Mmmmmmmm! . . . Umami!

What comes next in the following list?

1) Sweet

2) Salty

3) Sour

4) Bitter

5) ________

You may be drawing a blank (pun intended). If so, it’s entirely understandable. Traditional Western cooking identifies only the four items named above as the “basic tastes” our taste buds are designed sensitive to. But it’s recently (in the year 2000) been proven that there is a fifth basic taste that our taste buds are designed to detect.

The name of the fifth basic taste?

Umami.

No, I didn’t just insult your mother. Umami is the name of the taste. It’s a fusion of a couple of Japanese words that together mean something like “essence of savor.” It was first identified in 1907 by a Japanese professor named Kikunae Ikeda, who also found a way to crystalize from seaweed broth the substance that causes this taste. He then sold the process to a company named Ajinomoto, which is makes about a third of all the 1.5 million metric tons of this substance that is used as a food flavoring every year in the world.

Despite the exotic origin of the good professor’s artifically distilled substance (i.e., seaweed broth), national versions of the substance are actually very common. In fact, it is the most common amino acid in the food we eat, found in virtually anything with protein. Our bodies even make the stuff. It’s part of us. Humans have a umami taste.

It’s also in loads of things we eat: meat, fish, fowl, cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed, soy sauce, green tea, red wine, and a host of others. As a result, umami is an extraordinarily common taste . . . so common in fact that Americans don’t normally identify it as a separate taste. It’s in too many of our foods.

If you want to get a full strength taste sensation of umami, here’s what to do: Go to your grocery store (or simply your kitchen) and get a container of Accent flavor enhancer. It has just one ingredient: the artificial umami-inducing substance that Prof. Kikunae distilled. Put a little of the Accent in your mouth (or dissolve it in water and hold that in your mouth) and in a few seconds you will experience full strength umami.

It a kind of “meaty” flavor (unsurprisingly, since the stuff is in meat). Almost like salty, but not salty.

Once you taste it, you can instantly identify it in foods you’ve eaten in the past. After I did the Accent test, I immediately identified it as something I taste when eating very ripe tomatoes (ripe tomatoes have ten times the amount of the umami-causing substance as unripe ones).

While doing some web searching about umami, I found a good number of articles on it. Here are two of the more informative:

FIRST ARTICLE (WARNING! Evil file format! [.pdf])

SECOND ARTICLE

Now, at this point you may be all curious to go out and try the Accent test to find out what umami tastes like. Good! But you may be a little less anxious to do so once I tell you the name of the substance Prof. Kikunae distilled from seaweed broth.

The ubiquitous amino acid that causes umami is glutamic acid. That may not mean much to you. (It didn’t to me, though I take its derivative L-glutamine as a nutritional supplement for muscle building.) The name of the artificial version that Prof. Kikunae discovered, however, is much more well known: It’s monosodium glutamate or MSG.

MSG has gotten a bad rap in recent years, with some people absolutely convinced that the substance is pure evil and others equally convinced that it has no harmful effects at all. However that may be, a small taste of MSG for purposes of identifying the taste umami is worth it.

After all, if I’ve got a basic taste that I never knew about, I want to know what that taste is like!

(What I want to know now is whether there is yet another basic taste–hot–as reckoned in traditional Chinese cooking. Whether “hot” or “spicy” is a distinct taste is something I’ve looked into a bit and would love to see thoroughly argued.)

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin