Everything You Need to Know About Umami

Understanding what umami is and how to use it can be the key to cooking more delicious food. One of five universal basic tastes, umami is found in ingredients and cuisines throughout the world, and for the cook who knows what they’re doing, it can be the secret to truly transcendent dishes.

Over the past decade or so, umami and the over-hyped umami bomb have become common terms in the cooking lexicon of chefs, food writers, and home cooks. Everywhere you turn these days, from jar labels to burger chains, everyone seems to be talking about how much umami is in their food.

What has been left out of the discussion is an understanding of the nature of umami and how the search for it has influenced generations of cooks for thousands of years. To help flush out those details, we gathered everything you need to know about umami in one place. 

Defining Umami

The simplest way to define umami is any food with free glutamic acid, whether it occurs naturally or is present after cooking, aging, or fermentation.

The word umami is a Japanese word that is often translated into English to mean a “pleasant savory taste.” It was coined by Dr. Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese chemist who did groundbreaking work to identify umami’s chemical structure.

Umami rich ingredients occur naturally across a diverse set of foods that range from parmesan cheese to tomatoes to aged beef to kombu, which is kelp used to make dashi.

The amount of umami in an ingredient can be increased using various cooking techniques that increase the amount of free glutamate in it. The amount of umami can also be increased exponentially by using the right combination of ingredients.

Underlying this simple answer is a question about the nature of flavor, how it’s defined, and the role it plays in the food we eat.

To help keep things clear, we’re using the more formal definitions of taste and flavor, which are often used interchangeably. A taste has a distinct set of taste bud receptors in the oral cavity. Flavor, the more encompassing term, includes the integrated effect of taste, smell, and mouthfeel. You can learn more about these distinctions in the frequently asked questions below. 

A Brief History of Umami

Umami’s discovery as a distinct fifth taste comes from the work of Dr. Kikunae Ikeda, who was a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University. Ikeda thought there was a distinct quality in Dashi different from the other four basic tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, and sour). 

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He thought umami should be considered a basic taste because it couldn’t be produced by any combination of the other four. As Ikeda said, “it is usually so faint and overshadowed by other stronger tastes that it is often difficult to recognize it unless attention is specifically directed towards it.” 

To identify what made the taste unique, Ikeda worked for a long time conducting a chemical analysis of dashi that involved boiling kombu down to a tar like substance and using an evaporation technique to isolate specific compounds for testing. Dashi is a type of stock used in Japanese cooking made by soaking kombu and katsuobushi.

Eventually, Ikeda found that glutamic acid, which is an amino acid, is what gives dashi its unique flavor. The name he created for it was umami, which comes from a combination of umai “delicious” and mi “taste.” You can read more about Ikeda and his groundbreaking work in Discovering Umami – A Brief History of the Fifth Flavor.

The second fundamental discovery in understanding umami was made in 1913 by Shintaro Kodama, who worked with Professor Ikeda. Using dried bonito flakes, Kodama discovered that the nucleotide inosinate is the umami component in katsuobushi. This helped open a wide range of ingredients as potential sources of umami, specifically proteins such as beef, pork, and certain types of fish and seafood.

In 1957, Akira Kuninaka made a vital breakthrough working with dried shiitake mushrooms when he identified the synergistic effect between ribonucleotides and glutamate.

The synergy between the two comes from an effect where the intensity of the umami flavor in a dish is greater than expected from the individual ingredients alone.

The strength of the synergy between glutamate and inosinate varies according to the ratio between the two. The effect is strongest when the ratio is 1 to 1, which in some testing has been shown to create an effect where the flavor is seven to eight times as strong as either would produce by itself. This has led to the saying that with umami 1 + 1 = 8. An effect you can experience for yourself if you try our umami taste test.

This synergistic taste effect is often seen in everyday cooking when glutamates in vegetables and inosinate in meat are combined. This is one of the reasons soups, stews, and chilis made with meat and vegetables are so savory.

Umami as a Basic Taste 

For a long time in Western cooking, there were four widely accepted basic tastes – sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. The history of these four stretches back to Aristotle and the Greeks, who, in addition to the four generally accepted primary tastes, included astringent, pungent, and harsh. Over time others were added and subtracted to these core four. 

Although Aristotle didn’t have a name for it doesn’t mean that umami is a new taste. In many ways, it has been hiding in plain sight, traveling under a series of aliases – savory, meaty, rich, etc.- making it seem like a hundred different things all at once.

When Ikeda coined the term a little over a hundred years ago, it gave voice to a distinctive taste that has been an integral part of cuisines around the world for thousands of years. Umami is at the heart of Asian cuisines built around dashi, miso, and soy sauce. It’s also an integral part of murri, a rich fermented barley sauce used in Byzantine and Arab cuisines.

In the West, cooks have been building umami into their dishes since the beginning of time with a direct line from the Romans’ beloved garum, a fermented fish sauce, to Escoffier using mother sauces to redefine French cuisine, to our abiding love today of aged cheeses, cured meats, and even ketchup (Wikipedia).

What ties the different aspects of umami together is they’re all rich in glutamates, either because it occurs naturally within an ingredient or because a cooking technique turns glutamic acid into free glutamates.

The acceptance of umami as a basic taste in the West has only come over the past few decades. Its acceptance has come in part due to research identifying specific umami receptors. It also helps that there is a greater openness to global cuisines, along with a better understanding of Ikeda’s work and the nature of monosodium glutamate. 

A Quick Word About Glutamates, Inosinate, & Guanylate

Umami is primarily found in three substances: glutamate, inosinate, and guanylate. Understanding the type of ingredients each is found in and how they react to different cooking techniques makes it easier to develop umami in a dish.

