Although Americans have been using the word umami for the past decade and it’s been in use in the English language since 1979, its definition remains elusive to many. Ask someone who thinks that they know what umami is, and she’ll tell you it’s the “fifth taste,” after salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. It’s that other thing, the thing you didn’t even know needed a concept or a name until someone pointed it out. That deep, dark, meaty intensity that distinguishes seared beef, soy sauce, ripe tomato, Parmesan cheese, anchovies, and mushrooms, among other things. It hits the back of your throat and leaves you craving more.
But what does that actually mean? Isn’t that “fifth taste” just a combination of two or more of the other four? Umami, it turns out, is bolstered by science. The word and its concept were coined, in the early twentieth century, by a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda. Curious to know what was chemically responsibly for the distinct and dominant flavor of dashi, the stock that’s a staple of Japanese cooking, Ikeda examined closely the molecular composition of one of its main ingredients, a variety of seaweed. He determined that the culprit was a single substance, glutamic acid, and he named its taste umami, from the Japanese word for delicious, umai; umami translates roughly to “deliciousness.” Taste research from the past fifteen years has confirmed that molecular compounds in glutamic acid—glutamates—bind to specific tongue receptors; this, apparently, is what makes the magic. Any food in which glutamic acid occurs naturally or after cooking, aging, or fermentation is considered umami. In crystalline form, glutamates are known as MSG—palpable as sugar or salt, the reason why it’s hard to stop eating even the worst Chinese takeout.
Yet MSG has been largely stigmatized—a lazy shortcut, a headache-inducer—while umami has been unreservedly celebrated. Last week, three of New York City’s finest chefs appeared on a stage at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for the sixth annual Umami Recipe Competition, part of the International Restaurant and Foodservice Show. Wearing a headset and narrating his movements, each chef—employed, respectively, by the private dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Café Boulud, and Roberta’s—prepared a dish he’d devised to wow the judges.
The contest, I assumed, would be straightforward: Who could make the dish that tasted the most intensely umami? It’s a challenge that one American chef and entrepreneur has already embarked upon in an aggressively commercial way. Adam Fleischman, the man behind the two dozen restaurants called Umami Burger, came up with the idea after having an epiphany at an In-N-Out Burger, in 2008. He was eating a Double-Double, he told an interviewer in 2013, when he found himself wondering, “Why, over the years, do more pizza places and burger joints open up than any other kind of restaurant in this country?” Last week, over the phone, he told me that he had first read about umami a few years earlier, in various cookbooks. After his epiphany, he had another: umami might be the answer to his question, and the key to raising the bar on America’s favorite foods.
Working from a list of umami-rich foods he found online, Fleischman set about maximizing the potential of the hamburger by using ingredients like cheese, seaweed, and dried fish to amplify its flavor. (Dana Goodyear wrote about this process in 2011.) First, he tried blending them directly into the meat, but after months of experimenting, he took a different tack, creating “natural flavorings” he calls Umami Master Sauce, Umami Dust, and Umami Spray, to be added to a burger after it’s been cooked. Instead of the standard fresh tomato slice, Fleischman bakes tomatoes overnight in a soy-based sauce. Instead of American or another typical cheeseburger cheese, he uses aged Parmesan (in the form of a wafer, because Parmesan doesn’t melt well). For added measure: shiitake mushrooms, and housemade ketchup—already umami, but further accentuated with a touch of truffle. As the Umami Burger menu has expanded over time, so have the umami accoutrements, which include truffle cheese, soy pickles, miso mustard, and umami crema.
What I learned at the umami competition was that Fleischman’s approach—Where do I find the umami, and how can I get as much as possible?—is distinctly American, and different from the way the Japanese think about umami. Though all three of this year’s participants were American, the contest had a Japanese bent. There weren’t many rules, but the first mandated that the recipe “must contain one (1) known umami-rich ingredient” and offered a list of examples that figure prominently in Japanese cooking: kelp, bonito, dry mushroom, mirin, miso, soy sauce, rice vinegar. The three dishes entered into the competition were not the bold, powerful flavor bombs I expected. They were all complex and delicious, but also subtle, balanced, even virtuous. The dish that won was the least complicated: simple Berkshire pork chops, marinated in miso, sake, and soy and then grilled, by Jason Huang, of the Members Dining Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
After the grand prize—an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan—had been awarded, I spoke with one of the judges, Kazu Katoh, the president of the Organization to Promote Japanese Restaurants Abroad (J.R.O.), which sponsors the event. Umami, Katoh told me through an interpreter, is the foundation of Japanese cuisine. He acknowledged that it exists around the world: in the tomatoes and Parmesan cheese of Italy, for example, and in the miso, soy sauce, sake, and vinegar of Korea and China. The difference, according to Katoh, is rooted in geography. Japanese umami starts with Japanese terroir: “The temperature, and the moisture in the air. Vegetable growing, water. The dirt, the earth—it’s all important.” Then there’s technique: “The brewing and aging processes involved.” In French cooking, he said, “it’s all about adding. It’s about adding sauces, cooking it in bouillon, using oil, pouring more dressing on it. Japanese cooking is very, very simple. It’s about extracting.”
What then, did Katoh think of Umami Burger? He smiled knowingly. “I can say that they’ve been very careful to extract the taste of the meat by not burning it and not letting the juiciness escape,” he offered. But American hamburger meat, he said, “has been minced to kingdom come. There’s no more muscle, there’s no fat, it’s all just turned into mush.”
When I asked him to describe what umami tastes like, he grew philosophical. “It’s something that’s kind to the body,” he said. “It’s mild, and, after eating, it’s not heavy on your stomach. It helps you wake up better in the morning. That’s what deliciousness is about. It’s about feeling good after eating.” The most balanced meals, he said, have the same level of saltiness as exists naturally in our bodies, and umami in other countries can be too heavy on the stomach. “In Japan, we talk about it tasting good, sleeping well, and clean bowel movements. It has to do with the entire digestive process.”
Adam Fleischman is familiar with this line of thinking. The Japanese, he told me, define umami as “an over-all harmonious state of perfection where the ingredients come together, a really rounded and harmonious dish. They have a sort of zen way of looking at it.” But, he explained, “each chef uses it in the context of their country’s food. America has bold flavors. Japan’s are more subtle: kombu, dashi. Not so in your face.” With Umami Burger, he has tried to achieve both harmony and boldness. “At first, it was about the Japanese balance,” he said. “But I was also interested in amping up the umami flavors.” The Japanese, he said, “grew up on those ingredients. They’ve always had them. Their understanding of umami is more evolved than our understanding in the U.S. We have burgers, pizza, fried chicken, steak with a reduced demi-glace sauce.” The differences are stylistic, he said, but “related in glutamate.” In 2013, David Chang, of Momofuku, embarked on a quest to develop what Jane Kramer, in this magazine, dubbed “the New York umami.” “We wanted to create something that, when you taste it—well, you know where you are and who we are,” Chang’s head researcher said.
Umami may indeed be the fifth taste, and there may come a day when a bottle of MSG is as common in the home kitchen as the salt shaker or the sugar bowl, the simplest of flavor enhancers. But for now, as popular understanding of the concept discovered just over a hundred years ago continues to evolve, umami is more than the sum of its glutamates. It is a cultural cipher, a malleable, claimable standard of identity, innovation, and taste. Umami is a badge of pride, once Japanese, now universal. A state of mind. Deliciousness.
