Umami: why the fifth taste is so important | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

Umami: why the fifth taste is so important | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

Some extracts:
Umami has been variously translated from Japanese as yummy, deliciousness or a pleasant savoury taste, and was coined in 1908 by a chemist at Tokyo University called Kikunae Ikeda. [searching for its root he eventually pinpointed] glutamate, an amino acid, as the source of savoury wonder. He then learned how to produce it in industrial quantities and patented the notorious flavour enhancer MSG.

What gives good glutamate?
A quintessential example of something umami-tasting, says Paul Breslin of Monell University, who was among the first scientists to prove the existence of umami taste receptors, is a broth or a soup: "Something that has been slow-cooked for a long time." Raw meat, he points out, isn't that umami. You need to release the amino acids by cooking, or "hanging it until it is a little desiccated, maybe even moulded slightly, like a very good, expensive steak". Fermentation also frees the umami ? soy sauce, cheese, cured meats have it in spades. In the vegetable kingdom, mushrooms are high in glutamate, along with those favoured by children such as petit pois, sweetcorn and sweet cherry tomatoes. Interestingly, human milk is one of the highest MSG-containing mammalian milks.

When you combine ingredients containing  different umami-giving compounds, they enhance one another so the dish packs more flavour points than the sum of its parts. This is why the cooked beef, tomato and cheese in a cheese burger form a ménage à trois made in heaven.

Why umami?
Just as humans evolved to crave sweetness for sugars and, therefore, calories and energy, and loathe bitter to help avoid toxins, umami is a marker of protein (which is made up of amino acids, which are essential for life). This begs two interesting questions. First, why is our innate penchant for umami best served by cooked or aged foods? Breslin's answer is that cooking or preserving our main protein sources detoxifies them.

Force for good
Lacing cheap, fattening, non-nutritious foods with MSG to make them irresistible is clearly not responsible, but some argue that glutamate can be used responsibly to good effect. Breslin says one of his key motivations is finding ways through taste research to feed malnourished people. "What you want," he says "are things that are very tasty that kids will eat, that will go down easy and will help them."