Umami is present in almost all savoury foods and is one of the five primary human tastes, along with salty, sweet, bitter and sour. It is often conspicuous by its absence, like the lack of meat taste in vegan stock.
The word “umami” was coined in 1908 to describe the flavour discovered by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda. An academic with a thirst for learning, he took his studies to Germany and the UK at the turn of the 20th century before returning to Tokyo in 1901 to become a full-time chemistry professor at Tokyo Imperial University.
The eureka moment happened when he tasted his wife’s dashi cooking stock – stock typically made with water, kombu (kelp) and bonito fish flakes – and realised he recognised the same satisfying savouriness in the cheese and tomatoes he tried when he was in Europe.
He set out to study the flavour – which he called umami, roughly translating as “pleasant savoury taste” – and eventually isolated brown crystals of glutamate that carried the taste in 1908.
It would take nearly a century, and the subsequent discovery of glutamate receptors on the human tongue, before Western cultures accepted in the early 2000s that umami was a primary taste.
