Taste No. 5

Preface: I have not thought about it much before, but since starting this blog and writing about my cooking I find that a lot of the dishes I cook contain umami.

Tastes

It is generally acknowledged that our taste buds can only perceive four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. In addition to these four basic tastes, umami has been identified as the fifth basic taste. Umami is a fundamental taste in Asian cuisines and has a long history in Asian cooking. Even though umami was discovered over a century ago in 1908 by Japanese scientist, Kikunae Ikeda, it has struggled for popular acceptance as a distinct taste by Western scientists. It was only recognized as a basic taste in 2000 when researchers at the University of Miami succeeded in proving that taste receptors for umami exist, enabling this fifth taste to gain general acceptance.

All other tastes come from a combination of these basic (or primary) tastes. Just like all colours are derived from the basic primary colours of red, green and blue.

The essence of great cooking is to create a balance when using ingredients in cooking dishes so that all of these basic tastes are in harmony.

Understanding the basic tastes enables you to taste your cooking and recognise what is needed, and make the necessary adjustments. I rarely ever follow a recipe to the dot, I use it as a guide and continually taste while I am cooking, and add ingredients/seasonings as I go to my desired tastes. When you cook a dish it generally never turns out exactly the same as the last time you cooked it. It’s kind of like seeing your favourite band, you have probably seen them live many times and they play the same songs but every show is different, it’s always a different experience.

The Basic Tastes

Bitterness
Bitterness is the most sensitive of the tastes in that we can recognize it even in small amounts. Bitterness balances sweetness, and can also play a vital role in cutting richness in a dish. Common bitter foods and beverages include coffee, unsweetened cocoa, beer and olives.

Saltiness
Saltiness is a taste produced primarily by the presence of sodium ions. Salt is an important flavouring, it is a taste enhancer and taste modifier. It strengthens the impression of aromas that accompany it, and it suppresses the sensation of bitterness.

Sourness
Sourness is the taste that detects acidity. Examples of foods which exhibit sourness are lemons, vinegar and wines which have a sour tinge to its flavour. Adding sourness to a dish adds sparkle and brightness to a dish (eg: finishing off a dish with a squeeze of lemon). Balancing a dish’s acidity with other tastes is critical to making a dish delicious.

Sweetness
It takes the greatest quantity of a substance that is sweet (vs salty, sour or bitter) to register on our taste buds. Sweetness can add balance and roundness to savoury dishes, and bring out the flavour of other ingredients.

Umami

The term umami is Japanese which literally means ‘delicious’. Umami is described as a savoury or meaty ‘mouth filling’ taste, produced by glutamates which is found in amino acid rich foods such as fermented and aged foods (glutamate concentration increases as an ingredient ripens), in protein-heavy foods such as steak and in the additive monosodium glutamate aka MSG (this explains why foods treated with MSG often taste fuller or better). The discovery of umami lead to the chemical isolation of MSG and its commercial production and marketing as a flavour enhancer.

Umami is typically associated with glutamate but many ingredients chiefly owe their umami flavour to other compounds such as inosinate, guanylate and adenylate. The taste of umami itself is subtle and blends well with other tastes to expand and round out flavours. Umami intensifies sweet and salty, and rounds out sour and bitter.

There are a number of foods that contain umami such as:
• cheeses like parmesan and blue cheese
• soy sauce
• fish sauce
• Worchestershire sauce
• soy beans
• vegemite
• seaweed
• sake
• mushrooms (especially shiitake)
• asparagus
• tomatoes
• human breast milk (!)
• beef
• cured and smoked meats (ham, bacon etc)
• fish and shellfish (particularly anchovies and tuna)
• green tea
• savoury herbs like rosemary and thyme

The glutamate taste sensation is most intense in combination with sodium ion as found in salt. This is one reason why tomatoes exhibit a stronger taste after adding salt.

Now that umami is gaining more popularity and influence in cooking, a company in Britain has somehow bottled it all up and just released a tube of umami paste for sale in supermarkets (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1249571/Umami-Tubes-Taste-No-5-set-revolutionise-cooking-fifth-taste.html)!

The tube of umami is named ‘Taste No. 5’.




















With so many umami rich ingredients out there, I think this umami paste is unnecessary. It would be much better to use and experiment with different umami rich ingredients in your cooking rather than use a paste. It might as well have been called ‘I can’t believe it’s not MSG’ considering that its objective is to enhance the flavour of dishes but it was named Taste No. 5 to apparently evoke the added allure of a high-class perfume (?!) Kind of like Chanel No. 5 I suppose.



















The umami paste also has the potential to be overused in cooking like MSG is, with people thinking that the more they add the better their dishes will taste. This is incorrect, cooking is all about balance. Once you have added in the required amount of umami or MSG, adding any more does not make a difference and will instead have a negative effect. In economics, we call this the law of diminishing marginal utility. The law states that as a person increases their consumption of a product, there will be a decline in the marginal utility (satisfaction) that the person derives from consuming each additional unit of that product. For example, think about buffet restaurants. It’s ‘all you can eat’ but we all know that after a certain point, each additional plate of food will provide less utility (satisfaction) than the plate before it.

Umami plays an important role in making food taste delicious but there are also some other reasons why you should use more umami in your cooking -
• Foods that have umami are very delicious and satisfying and, as a result, we tend to eat more food.
• Umami is savoury and creates a sensation that chefs call mouth-feel. We get this mouth-feel sensation from eating fat. So if you use more umami in cooking, you can reduce the amount of fat that you use in your food and still get a great taste.
• Salt heightens flavours in dishes, especially in the presence of umami flavours. If you use a lot of umami in your cooking you don’t have to use as much salt.


