lemon juice or vinegar, and the bitterness of arugula. But there is no one umami flavor (the word itself means “deliciousness”), even though it is described as “brothy.” Umami foods are characterized as having a high level of glutamate, an amino acid; MSG, a manufactured form of it, adds flavor to food, just as sugar adds sweetness, salt adds saltiness and vinegar adds tartness—all heighten the flavors of the foods they enahnance. |  Parmesan cheese: salty or umami? |
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| Yet, back to the argument: We can identify sweet, salty, bitter and sour. What does umami taste like? You can name foods and dishes that contain umami flavor, but cannot point to any single, easily-recognizable flavor attribute. Here are some of the cornerstone products that showcase umami: MSG, Parmesan cheese, anchovies, soy sauce, dried mushrooms, ketchup and konbu, a large seaweed used to make dashi. What do they have in common? If you asked, what do ice cream, chocolate, orange juice, cherries and marzipan have in common, one might say “sweetness” or “sugar.” What about ketchup and Parmesan, seaweed and anchovies? One might describe the first four umami ingredients as salty, and try as we can, we still can’t get brothy out of a tomato or konbu, until they are made into broth. And this is why umami, the fifth taste, has not “broken out” in the West. You can train people how to combine ingredients for heightened umami flavors, you can hand out umami-enriched recipes, you can print lists of umami-rich foods for people to memorize, but you can’t train them to identify them “umami taste” as you can sweet taste, salty taste, etc. If someone had you taste watercress, it wouldn’t be too hard to classify it as bitter. If given bacon, ham, salt pork or sausage, you’d put them in the salt category. But, umami claims them as well. We would find a tomato sweet; umami calls it umami. See? None of this is addressed by The Wall Street Journal article or any other article we’ve read. We lack the scientific expertise to say that umami isn’t the fifth taste, experts say that it is. We just think that it double dips. It seems to us that every food that umami claims as its own can fall within one of the four existing classes, whereas sweet, salty, sour and better are completely discrete. All comments are welcome. | ||