![]() ![]() ( Dana Goodyear wrote about this process in 2011.) First, he tried blending them directly into the meat, but after months of experimenting, he took a different tack, creating “natural flavorings” he calls Umami Master Sauce, Umami Dust, and Umami Spray, to be added to a burger after it’s been cooked. Working from a list of umami-rich foods he found online, Fleischman set about maximizing the potential of the hamburger by using ingredients like cheese, seaweed, and dried fish to amplify its flavor. After his epiphany, he had another: umami might be the answer to his question, and the key to raising the bar on America’s favorite foods. He was eating a Double-Double, he told an interviewer in 2013, when he found himself wondering, “Why, over the years, do more pizza places and burger joints open up than any other kind of restaurant in this country?” Last week, over the phone, he told me that he had first read about umami a few years earlier, in various cookbooks. Adam Fleischman, the man behind the two dozen restaurants called Umami Burger, came up with the idea after having an epiphany at an In-N-Out Burger, in 2008. The contest, I assumed, would be straightforward: Who could make the dish that tasted the most intensely umami? It’s a challenge that one American chef and entrepreneur has already embarked upon in an aggressively commercial way. Wearing a headset and narrating his movements, each chef-employed, respectively, by the private dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Café Boulud, and Roberta’s-prepared a dish he’d devised to wow the judges. Javits Convention Center for the sixth annual Umami Recipe Competition, part of the International Restaurant and Foodservice Show. Last week, three of New York City’s finest chefs appeared on a stage at the Jacob K. ![]() Yet MSG has been largely stigmatized-a lazy shortcut, a headache-inducer-while umami has been unreservedly celebrated. In crystalline form, glutamates are known as MSG-palpable as sugar or salt, the reason why it’s hard to stop eating even the worst Chinese takeout. Any food in which glutamic acid occurs naturally or after cooking, aging, or fermentation is considered umami. He determined that the culprit was a single substance, glutamic acid, and he named its taste umami, from the Japanese word for delicious, umai umami translates roughly to “deliciousness.” Taste research from the past fifteen years has confirmed that molecular compounds in glutamic acid-glutamates-bind to specific tongue receptors this, apparently, is what makes the magic. Curious to know what was chemically responsibly for the distinct and dominant flavor of dashi, the stock that’s a staple of Japanese cooking, Ikeda examined closely the molecular composition of one of its main ingredients, a variety of seaweed. The word and its concept were coined, in the early twentieth century, by a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda. It hits the back of your throat and leaves you craving more.īut what does that actually mean? Isn’t that “fifth taste” just a combination of two or more of the other four? Umami, it turns out, is bolstered by science. That deep, dark, meaty intensity that distinguishes seared beef, soy sauce, ripe tomato, Parmesan cheese, anchovies, and mushrooms, among other things. It’s that other thing, the thing you didn’t even know needed a concept or a name until someone pointed it out. Ask someone who thinks that they know what umami is, and she’ll tell you it’s the “fifth taste,” after salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. Photograph by Eddie Jim/Fairfax Media via GettyĪlthough Americans have been using the word umami for the past decade and it’s been in use in the English language since 1979, its definition remains elusive to many. ![]()
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