Umami

 

My wife and I recently returned from the annual International Festival of Wine and Food at the Banff Springs hotel, where the master of ceremonies, Tim Hanni, presented a fascinating (and very funny) seminar on matching wine with food.

Much of Hanni’s talk was devoted to exactly how the sense of taste works. It’s amazing, but all the enormously varied tastes we enjoy as we eat different foods are technically made up of just a handful of basic tastes. Traditionally, those have been listed as sweet, sour, salt and bitter; but increasingly, Western scientists have begun to accept the long-held Japanese belief that there is a fifth basic taste, called “umami”–a taste Hanni, who is also a chef, is particularly interested in. ( In fact, he has a T-shirt that proclaims him “The Swami of Umami.”)

Saltiness is produced primarily by sodium chloride, sourness by acids, and sweetness mainly by sucrose. We’re a thousand times better at detecting bitterness than any of the others, probably because most natural poisons taste bitter.

As for “umami,” which is often translated as “savory,” it’s the taste of glutamate, an amino acid found throughout living things, including ourselves. Protein-rich foods like cheese, meat and fish therefore have lots of glutamate. In some foods, glutamate occurs in “free” form–not bound up with protein–and that’s when umami is particularly strong. Foods rich in free glutamate taste good themselves and can enhance the flavors of other foods. Parmesan cheese, for instance, is rich in glutamate; so is tomato sauce. Grapefruit, potatoes, apples, oranges and mushrooms all have plenty, as well. And so, of course, does monosodium glutamate, or MSG, a favorite seasoning of Oriental cooks.

The evidence that umami is a fifth basic taste is growing rapidly. Recently, for example, two University of Miami researchers reported that they’ve discovered that certain taste buds in the mouths of animals react only to MSG. This backs up other research, in which the majority of individuals fed three samples of chicken stock, identical except for the presence of salt and MSG, preferred the taste of the stock with the MSG. They described it as richer, more savory, and more chicken-like.

MSG is nothing but sodium, glutamate and water. It doesn’t make food taste saltier, nor is it high in sodium (it contains only one-third the sodium of ordinary salt and is used in much smaller amounts). A small number of people claim to have a sensitivity to MSG which causes them discomfort if they ingest it in larger-than-normal amounts, but for most people, MSG is completely safe and simply makes food taste better.

Taste, of course, is detected by taste buds, located primarily on the back, sides and tip of the tongue, on the palate, and in the throat. Each taste bud is like a tiny computer that analyzes, codes and sends to the brain inputs from as many as 100 sensory cells. One end of these specialized cells is exposed to the environment in the mouth; the other end releases chemical neurotransmitters which stimulate the nerve fibers that send taste signals to the brain.

We’re all born liking sweet things and disliking anything bitter or sour. This makes sense: mother’s milk, after all, is sweet, as are most ripe fruits and vegetables. Unripe or toxic fruits and vegetables are more likely to be sour or bitter.

Some of us find more foods bitter than others do. Consider this list: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, buttermilk, cabbage, cauliflower, coffee, collard and mustard greens, cottage cheese, grapefruit, radishes, rutabaga, sauerkraut, spinach, strong cheeses, turnips. My mother will recognize it as a list of things I wouldn’t eat as a kid. To me, they all tasted bitter.

 

Well, Mom, I finally have an excuse: I may be a “supertaster.” Researchers have found evidence that approximately 25 percent of people are supertasters and find a synthetic compound, propylthiouracil (PROP), intensely bitter. Some 50 percent find it moderately bitter; about 25 percent can’t taste it at all. Evidence indicates that supertasters may experience an overall higher level of tasting ability than others, and may actually have more taste receptors than non-supertasters. They appear to be more responsive to many bitter compounds, including those in coffee, grapefruit juice and green tea, perceive saccharin and sucrose as sweeter than other people do, seem to be more sensitive to oral pain, and find hot foods hotter than other people do.

(Of course, I may also have suffered from “neophobia,” the fear of new things–a survival trait if the “new thing” happens to be poisonous!. Tests show people are unwilling to try even ordinary foods like beefsteak and oatmeal if told they’re “laguna steaks” and “lat.” And some foods simply disgust us. Something slimy, like oysters, may arouse “secondary disgust” — we just don’t like the way it looks. But disgust varies from culture to culture. Various cultures, after all, eat giant water bugs, fried cockroach eggs, dog meat, rat stew, grasshoppers, grubs and sheep’s head.)

On the other hand, even supertasters can learn to like the foods they hated as a kid. One interesting point Hanni made in his talk in Banff was that taste is far more complex than just a neurochemical reaction to the five basic tastes. Many other factors figure into it. If your mother always fed you boiled spinach when you had a cold, and cuddled and played with you at the same time, you may love boiled spinach, despite the fact it’s one of the most disgusting foods on the planet (I’m sorry, is my prejudice showing?) because you learned to associate it with something pleasant. Similarly, the taste of the most expensive red wine on the planet is not one that someone who has never tasted any red wine before is going to cotton to. Appreciating the sometimes bitter and astringent tastes of wine is something you learn, by associating drinking fine wine with other pleasures.

As for the trick of matching wine with food, Hanni’s whole point was that you can match your favorite wine, whether red or white, dry or sweet, with any food, if you make an effort to balance the food to the wine. That’s because the taste of a particular flavor effects how you perceive the next flavor you taste. (Drinking orange juice right after brushing your teeth was the specific example he used.) To make that white zinfandel you’re fond of go with your food, you just need to season the food properly. Essentially, sweet or savory (umami) foods will make wine taste less sweet, more acidic (sourer) and more bitter, while sour or salty foods make wines taste sweeter, fruitier, and less bitter. By adding the appropriate condiments–vinegar, chutney, soy sauce, salt, etc.–you can bring any food into better balance with any wine. (Spicy foods, by the way, make wine taste more bitter, because they sensitize the mouth.)

As we approach the peak eating season of the year, otherwise known as Christmas, it’s encouraging to know that scientists are laboring hard all over the world to understand how we taste things, research that I predict can only lead to making food taste even better.

Pass the glutamate.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/1999/11/umami/

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