The Fifth Taste
Roasted crickets taste hearty, nutty, and umami.
Umami is the fifth taste. When we hear sweet, salty, sour, or bitter, we immediately have an idea of how something might taste, but umami is a vague notion for many – it tastes somehow savory, hearty, and robust.
While the other four tastes were known since ancient times, umami remained undiscovered for a long time and has some catching up to do.
Today, we want to focus on this taste sensation.
The word "umami" is Japanese and means delicious, savory. In the early 20th century, there were already reports of a fifth taste sensation. It was discovered by the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda, according to legend, when he ate Dashi, a broth made from Kombu seaweed. Kikunae Ikeda had lived in Germany for a few years before and had eaten previously unknown foods like tomatoes and asparagus. While he was eating his Dashi, he noticed a taste that was neither salty nor bitter nor sweet nor sour. It reminded him of something he had also tasted in tomatoes and asparagus. Since it couldn't be assigned to any of the known taste sensations, it had to be a fifth taste. He named it as he found it: delicious – umami.
Kikunae Ikeda started experimenting in the laboratory and a year later, in 1908, he extracted glutamate from the Kombu seaweed. Glutamate is the salt of glutamic acid. It belongs to the amino acids and is therefore a building block of all proteins.
Despite this discovery, it took nearly 100 years for umami to be officially recognized and named. How did this happen?
When Cheese Ages and Tomatoes Sun-Dry
Umami is much subtler than the other taste sensations, and it has no clear equivalent in nature. The typical umami taste only emerges during cooking, drying, or fermentation. It occurs when cheese ages, tomatoes sun-dry, or meat is cooked.
During this process, the proteins in the food break down, releasing amino acids. Only then are the molecules small enough to dock onto our taste receptors, and we taste umami.
Umami in Fine Dining, Glutamate in Convenience Food
While gourmet cuisine experiments with licorice, pickled seaweed, fermented crickets, and soy sauce ice cream to incorporate the full-bodied umami taste into dishes, monosodium glutamate (MSG) doesn't enjoy the best reputation.
The essence that Kikunae Ikeda extracted from the Dashi seaweed in 1908 spread rapidly and was sold as monosodium glutamate worldwide. Instead of being used as an exquisite ingredient, it was mostly used in convenience food and gained a bad, even health-damaging reputation.
Negative health effects could not be scientifically proven. According to the German Society for Nutrition, Europeans consume eight to twelve grams of glutamate daily.
Objectively speaking, umami is the savory taste of hydrolyzed proteins. Whether they were produced in gourmet cuisine or in the lab is probably especially relevant from a culinary perspective.
Moreover, the most original human food source in the world contains a lot of glutamate: breast milk. While cow's milk contains only two milligrams per 100 milliliters, human breast milk contains more than ten times as much.
Umami is delicious, and with insects on the menu, a new and exciting field of promising taste creations opens up. We are excited to be a part of it.