One of the most common amino acids found in nature, glutamic acid, can be found naturally in large quantities in meat, fish, vegetables, and some dairy. It is a non-essential amino acid, meaning our bodies can synthesize it.

Without delving too deeply into the chemistry of umami, glutamic acid by itself doesn’t deliver much flavor. Only when it’s broken down into its free state, often referred to as glutamates, free glutamates, or L-glutamate, and comes in contact with umami taste receptors do ingredients deliver their full umaminess.

This is generally done through cooking, aging, fermenting, drying, or smoking an ingredient to start breaking down the proteins in it – which releases the glutamates.

Nucleotides are organic molecules that play a primary role in metabolism. The primary ones that impart umami are inosinate, found primarily in meat, and guanylate, generally found in plants and fungi.

One of the reasons why umami is often found in aged and fermented foods is that as food ages, its proteins break down, freeing the amino acids through a process called proteolysis, which increases their level of free glutamates.

Tasting Umami

The best way to understand what umami tastes like is to try it for yourself. We’ve developed a simple taste test to help people understand umami flavor that illustrates how it can be used to improve dishes.

The tasting uses vegetable stock as a base with MSG Seasoning representing glutamates and Umami Powder, demonstrating the multiplying effect of ribonucleotides. 

The tasting is something anyone can do at home in fifteen minutes and is a blast to do with a group of friends who love food and will expand your understanding of how flavor works.

How to Get More Umami Into Your Cooking

Umami is frequently described as having a savory flavor that gives dishes a richness and mouthfeel that coats the tongue. Depending on the ingredient, it is often described as mouthwatering, subtle, and pleasant.

A unique aspect of umami, compared to the other tastes, is that the goal for cooks is to maximize the amount of umami taste in a dish. With other tastes, the goal is to create a balanced dish that has the right amount of the other tastes to make sure a dish isn’t too sweet, too salty, or too bitter.

Umami is generally found in ingredients that contain high levels of glutamates, inosinate, and guanylate. There are several ways to introduce more umami into your cooking. The first is to use umami rich ingredients such as parmesan cheese, black garlic, or soy sauce.

Protein sources include fish and shellfish, along with cured or aged meats. Vegetables with a lot of umami include asparagus, tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, and spinach. Dried mushrooms, especially shitake, porcini, and morels, are a good choice, especially when combined with other ingredients. On the beverage side of things, green tea is an excellent source.

Some common techniques for adding savoriness to foods are dry aging, curing, smoking, and fermentation.

How to Cook with Umami Foods has an in-depth look at how to use different cooking methods and which ingredients add the most umami taste to dishes. Another resource is the Umami Information Center’s database of ingredients, which includes the different levels of amino acids and nucleotides in various ingredients. 

A simple way to add more umami to a dish is to use one of the umami seasonings or sauces on the market. Anjimoto, founded by Ikeda, sells pure monosodium glutamate or MSG, a natural product that enhances flavor, similar to adding salt to a dish. 

Favorite Umami Recipes

As you might imagine, we’ve developed a few recipes over the years that are rich in umami.

Black Garlic Risotto – Our favorite umami focused recipe uses dried porcini, aged parmesan cheese, and fermented black garlic to create one of the best risottos we’ve ever eaten.

Homemade Tomato Sauce – To increase the depth of this tomato sauce, we use three unique ingredients (tomato paste, anchovy paste, and Worcestershire sauce) to add layers of savoriness that elevate this sauce over anything you can buy in a jar. 

Au Jus Sauce – The best au jus sauces are filled with a rich umami taste that clings to slow-cooked roast beef and French dip sandwiches, adding flavor and moisture.

Homemade Gravy Recipe – A simple way to improve any sauce or gravy is to use umami’s synergistic effect. Our favorite gravy recipe does this by fortifying the stock with aromatics and adding a half teaspoon of MSG and Umami Powder. This small addition deepens the gravy’s flavor without losing sight of itself. 

Adding a small amount of MSG seasoning and Umami Powder in a 1-to-1 ratio is a simple way to use umami’s synergistic effect to improve stocks and broths without changing their underlying flavor.

A Brief Word About Umami and MSG

There is a long history of monosodium glutamate, commonly known as MSG, in the United States that starts with a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine and continues today that, unfortunately, is filled with misinformation, cultural misunderstandings, and more than a tinge of racism. It’s disturbing and unfortunate and a story that deserves a deeper dive and more thorough retelling than we have room for here.

The fact is that MSG is a naturally occurring substance that is not only safe to eat – it is also one of the easiest ways to improve the taste of food. It should be another tool that cooks use, like salt, pepper, and the plethora of other herbs and spices lining our spice racks.

Take the time to educate yourself on the facts about MSG.

• Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is nothing more than the sodium salt of the amino acid glutamic acid. Glutamic acid is present in our bodies, occurs naturally in many ingredients, and is a regular addition to many food additives.
• MSG is primarily produced today through a fermentation process using starch from sugar beets, sugar cane, or molasses. The fermentation process used to make MSG is similar to that used to make yogurt, vinegar, and wine.
• The FDA considers the addition of MSG to foods to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS). Although many people identify themselves as sensitive to MSG, in studies with such individuals given MSG or a placebo, scientists have not been able to consistently trigger reactions.

For more information, read the FDA’s FAQ on MSG.

Frequently Asked Questions About Umami

Here are some common questions and terms that are helpful in understanding umami and how taste works.

If you want to learn why we named our publication Umami, you can read a brief history on our About Page.