Thus, umami = deliciousness + eating more food + reducing fat and salt intake.


On a side note.

While writing this I was googling some information. So what would one expect to find if they input the words ‘human tastes’ into the search box?... well I wanted to read more about and understand the human tastes – how do we taste, what do we taste, what types of tastes do we have etc.

The top searches returned for ‘human tastes’ were articles on What does human flesh taste like?, The Great Taste of Human Flesh…not exactly what I wanted or was expecting, kind of interesting but also kind of disturbing!

I guess now that I may have sparked your curiosity on this subject, you may be wondering ‘what do humans taste like?’ just in case you ever happen to be involved in a plane crash into snowy mountains somewhere in the middle of nowhere with no help in sight, stranded for days and the only way to survive may be to eat your fellow beings…

Articles on what humans taste have obtained information from experts in the area, from some of the most infamous citizens of our time!

Germany’s cannibal Armin Meiwes, in an interview from his prison cell, says - "The flesh tastes like pork, a little bit more bitter, stronger. It tastes quite good."

Karl Denke was a cannibal (also from Germany) who killed people, pickled their flesh and sold it on the black market as pork.

This certainly gives new meaning to all those ads on TV right now encouraging people to eat more pork. In the ad there is a chick catching up with all her girlfriends and telling them that she had ‘porked’ her boyfriend last night, meaning that she had cooked him pork (not eaten him of course!)

You can watch the ad here if you haven’t seen it yet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwi834EIa38


Get some pork on your fork!

The Bastardisation of Stir Fries

I have a bone to pick….it’s on peoples conception of a stir fry.

I often get people telling me that they are cooking a stir fry and asking if I have any tips for them. I would ask what they are having in their stir fry and then I get a whole list of every vegetable they have in their fridge and some meat.

I think that stir fries suffer from the idea that it’s the kind of dish where you can chuck anything into a wok, give it a fry, season with some oyster sauce/soy sauce or chilli sauce and whola…

So I try to explain my view of how a good stir fry should be and I begin talking about pasta sauces and pizza.

A simple and basic pasta sauce made with only a few ingredients is very satisfying. One of the pasta sauces I love cooking from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking contains just tomatoes, onion, carrot, celery, some extra virgin olive oil and a little salt, sautéed and simmered on a low heat until it thickens.

The key to a good pizza is one that is not overloaded with too many toppings, 2-3 different toppings, some cheese and sauce is a good guide.

I think that cooking a stir fry should be approached in the same manner as cooking pasta sauces and making pizza. Think about what ingredients you are including and less can be much more satisfying.

Using too many ingredients can complicate and overcrowd a dish. Each vegetable has its own distinctive flavours and the type of meat used changes the taste of the dish.

Just because you can put anything that you want into a stir fry doesn’t mean that you should!

This is a simple stir fry that I cook regularly containing only a few ingredients - snowpeas (or sugar snap peas), prawns and shiitake mushrooms, with some crushed garlic, sliced ginger, and flavoured with some oyster sauce, fish sauce and salt.

Ingredients

• 300-400g snowpeas or sugar snap peas
• 3 shittake mushrooms, soaked till softened and sliced
• 8 prawns, shelled and deveined and sliced in half lengthways
• 2-3 cloves crushed garlic
• 2 pieces of ginger, sliced
• 1 cup of water
• ½ teaspoon of salt
• ½ tablespoon of fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons of oyster sauce
• 1 teaspoon of cornflour

(Measurements are a rough guide only as I have cooked this dish so much that I don't need to measure anything, I just add each bit in and then taste to correct the flavour. So feel free to play around with the ingredients to your desired tastes.)

Method

• Heat up a wok, add a little vegetable oil and cook the shiitake mushrooms and prawns first. Set aside.
• Then fry the garlic and ginger with the snowpeas in the wok, add in some water, cover and cook for 2-3 minutes until the snowpeas change colour and turn a dark green (uncover and stir from time to time).
• Then add back in the shiitake mushrooms and prawns, add in a pinch of salt, some oyster sauce and fish sauce (add in a little more water if necessary).
• In a small bowl mix a little cornflour with water and add into wok to thicken the sauce.

Be careful not to overcook the prawns or snowpeas. When you bite into the prawns they should be soft and tender (not rubbery) and the snowpeas should still have a crunch.

































You may note that in the photo there is no sauce but around 1 cup of water was added. The cornflour thickened the sauce so that it coats all the ingredients.

Only add enough water to cook with, adding too much water will dilute the flavours of the ingredients resulting in more seasoning required which will affect the taste of the dish.

You are making a stir fry and not a soup, the meats and veges should not be drowning in their own sauce.

I love this dish because it’s simple to make and tastes amazing!

We are known to have four basic tastes - sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Some argue that there is a fifth taste called ‘umami’. Umami is best described as savoury and is found in amino acid rich foods that give a sense of lingering mouth-feel. Umami is not a strongly detectable taste of itself, but it tends to accentuate and embolden other tastes. Umami intensifies sweet and salty, and rounds out sour and bitter.

Shiitake mushrooms and fish sauce are high in umami!

Umami is also found in MSG (surprise!)

So next time when you want to make a stir fry, stop and think about what you are putting into it….don’t bastardise it!