Understanding Umami Flavor With a Simple Taste Test
The best way to understand umami flavor is to try it for yourself. We’ve developed a simple taste test to help people understand what umami tastes like and how to use it to improve their cooking.
This umami taste test can be done in 15 minutes, only requires a couple of ingredients, and is fun to do with friends.
What is Umami Flavor
Umami is a Japanese word often translated into English to mean a “pleasant savory taste.” The simplest way to define umami is any food with glutamic acid, whether it occurs naturally or is present after cooking, aging, or fermentation.
Many writers complain that it’s hard to describe umami in a couple of words, using its descriptive difficulties as a reason for disqualifying it from being a basic taste. As if art or love or beauty can easily be described in a single pithy sentence.
The challenge to describing any of the basic tastes is our natural impulse to describe them using their own names. When a dish is too sweet or too salty, we say it’s too sweet or too salty and assume everyone understands precisely what we mean.
One thing that differentiates umami from other basic tastes is that they are easily identified by specific things people can try, where the taste is so pronounced it overwhelms everything else, providing tasters with a baseline.
To understand sweet, people can have some sugar or honey; for sour, a sip or two of lemon juice. For bitter, chew on a couple of coffee beans or take a bite of bitter melon. For salty, half a teaspoon of sodium chloride is all it takes to embed salty deep in your brain.
With umami, it’s not so easy; even rich umami ingredients, such as parmesan cheese, cured meats, tomatoes, and mushrooms, have enough other flavors to cloud the issue.
Another way umami is different is the goal for most cooks is to maximize the amount of umami in their dishes. It’s rare for someone to say a dish is too savory or has too much umami.
This is very different from the other four basic tastes, where the goal is to create a balanced dish that has the right amount of other tastes to ensure a dish isn’t too sweet, too salty, or too bitter to eat.
Umami Taste
To understand umami’s distinctive taste, it can be helpful to talk about its characteristics, what it is, and what it is not.
Umami is often described as having a savory flavor that provides food with a richness and mouthfeel that coats the tongue.
Depending on the dish being eaten or the ingredients being tasted, it can be described as mouthwatering, subtle, and pleasant.
Some of the most common characteristics ascribed to umami are that it spreads across the tongue, creating mouthfeel, that there is a warmth and richness to it, and that it lasts a long time, lingering on the palate long after a bite is finished.
It’s often said to make a dish feel thicker, that it creates a mouthwatering sensation, leaving a taster wanting more. The words most often associated with umami are savory and delicious.
Dishes lacking umami taste are often described as being flat, one-note, having simple flavors, and that the dish is forgettable, bland, and boring.
To help people understand umami, we created a simple taste test that anyone can do at home in fifteen minutes. It’s also the perfect thing to do with friends who love food.
The tasting uses vegetable stock as a base, along with MSG Seasoning to represent glutamates and Umami Powder to show how ribonucleotides multiply the amount of umami in a dish.
It’s worth noting that the whole monosodium glutamate (MSG) is bad for you has been debunked time and time again and that the truth of the matter is MSG is an easy and natural way to improve the taste of your food in the same way salt or sugar are added to dishes.
For a deeper exploration of the science of umami, glutamic acid, and its role in making food taste delicious, read Everything You Need to Know About Umami.
This taste test uses vegetable broth as a baseline. The stock is divided into four cups, with a few additions to demonstrate umami’s characteristics.
The first cup is vegetable stock by itself. In the second cup, MSG Seasoning is added to represent glutamates by themselves. In the third, Umami Powder is added to represent nucleotides on their own.
MSG and Umami Powder are added to the fourth cup to demonstrate the synergistic effect that happens when glutamates and nucleotides are combined. This effect is the simplest way to describe an umami bomb.
Another fun thing to include in the tasting is miso soup, which played a key role in Dr. Ikeda’s work on the origin of umami. Miso soup has often been described as a pure umami.
Some things to discuss during the tasting are:
- How different does the broth alone taste compared to the other three cups?
- How long does the flavor from each option linger on your palate?
- How does the aroma of the broth change from cup to cup?
- Where does the flavor in each cup hit your palate? Where does it stay?
- Which cup do you want to take another sip from?
- How do the flavors in the cup relate to the taste of other umami rich ingredients such as tomatoes, cured meats, and fish sauces?
We’d love to hear about people’s experience with the taste test in the comment section below or by tagging us on Facebook or Instagram.
What is Umami Flavor
Ingredients
- 2 cups vegetable broth, low sodium preferred
- 1 tsp MSG Seasoning, divided
- 1 tsp Umami Powder, divided
Instructions
- Try a small taste of the Monosodium Glutamate and Umami Powder before starting the taste test. Make sure to take a sip of water before tasting each element to cleanse your palate.1 tsp MSG Seasoning, 1 tsp Umami Powder
- Warm the broth until it reaches the temperature of warm soup – usually around 60 to 90 seconds in a microwave.2 cups vegetable broth
- Divide the broth into four different cups. Keeping track of what is being added to each, set the four cups up in a row, stirring the appropriate ingredients into each.
- Cup 1 – ½ cup of broth.
- Cup 2 – ½ cup of broth plus ½ tsp of MSG Seasoning.
- Cup 3 – ½ cup of broth plus ½ tsp of Umami Powder.
- Cup 4 – ½ cup of broth plus ½ tsp of MSG Seasoning and ½ tsp of Umami Powder.
- Starting with Cup 1, taste each of the cups in order, taking a sip of water to cleanse your palate between each one.
Mark is an experienced food writer, recipe developer, and photographer who is also Umami’s publisher and CEO. A passionate cook who loves to cook for friends, he can often be found in the kitchen or by the grill testing new recipes.
More Info About Mark Hinds
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