JAPANESE SEASONINGS

Food Culture That Features UMAMI UMAMI
When people eat food, they enjoy its flavor, smell, temperature, texture, how it’s presented and even their eating environment. But in terms of flavor, the Japanese might be the ones who take the most responsive approach toward the food they eat. They appreciate flavor based on seven categories: sweetness, sourness, spiciness, bitterness, saltiness, astringency and umami. While the first five categories are employed in most other countries, you might be unfamiliar with the last one. Umami is something that many Japanese seasonings and dashi broth make the most of; in other words, it is what differentiates Japanese cuisine from others.

Although umami is an internationally approved term, it was relatively recently introduced to the world. Directly translated as “flavorfulness” or “tastefulness,” umami is a type of flavor created by components such as gultamine, inosine, and guanine. So food ingredients with such components contribute a lot to the creation of umami. Gultamine is found in kelp, cheese, and tea; inosine is found in dried sardines, bonito flakes, as well as meat and fish; and guanine is in dried shiitake mushrooms, and meat. This is why umami is found in dashi broth, which uses kelp, bonito flakes, and dried shiitake. The concept of umami has not existed in the Western world, but the people there have used similar systems of creating umami in their food. For example, bouillon and fond de veau are two good examples of food that are full of umami.

The fermentation and aging process also increases umami. As you know, aging beef not only makes the meat softer but it also adds a certain flavor to it. Also, cheese has a different flavor before being fermented and aged, and bacon develops a unique flavor to the meat while aging. These flavors obtained after fermentation or aging are umami. Japanese seasonings like shoyu (soy sauce), miso, sake, and su (vinegar) are produced through either fermentation, aging or both. This makes Japanese cuisine full of umami.

Osechi ryouri, traditional Japanese New Year dishes, consist of an assortment of dishes prepared specifically for this occasion, and most of them are cooked with full use of Japanese seasonings. Eating osechi ryouri is a good way to appreciate umami.

Also, it is proven that mixing different umami components can multiply the umami flavor. For example, dashi broth can be made only from kelp, which contains gultamine, but when it’s mixed with dried shiitake that has a lot of guanine or bonito flakes that have inosine, it produces more umami. Ramen stock is often created by combining chicken or beef with vegetables. The former include inosine and the latter has gultamine. Japanese chefs maximize this feature to get the best flavor out of what they have.

As mentioned above, outside Japan the concept of umami was not in the cooking dictionary but the umami itself was in their cuisine. In Asian countries, people take advantage of umami in their cuisine. The fish sauces like nam plar in Thailand and nuoc cham in Vietnam and a variety of jiang (Chinese miso) in China are all fermented and aged seasonings. In Europe, they enjoy cheese, aged ham, and soups from various ingredients. Next time you have a meal it might be fun to think, “What made this umami?”

Multiplying umami by mixing different components
in various soup stock bases

	Gultamine	X	Inosine

Dashi broth (Japanese):	kelp	X	bonito flakes

Bouillon (French):	celery, onion, carrot	X	meat

Tan (Chinese):	leeks, Chinese cabbage	X	chicken, scallop

Who found umami?

Japanese traditionally use dashi broth made from kelp for cooking, and they knew a component in kelp played a huge role in giving great flavor to their food. In 1908, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University named Kikunae Ikeda succeeded in extracting gultamine from kelp and proved it is the main ingredient in kelp dashi broth. He named it “umami.” After that, inosine in bonito flakes and guanine in dried shiitake were found to give umami. In 1985, the International Umami Symposium was held, and this gathering officially recognized the term umami.

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