Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (46 page)

MSG can make people eat more, yet the Japanese, who have the lowest body mass index (a measurement of weight and height that indicates health) among rich nations, eat two to three times as much monosodium glutamate, inosinate, and guanylate as Americans. They unabashedly add it to foods. Yet only 3 percent of the Japanese population is classified as obese. Thirty-four percent of Americans are obese. Perhaps the mouthfulness that the Japanese get from their umami-rich diet allows them to eat less without sacrificing sensory satisfaction.

“It really clicked with me about how umami was probably the taste that you were wanting when you craved certain foods,” said Adam Fleischman, founder of Umami Burger in Los Angeles.

“In American foods, pizza and burgers were the ones that were the most crave-worthy. And they seemed to be the ones that had the most umami in them, with the most perfect balance of umami flavors,” he said, giving me background on how he decided to open a restaurant focused on umami.

He’s absolutely right. Pepperoni pizza is one of the most umami-laden foods on Earth. There’s umami in the ripened, cooked tomato sauce. There’s umami (a little) in the mozzarella cheese, and there’s umami in the cured pepperoni. Douse a slice with aged Parmesan and you’re gilding the umami lily.

“I wanted to pack as much umami as I could into a burger,” said Fleischman. “So I researched all the foods that had the most umami and just figured out a way to get the most umami into a burger.”

The chain’s signature menu item is the Umami Burger, made from a patty of fresh-ground flap beef topped with grilled shiitake mushrooms, roasted tomato, caramelized onions, house-made ketchup, and a brilliant jolt of unexpected crunch in the form of a panfried Parmesan cheese crisp. Fleischman calls the burger “umami × 6.”

Level of Naturally Occurring Umami

Source: K. Ninomiya, “Natural Occurrence,”
Food Review International
14: 177–212.

When I was presented with my Umami Burger, it arrived on a large oval plate, with no garnish or side dish, an entree presentation that demands that the burger be the center of your attention. And, indeed, it was a rich, huge sensory experience. Not a huge burger, though. In fact, I was somewhat surprised at the size of the sandwich. I have had much bigger burgers in my dining career and I’ve had much richer. I can remember struggling to eat the second half of my burger at Minetta Tavern in New York City, a place renowned for its signature blend of ground marbled and aged rib eye, skirt steak, and brisket beef, which weighs in at almost nine ounces before cooking. It is loaded with umami, as the beef is dryaged before being ground, but it’s a monster. Served with savory-sweet caramelized onions, it was one of the many times I wished I had a bigger stomach. Umami Burger’s burger, though, at six ounces before cooking, is huge in flavor, not size.

The mouthfulness of umami gives a sensory satisfaction that differs from anything else. One of the main differences between Japanese cuisine and Western cuisines that are built on French technique is that Japanese food doesn’t rely as heavily on fat to carry flavor. Instead, it gives that job to umami. Japanese chefs employ all manner of umami infusion in their cooking. In addition to soy sauce, they use a type of seaweed called kombu to make dashi broth that serves as the basis for dishes such as miso soup and ramen. Kombu is probably the most umami-rich ingredient in the sea. Ounce for ounce, it’s almost on a par with Parmesan, the most umami-rich ingredient on land.

Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo cook guys’ food at their restaurant, Animal, in Los Angeles. Dotolo had described tofu as having the texture of calf brains and joked that he considered putting it on the menu at Animal—tofu with meat. That’s when I knew I had to taste these guys’ food.

Amid the pig tails, goose liver, myriad sausages, and pork belly on Animal’s menu sits a curious fish dish, the hamachi tostada. It sounds innocent enough. On top of a crisp tortilla saucer sits a vertical tangle of fresh cabbage, herbs, onion, and fried shallot. After eating three or four plates of meat, Roger, my sister, and I sighed with relief at the arrival of something crunchy and green. But upon first bite any thoughts of austere fish swam out of our mind. This unassuming dish rocked our world with a hugeness of flavor that came, unmistakably, from umami.

Dotolo spoke with me about this dish, which he and Shook had originally created for an evening event. “What would be something that would be flavorful but still be somewhat light?” thought Dotolo as he considered but rejected pork belly, given the late hour when it would be served. They didn’t want to do red meat, since that was expected of them. The hamachi dish pulled together fresh white fish, a crisp fried tortilla, and crunchy vegetables with a unifying fish sauce vinaigrette. It is a gorgeous example of how an umami-rich ingredient—Vietnamese fish sauce, in this case—can unify disparate ingredients into a coherent whole that doesn’t necessarily have to be rich or fatty to deliver huge flavor.

