Roseville's golden grouper is a showcase of bold, savory umami flavors Photo by Howard Lipin. | The Fifth Dimension
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By Peter Rowe
There's a fifth taste? Absolutely -- just as there was a fifth Beatle.
Most people know the John, Paul, George and Ringo of taste buds: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. But scientists insist there is a fifth, a gustatory Billy Preston: umami.
Preston, naturally, played keyboards for the "Let it Be" album and most of "Abbey Road."
But umami? What's that?
If the term sounds foreign to you, don't fret. The 1996 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary runs 2,214 densely packed pages, but "umami" is a no-show among the 315,000-plus definitions. When Bravo's "Top Chef" dropped the word in an episode this month, several contestants drew a blank; within minutes, "Chef"-obsessed bloggers were trying to pin down this elusive term.
Umami -- that's "oo-MAH-mee" -- is a Japanese word for the meaty or savory taste triggered by amino acids and nucleotides, such as glutamate and aspartate. Compared with its bandmates sweet and salty, umami is quieter and less obvious. Still, umami's lip-smacking pleasures can be found in a broad array of delicious foods. You experience this mouth-filling flavor in steak, tomatoes, mushrooms, soy sauce, cheeses and kombu, the dried seaweed found in dashi, a common Japanese stock.
While umami has spent centuries in the shadows of its flashier colleagues, that may be changing. "It's become very big in scientific and culinary circles," said Michael O'Mahoney, a professor of food science and technology at UC-Davis.
Umami Burger, a grill that celebrates the fifth taste, has two locations in Los Angeles. Nationwide, Kikkoman's latest ad campaign links its soy sauce to umami, a "natural flavor enhancer, bringing depth and balance to your food without drowning subtle tastes."
The fifth taste isn't always a supporting player, though. "Umami bombs," concentrated blasts from protein-rich ingredients, are exploding on San Diego plates. The C Level Lounge's lobster truffle mac n' cheese? Nine-Ten's slow-roasted lamb loin with chanterelle mushrooms? Roseville's golden grouper with purple potato lyonnaise, asparagus, king trumpet mushrooms and truffle butter? These meals all boast a range of flavors, but none is primarily sweet, salty, sour or bitter.
"It's already being done with how we put our dishes together," said Amy DiBiase, Roseville's executive chef, "but we didn't put the name on it."
Oh, mommy, so that's umami!
Blame the ancient Greeks for umami's low profile. Democritus, a contemporary of Plato, taught that all tastes could be traced back to the big four. Not everyone agreed -- in India, two additional tastes were identified: spicy and astringent -- but Democritus' views held sway in the West for millenniums.
In the late 19th century, though, Auguste Escoffier noted that his veal stock was not sweet, sour, salty or bitter. The flavor, the French chef insisted, was something else altogether.
His observation received scientific validation in 1908, when a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University published his research on kombu. Kikunae Ikeda had found large amounts of glutamic acid in the seaweed and argued that this yielded a distinctive brothy taste. He dubbed this "umami," which loosely translates as "delicious."
Soon, Ikeda and a partner had founded Ajinomoto to manufacture monosodium glutamate. MSG was a culinary gold mine -- it remains a popular flavor enhancer, especially in Asian cooking.
Commercial success, though, did not save Ikeda from the enduring scorn of skeptics. Some scientists denied that umami was a primary taste, one that could not be duplicated by combining other primary tastes. Ikeda traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1912 to defend his findings at an international chemistry conference.
"Those who pay careful attention to their taste buds will discover in the complex flavor of asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat, a common and yet absolutely singular taste which cannot be called sweet, or sour, or salty, or bitter," he told his peers.
Umami's battle for recognition received a boost in 1982, when Ajinomoto underwrote the new Umami Information Center in Tokyo, which later opened offices in London and New York City. In recent years, a team of researchers at the University of Miami and Charles S. Zuker, then at UCSD, found that taste buds contain umami receptors.
The argument was over, with the fifth taste triumphant -- and a new argument gaining strength.
"The question really is, what is a basic taste?" asked O'Mahoney. Are there five basic tastes? Six? 60? "Tell me what a basic taste is, and we can start talking."
O'Mahoney believes there is at least one more irreducible taste -- he finds it in the earthy, not-precisely-salty smack of potassium chloride. We have few words to describe flavor, he said, so "basic tastes" vary from person to person and country to country.
In the 1970s, O'Mahoney conducted a series of experiments in the United States and Japan, asking volunteers to describe samples of various foods.
Most Americans used only four terms.
The Japanese? Just five -- and the fifth was umami.
Despite trendy restaurants and big ad campaigns, umami's identify crisis continues on this side of the Pacific.
"For most of us, it's not a distinct flavor that we know," said Dr. Terence Davidson, a professor of surgery at UC-San Diego whose research has shed light on how and what we taste. "I don't think it's of much interest here in the States."
Slowly, though, umami is edging into the spotlight. In April 2008, New York City hosted its first "Umami Food & Arts Festival," 11 days of cutting-edge dining and performance. A second Umami Festival is planned for February.
A short train ride from Manhattan, Westchester County's Umami Cafe specializes in meals with mouth-filling, protein-rich, savory flavors. Lobster rolls! Mac and cheese! Roasted duck!
But umami doesn't need star billing to perform. Eight years ago, when DiBiase was working at San Diego's Laurel, customers swooned over a Parmesan risotto lightly adorned with fresh white Alba truffles. The menu didn't note this, but every ingredient -- cheese, risotto, truffles -- was dense with glutamates.
"People would just freak out about that dish," DiBiase said
In her experience, diners are drawn to umami-saturated foods. "Pizza, pasta with parmesan cheese -- it makes sense. People are always asking for Parmesan cheese on things."
But many people avoid MSG, sure that the product most associated with umami triggers headaches. Although research into MSG's culpability has been inconclusive, San Diego's Senomyx is experimenting with umami ingredients that can replace or reduce the MSG in a dish.
In laboratories near University Towne Centre, Senomyx develops new flavors, flavor enhancers and "bitter blockers" for global food companies like Nestle, Coca-Cola and MSG manufacturer Ajinomoto. New ingredients, measured in billionths of liters, are placed on a tray, slid into a refrigerator-sized device and then sprayed onto receptors harvested from human taste buds.
Computers track which ingredients stimulate which receptors. How quickly does that taste register? How soon does it fade?
Senomyx can test up to 250,000 samples a week.
"Much faster than humans," said Guy Servant, the head of screening.
But after machines narrow the field to a handful of potential winners, Senomyx summons 55 San Diegans. These are trained but anonymous tasters -- the panelists' identities are withheld from the public and, more importantly, rival food companies.
The panel's reports are confidential, too, and somehow that seems appropriate. Umami, working hard without credit. How Billy Preston-like.
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Peter Rowe writes about food for The San Diego Union-Tribune.
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