wunder beta🍜 Umami: the fifth taste and where it hides
Glutamate has its own receptor on your tongue. Meet the taste that took a century to be believed.
What you’ll learn
- The taste that took a century to be believedRecount how umami was identified and why it took until the 2000s to be accepted as a basic taste.Kikunae Ikeda isolated glutamate from kombu in 1908 and named the taste umami; scepticism persisted until the T1R1 and T1R3 receptor was identified nearly a century later.
- Free glutamate is the whole storyDistinguish bound from free glutamate and explain why ageing, ripening and fermentation increase savouriness.Only free glutamate is tasted, so foods whose proteins have been broken down by time, enzymes or microbes - kelp, aged cheese, fish sauce, ripe tomatoes - carry the most.
- Synergy: the multiplication trickExplain umami synergy between glutamate and nucleotides and identify classic pairings that exploit it.Inosinate and guanylate stabilise glutamate at its receptor, multiplying perceived savouriness - which is why kombu meets bonito, tomato meets cheese and mushrooms meet meat.
- MSG, and a misunderstanding that lasted fifty yearsDescribe what MSG is, how the 1968 scare developed, and what controlled studies and regulators actually found.MSG delivers the same glutamate found in cheese and tomatoes; blinded trials failed to reproduce the reported syndrome at ordinary doses, and regulators treat it as generally recognised as safe.
- Cooking with umami on purposeUse umami ingredients deliberately, in layers and in combination with acid and salt.Small amounts of several savoury ingredients beat a heavy hand with one; umami amplifies rather than announces itself, and it needs acid or salt for contrast.
Questions this course answers
Raw meat contains a great deal of glutamate but does not taste very savoury. Why?
Only free glutamate reaches the receptor. Ageing, curing, fermenting, ripening and long cooking all break proteins apart and release it, which is why old and fermented foods taste so savoury.
Match each compound to the ingredient it was first identified in
Each savoury compound was isolated from a staple of Japanese cooking, decades apart - and their combinations are what produce dashi's depth.
What happens when you combine a glutamate-rich ingredient with a nucleotide-rich one?
The nucleotide binds near the glutamate site on the same receptor complex and stabilises it, so the receptor responds strongly at concentrations that would otherwise be barely detectable.
In what year did Kikunae Ikeda isolate glutamate from kombu and name the taste umami?
1908, at Tokyo Imperial University. The receptor that confirmed umami as a basic taste was not identified until nearly a century later.
Complete the sentence about the receptor
The T1R1 and T1R3 pair is the umami receptor. A basic taste is expected to have its own dedicated machinery, and until that was found the sceptics had a real argument.
Put these umami discoveries in chronological order
Nearly a century separates the first compound from the receptor that proved umami deserved its own place among the basic tastes.
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