To make fish sauce, tiny fish are salted heavily, sweetened with sugar, and put aside to ferment for two months to two years. During this time, the fish emits an odor so strong it’s embarrassing. During a boat tour in 1997 along the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand, I first got a whiff of something that made me look at my fellow passengers with suspicion. As it got stronger, the tour guide pointed out the fish sauce manufacturing facility located riverside, by which point we were muzzling ourselves with anything we could get our hands on to stop the stench from reaching our olfactory system.

When fish sauce is fully fermented, refined, and bottled, it retains some of its odorific quality. But it’s not the fishy smell that makes chefs reach for it when they’re cooking. It’s the ridiculously high levels of glutamates that are formed in the fermentation process. Chefs usually add it in such subtle quantities that you’d never know a soup, stew, or sauce contained a fishy-smelling ingredient. All you’d notice is that it was full, round, savory, and delicious.

In Japan, soy sauce, miso, and dashi go into many sauces. Each of these ingredients is a potent source of free glutamates. In Southeast Asia, fish sauce gives depth to many dishes. In China, hoisin, oyster, fermented black bean, and mushroom sauces are common. They’re also all full of glutamate.

Every student who goes to culinary school learns early how to make a stock and eventually, how to make the mother sauces: béchamel, espagnole, velouté, hollandaise, and tomato. Mother sauces are the building blocks for much of classic French cooking, and it’s no coincidence that three of them derive their flavor from umami. Velouté and espagnole start with stocks made from simmering
bones, a process that frees glutamates from the animal protein. Tomato sauce is, of course, loaded with umami that occurs naturally in the fruit and is concentrated and further developed in the cooking process. Even béchamel, which we think of today as a white sauce made from milk and butter, originally called for veal, according to the recipe of Escoffier, the French chef who modernized cooking, wrote
Le Guide Culinaire,
and in the process became one of the first celebrity chefs in 1907.

Glutamic acid is the predominant free amino acid in tomatoes, which also include IMP and GMP. As tomatoes ripen, the glutamatic acid content—and hence umami—increases, as it does when they’re cooked, dried, or heat-processed. So it should be no surprise that three-quarters of the tomatoes eaten by Americans are in some way processed: cooked; canned; turned into pasta sauce, salsa, juice, or ketchup, all of which are chock-full of free glutamates. In fact, many of the foods we eat would be only mildly appealing without the punch of a tomato garnish. French fries are, for example, a vehicle for delivering ketchup—and hence umami.

If you want to get more flavor from your food, you could make one simple switch: replace some of the added salt in your diet with monosodium glutamate. Dare I even suggest this? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Monosodium glutamate contains that same sodium that performs superheroism in foods. But MSG has one benefit over salt: it also contains umami. For the same amount of sodium, you get two tastes in one.

Of course, no one feels good about sprinkling a white powder into his food, regardless of what it is. The more natural way to work MSG into your food would be to follow Animal’s and Umami Burger’s lead. Use glutamate-rich ingredients. Instead of water, use chicken or beef broth. Instead of salt, use soy sauce or fish sauce. Garnish just about anything with cooked mushrooms or tomatoes or aged cheese and enjoy a taste two-fer. Umami brings together the ingredients in a dish by adding something akin to time and patience. Keep that in mind when you’re trying to combine flavors. Or keep them apart.

Just as a dish that’s too sweet will taste out of balance, so will one with too much umami. Umami gives such full flavor that overuse of it can be fatiguing. People will generally use the term
rich
to describe a sauce, for example, that’s been reduced so much that the glutamates are concentrated into too little volume. If you experience an entree, soup, or sauce that’s full of intense flavor yet you find yourself wanting to squeeze a lemon on it, it’s likely that the umami is too high. Acid is often the only thing that will tame excess umami. That’s why the slices of pickled ginger are there at the sushi bar and a pickle appears on most of the burgers and next to the sandwiches in the United States.

When you’re cooking or tasting food, form a visual image of the Taste Star to jog your memory. There are five Basic Tastes and they all need to be in balance. Umami is no different. If the umami is too high, the dish will taste muddy, too savory, too mouth-filling. The flavor will be indistinct and unidentifiable—and not in a good way. A general savory umami-ness is fine if that’s what you’re going for. A chef who puts a soup on the menu and calls it lobster bisque probably wants the lobster flavor ringing out loud and clear. Too much umami in a subtle, albeit savory, dish will overwhelm its signature flavor. You’re not paying those extra few dollars for umami; you’re paying for the lobster essence. On the other hand, if a dish like soup is lacking umami, you’ll know it when you take a bite and crave the
something
that Ikeda, Frankenthaler, and Dotolo knew was there all along.