If you’re as deeply obsessed with the current season of Masterchef Australia as I am, there’s one aspect of the show that is noticeably different to prior series. Every second episode one of the judges or contestants will describe the food as having “umami” flavour.
Speaking of Masterchef, hear about how the show is delivering on the ‘snacks’ this season:
Unfortunately, I am not Gordon Ramsay, or anywhere near a cooking expert so each episode I’ve been left wondering, WTF is ‘umami’ and why do they keep saying it on Masterchef!?
In the same boat? Here’s a bit of a rundown of “umami” – the ‘fifth taste’.
Most of us are familiar with the four basic tastes – sour, sweet, salty, and bitter. All four come together to make the kind of food you can’t help drooling over. But there’s actually a fifth taste – umami.
The word ‘umami’ translates to “pleasant savory flavour” and was first coined by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1908.
It all started in 1907 when Ikeda was eating dashi broth and realised it was “more delicious than normal.” After giving it a good stir, and doing a lot of complicated scientific research, Ikeda had isolated the taste, derived from brown brown crystals of glutamic acid – or glutamate.
Not only did Ikeda give the taste it’s now iconic name, umami, but in 1909 he developed a process for producing monosodium glutamate – what we now commonly call MSG.
MSG is found in everything from stock cubes to soup, ramen, gravy, stews, condiments, savoury snacks and more – it’s one of world’s top flavour enhancers after salt and pepper.
There’s a popular belief that MSG can cause headaches and other health problems, but the NSW Food Authority states that “there is no convincing evidence” of that after numerous scientific studies.
So, what does umami actually taste like, and why has it become such a popular way to describe food? The New Yorker’s Hannah Goldfield describes it as “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.”
I’ll admit, I’ve only just started hearing the word umami floating around, but apparently – it’s evolved into a bit of a buzzword in the last decade. First We Feast states that even though we’ve known about umami for over 100 years, scientific research conducted from the 80s to the early 00s “showed that humans have taste receptors for L-glutamate, and modified glutamate receptors in our brains.”
“Umami…was touted as a ‘new’ flavour even though we’d been tasting it all along,” Jaya Saxena wrote in 2016. Without knowing we could taste umami, we never had a word for it – until now. That might explain why it’s now so popular.
However, for a taste that has so many meanings and variations it does get thrown around a lot on Masterchef. Shoutout to Kikunae Ikeda for putting it on our radar and awakening our taste buds.
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