What is Umami?
It is the fifth taste sense known for qualities such as savouriness, mouth filling, and satiation. Umami is the most complex taste and can be hard to describe, but for us at Lion’s Den it means deliciousness, flavour and total satiation.
It has been used for centuries to enrich meals in every culture - soy sauce and tuna, tomato and aged cheese, and kombu seaweed with shiitake dashi.
It’s known that umami has the following effects on taste and nutrition:
Spreads all over the tongue.
Taste lasts longer.
Facilitates the secretion of saliva.
Proved to help protein absorption.
However it is only in the last two decades that a considerable amount of research has been done on umami. The results of this research reveals the way in which it is perceived and the biological processes underlying this perception are unique to the compound glutamate / glutamic acid.
Umami makes us want to eat more of things that have it, and it is deeply satisfying. Most naturally glutamate-rich ingredients are in fact plants, fungi and other vegetal and nonanimal organisms: seaweeds like kelp or dulse, tomatoes, green tea, walnuts, and of course mushrooms, especially shiitake mushrooms.
What is Glutamate?
It is a type of amino acid. Amino acids are vital for life for many species on earth because they are the building blocks of protein. Glutamate is your body’s most abundant amino acid which is made and stored in muscle tissue, is essential for proper brain function.
Protein itself has no taste - taste is only perceived when protein breaks down and the amino acid chain disintegrates. These scattered amino acids are known as free amino acids. The main amino acids of umami are glutamate, inosinate and guanylate.
Healthy levels of glutamate provide energy for brain cells, help regulate mood, help control learning and memory, and promote a healthy sleep cycle.
Making Umami
Umami Synergy
To maximise the umami we combine different ingredients with different umami qualities to make super umami.
Glutamate is most powerful when paired with either Isonate or Guanylate having a synergistic effect (umami synergy) - Glutamate plus Inosinate, or Glutamate plus Gunaylate. Guanylate mainly exists in dried mushrooms, with Shiitake having the highest amount. As Lion’s Den is plant based and our purpose it help people eat more plants, we look for our umami synergies in the plant world, with mushrooms being our core ingredient.
Ribonucleotides makes umami more umami by holding on to the glutamate for longer.
This means our taste equation looks like this:
1 + 1 = 8
For every 1 milligram of glutamate plus 1 milligram of guanylate we get 8 times the umami power! Umami synergy.
Process
We can increase the umami content by breaking down protein structures, and creating more free amino acids like glutamate. Techniques like fermentation, reducing, boiling, concentrating. Glutamate is most free in water, as opposed to oil or fat, which is why Dashi (Japanese stock) is a well known cultural identity for umami.
UMAMI AND Health
Protein Absorption
Recent studies have revealed the presence of umami receptors are not only on the tongue, but also in the stomach.
When food enters the stomach, and our receptors in the stomach detect an umami substance (glutamate), the umami information is conveyed to the brain via the vagus nerve. The brain in turn transmits a message to the stomach that triggers the digestion and absorption of protein.
Sensing umami triggers the secretion of saliva and digestive juices, facilitating the smooth digestion of protein.
Nowadays we have a tendency to be overly focused on isolated nutrients, for example we are obsessed where our protein comes from. Especially when we discuss the topic of sustainability and whether protein should come from either animal or plant-based ingredients. This key bit of information, how we increase absorption with umami, allows us to understand how we can maximise our protein absorption in a plant-based diet.
Reduced Salt
We all know we need to reduce salt, the excessive intake is linked to many different lifestyle diseases. Well, umami helps to reduce salt content in cooking. At the end of the day we eat for nutrition and because food tastes delicious! If umami can help increase the overall satiation, working synergistically with salt (another taste), we can use less salt without compromising palatability.
Improving quality of life for the elderly
Elderly can suffer with taste impairment which is thought to be primarily due to a decline in salivation.
Umami is mouthwatering, literally. Recent advances in taste physiology confirm that glutamate promotes salivation, and therefore can be used in foods aimed at older generation to both increase salivation and decrease salt intake.
Babies need Umami
Umami is an important taste for newborn babies. Breast milk is rich in the umami component glutamate. It is also contained in amniotic fluid, making umami a familiar taste even before birth. One study shows that there is 4 times as much glutamate in mother’s milk 7 days after birth, than other other amino acids.
History
It has taken a long time for us to realise what umami even is. While all other tastes have been well documented for thousands of years, it took until 1909 to get a clear understanding of what umami was for, and to receive the name we call it today. Kikunae Ikeda, a chemistry professor at Tokyo Imperial University, had been studying a family of kelp seaweeds called kombu. After steeping, boiling down and concentrating massive quatities of kombu stock (dashi), Ikeda was eventaully able to isolate the savoury-tasting molecule from everything else in the kombu: glutamate. To create a name he combined two words, umami mean “deliciouness,” and mi meaning “taste.”
Following in Professor Ikeda’s footsteps, other Japanese scientists discovered the umami substances inosinate and guanylate.
It is only really in the last 25 years that we declared it a taste. In 2000, there was a discovery that a version of one of the brain receptors for glutamate (neurotransmitter) was also produced in the taste buds. Not only could se sense glutamate, but we could sense it as a taste.
This new found discovery has allowed cooks and chefs around the world to fully understand the powers of umami to create deliciousness.
For more information please visit: www.umamiinfo.com/
