New Zealand Listener – August 03, 2019

36 LISTENER AUGUST 3 2019

O

ur tongue’s receptors have always

recognised four “tastes”: sweet, salty,

bitter and sour. But in 1908, Japanese

scientist Kikunae Ikeda identified a

fifth one. He’d noticed the soup his

wife served for lunch each day caused

a different reaction to that of the

familiar four. After much research, he identified this

Fresh thinking

We’ve learnt to cook with dried shiitake

mushrooms, but with fresh ones now being grown

here, umami flavours can come to the fore.

by Lauraine Jacobs

FOOD

™THIS LIFE

as savoury, then made up the word

“umami” to describe it. Umami is

caused by a component in the food,

glutamate, which gives it a lingering

and satisfying feeling that the other

tastes do not.

The Western world took almost

100 years to embrace umami as

the fifth taste, but it is now widely

recognised. Most foods have some

natural glutamate, but umami is more

pronounced in a variety of foods,

including ripe tomatoes, soy sauce,

mushrooms, parmesan and similar

cheeses, Asian-style fish sauces, gravy,

Marmite and fermented and aged