Understanding Umami

Although chefs have long known that some ingredients—anchovies and soy sauce, for example—give dishes greater depth of flavor, they haven't always understood why. The answer lies in the groundbreaking research of a Japanese scientist named Kikunae Ikeda. In 1908, while trying to understand what made dashi broth so flavorful, Ikeda identified a "fifth taste"—umami, or, in Japanese, "deliciousness." He traced its source to glutamic acid, an amino acid plentiful in the seaweed and dried bonito flakes used in dashi.

For years, scientists thought there were only four primary tastes—tastes that can't be produced by combining others. Twentieth-century scientists debated whether umami was a true primary taste on par with sweet, sour, salty and bitter. But after researchers proved that umami foods could produce electrical signals in taste nerves, and after neuroscientists at the University of Miami found taste-bud receptors on the tongue for umami, the legitimacy of the "fifth taste" was no longer disputed.

Glutamic acid, the amino acid responsible for the umami sensation, occurs naturally in many foods, such as truffles, tomatoes and scallops. It is present in proteins and in foods that are aged or very ripe, or have been brewed or fermented, such as mushrooms, aged cheese, red wine—and soy sauce. Adding brewed soy sauce to any savory menu item can help its natural flavors "pop," making foods taste richer and more fully rounded without necessarily adding a pronounced Asian flavor.