What is Umami? (And How You Can Use This Delicious Taste)

What is umami? It’s a question that I hear a lot.

When people talk about umami, what they’re referring to is the fifth basic taste alongside salty, sweet, sour, and bitter.

The “umami” taste is triggered by glutamates, which are amino acids found in certain protein-rich foods like animal meats and fish, as well as certain vegetables like tomatoes and mushrooms. They’re also found in fermented products and aged products like kimchi, parmesan cheese, or soy sauce.

Humans have receptors in our mouths that detect these glutamates, and that’s what gives the food its savoury, meaty taste. Whether you realise it or not, you’ve probably been enjoying umami your entire life. It’s why parmesan is the “king of cheeses”. It’s why the BLT, even though it’s so simple, tastes so good. And it’s why soy sauce can elevate any dish to god-tier.

The bottom line is this: you can leverage the umami taste in order to improve the flavour of basically any savoury (or sweet) dish.

If you find that the dish is missing that savoury taste, all you need to do is add in some umami-rich ingredients like dried tomatoes, Marmite, or maybe some aged cheese.

What is umami?

So, what is umami? Despite common misconception, “umami” isn’t a flavour; it’s a basic taste.

Flavour in generally is defined as a combination of both taste and smell. Many people don’t realise it, but smell plays a vital role in how we taste food. It’s why, as many people have learned during the Covid-19 pandemic, when you lose your sense of smell, food just doesn’t taste as good.

Umami is in fact, as we’ve already discussed, a taste, alongside saltiness, sourness, bitterness, and sweetness.

I like to think of the five basic tastes like the primary colours. You can’t make blue, red, or yellow by mixing together any other colours. They can only be used to make other colours, right? Well, the same thing applies to the basic tastes.

You can’t make, say, bitterness by mixing together saltiness and sweetness. You can’t make saltiness by mixing together sweetness and sourness. And you can’t make umami by mixing together saltiness and sweetness. Each of those five basic tastes is a self-contained taste that can only be used in conjunction with each other to create entirely new flavours.

If you go and ask some of the “older generation” how many tastes exist, they’ll probably tell you there are only four, and that’s fair enough. That’s because we’ve only known about the umami taste since 1908. And it’s took even longer to become readily accepted as a concept.

Umami was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese chemist researching the distinctive flavour of dashi, a Japanese stock crafted from fish and seaweed. He managed to isolate the source of this flavour to a seaweed called kombu. It turns out that seaweed is very rich in the glutamates that give food the umami taste. He coined this new taste umami, which loosely translates to “delicious” in Japanese.

Ikeda continued his work researching glutamates. He founded a company called Ajinomoto who then engineered a concentrated form of glutamate bonded with salt (aka sodium) that would prove to be one of the most contentious ingredients of the 21st century: monosodium glutamate. MSG.

And you cannot talk about umami without talking about MSG.

What is monosodium glutamate (MSG)?

The prevailing thought for decades has been that MSG leads to headaches, numbness, and general feelings of discomfort, an experience questionably dubbed “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” due to the ubiquity of the ingredient in Chinese restaurants and takeaways.

To the best of my knowledge, the health concerns linked to MSG have never been scientifically proven. These concerns can be traced to a letter that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, which claimed Chinese food brought headaches and so on, and speculated that MSG may have been the cause.

This wasn’t a scientific journal entry or a formal study.

This was literally just a doctor who wrote a letter expressing a hunch that he had, that MSG may have been the cause for his personal experience.

Actual scientific research has since indicated that MSG is, for most people, completely harmless. MSG is generally recognised as safe, as far as the FDA is concerned.

Regardless of all of that, people are still scared of MSG. Maybe it’s because it sounds like something that has to be made in a factory or a laboratory. And that’s kinda true.

MSG doesn’t naturally occur in isolation; it has to be manufactured. But those glutamates, the amino acids that are combined with sodium to create MSG are derived from natural sources.

I like to think of it like vitamin tablets. You can’t get vitamin D in isolation in nature, right? So for those people who do need more vitamin D, we extract it from foods rich in the stuff, like mushrooms, and we manufacture it into a convenient tablet form.

Our bodies don’t care where the vitamin D comes from; it just knows that vitamin D is vitamin D. And the same goes for glutamates. It doesn’t matter whether those glutamates come from parmesan cheese, soy sauce, or MSG. All the body knows is that it’s getting glutamates. And it loves it.

Long story short, as Harold McGee put it, MSG is harmless in small and large quantities.

If it’s so harmless, then how come some say it’s bad for us? To be honest, it’s probably for the same reason your mum doesn’t use salt. She read the news once, read an article that said salt was bad for you, and hasn’t touched the stuff since. But seriously though, if you’re eating Doritos, Pringles, or instant noodles, then you’re eating MSG anyway. The stuff is everywhere.

But should you actually use it in your cooking?

I like to think of MSG like an umami powder. You can use it in any dish that you think needs a savoury kick.

I’ve used it in avocado on toast, soup, and god knows how many other dishes. It isn’t some kind of special ingredient that you have to use in certain kinds of dishes. If you think that dish needs a bit more savoury flavour, add a little sprinkle of MSG.

That being said, I do prefer to use natural ingredients high in glutamates if it’s possible to do that. There are so many foodstuffs naturally high in glutamates—seaweed, any soy-based products like tofu, soy sauce, tempeh, or miso, aged cheeses like parmesan, fermented products like kimchi or yoghurt and vegetables like mushrooms and tomatoes are all high in stuff.

But glutamates aren’t the whole picture of umami.

Glutamates, inosinates and guanylates

A student of Ikeda discovered that another chemical can give food the umami taste: a nucleotide called inosinic acid.

Both fish and meat are rich in inosinates, and when eaten in conjunction with glutamates, you’re really taking the food to the next level.

Then there’s another nucleotide called guanylic acid. Guanylates can also be paired with glutamates to give a rich flavour, and these are often found in dried mushrooms, yeast, and seaweed.

These three flavours (glutamates, inosinates and guanylates) play off each other. So when you use them in conjunction with each other, they all make the others taste better, as well as improving the flavour of the overall dish.

If you combine something rich in glutamate, something rich in inosinate, and something rich in guanylate, you can’t go wrong. Tomatoes with beef and dried mushrooms, broccoli with anchovies and seaweed, and so on.

But you might be a little bit concerned about adding certain ingredients to certain dishes. What if you don’t want to have anchovies with your broccoli, for example?

Well, one option is to use these ingredients reservedly. If you use them in small quantities, you can add that umami taste without adding a flavour that’s too overpowering.

Food writer J. Kenji López-Alt uses three umami-rich ingredients in a bunch of his recipes in his cookbook, The Food Lab. He uses soy sauce, which provides the glutamates, anchovies, which provide the inosinates, and Marmite, which provides the guanylates—a combo he calls the “umami bomb.”

In my view, the key lies in experimentation.

Ideally, though, you’ll want to pair that up with something else rich in inosinate, like meat or fish, and something rich in guanylate, like dried mushrooms. But if you really don’t want to add those flavours, you can also buy inosinates and guanylates in sodium forms too. They work exactly the same way as MSG—a neutral flavour that can be added to basically any dish.

So when you’re next asked “what is umami?” You can answer that it’s the key to flavour.