What is Umami?

What exactly is umami? Taking its name from Japanese, umami is a pleasant savoury taste imparted by glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, which occur naturally in many foods including meat, fish, vegetables and dairy products. As the taste of umami itself is subtle and blends well with other tastes to expand and round out flavors, most people don’t recognize umami when they encounter it, but it plays an important role making food taste delicious. Umami is a distinct, difficult to describe flavor caused by the interaction of glutamates, a naturally occurring amino acid, with receptors on the tongue. Some people call umami “the fifth taste,” as it is distinctly not sweet, sour, hot, or salty. In addition to having a unique standalone flavor, umami appears to enhance foods it is combined with, making other flavors richer and more intense. The concept of umami is ancient, although the official term is relatively recent.

Every time someone puts ketchup on fries, they are using the principle of umami. Both potatoes and tomatoes have high amounts of free glutamates, which interact with each other to create a distinctive flavor. Other foods with an abundance of free glutamates include seafood, shiitake mushrooms, meats, carrots, and seaweed, among many others. Many of these foods have been traditionally paired to enhance their natural umami flavor.

The discovery of umami is credited to Kikunae Ikeda, a researcher at Tokyo Imperial University. Ikeda was researching the unique flavor of seaweed broth when he isolated a distinctive compound which he identified as umami, or savory, since it did not fit with the other four identified tastes.

When humans eat, they use all of their senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) to form general judgments about their food, but it is taste that is the most influential in determining how delicious a food is. Conventionally, it has been thought that our sense of taste is comprised of four basic, or ‘primary’, tastes, which cannot be replicated by mixing together any of the other primaries: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. However, it is now known that there is actually a fifth primary taste: umami.

There has been some controversy over umami. Some people believe that it is not, in fact, a distinct flavor, and wish that it was not classified as the fifth taste. Others have historically had concerns about glutamates, MSG in particular, claiming that the compounds have deleterious health effects. Especially in the West, the concept of umami was not as readily adopted as it was in Asia, as is reflected by the lack of an English word for the taste. However, Western chefs have slowly embraced the concept, designing dishes which harness the power of umami, whether it is truly a distinct taste or simply a subset of another.