Ummm…Umami

Umami seems to be a hot button across the entire swath of the food industry, from gourmet kitchens to scientific institutions. Last week, Kim Decker, a long-time colleague and writer par excellence, wrote me a note (this delightful dissertation being Kim’s idea of a “note”) about a umami symposium she recently attended. Many thanks for sharing the experience; but next time, don’t forget to include the doggie bag.

   -Lynn A. Kuntz

One of the pleasures of writing about the food and beverage scene is that even months after I’ve put an article to bed, new developments surface that cause me to look at an old topic with fresh eyes.

Such was the case several weeks ago when I attended “New Frontiers of Taste,” an umami symposium organized by the Umami Information Center and scheduled to take advantage of some coinciding events—namely, the 100th anniversary of umami's “discovery” (or, perhaps more accurately, its elucidation) by the Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda, and this year's International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste (ISOT), held here in San Francisco from July 21 through 26.

I had treated the topic of umami in a piece several months before and hadn't quite gotten it fully out of my system, so seeing as how the event was only a BART ride away and promised to gather a panel of sage voices to discuss umami past, present, and future—AND seeing as how it was followed by a luncheon prepared by several chefs playing at the tops of their games—I went. I know: poor me.

It was a wise decision—and not only because I got to meet my friend Brendan Naulty, president of Ajinomoto Food Ingredients’ U.S. operations, when he rescued me from missing-press-pass purgatory, but because I also got French Laundry chef Thomas Keller to autograph my luncheon menu. (He was responsible for the sous vide lamb rib eye with confit byaldi, roasted fennel, and pickled shallot sauce that served as our main course.) But best of all, the symposium offered me the chance to consider angles on umami that I didn't get to cover in my earlier exploration.

For starters, the discussion, ably moderated by Kathy Sykes, Ph.D., a British scientist and communicator who's appeared on the BBC series “Ever Wondered About Food...,” roamed a deep gastronomic territory that we rarely get to explore, save for at the edges. One of the panelists was Kunio Tokuoka, executive chef at Kyoto’s Kitcho restaurant, who, with more than 30 years experience in Japanese kitchens, has an intuitive feel for the role that umami plays in balancing a meal both aesthetically and nutritionally. And if there’s anything that Japanese cuisine is, it’s aesthetically and nutritionally balanced. In fact, Chef Tokuoka cited the taste of umami as a potential tool for improving the sensory appeal of dishes that are otherwise short on the fat and salt that we love but could stand to use less of. As more Japanese diners drift away from their country's traditional cuisine, Chef Tokuoka is working with the head of Japan's diabetes society to review umami-based strategies for getting them to eat better.

Nearby on the panel was Master of Wine Tim Hanni. I was excited to hear from him, as I’d read about his work relating people’s tastes in wines to their number of taste buds. He’s also been investigating the relationship between wine and umami (among the other four tastes) and, here again he left us considering the importance of balance. If I understood correctly, Hanni has found that, like sweetness, too much umami makes a wine taste more acidic, bitter, and tannic, while diminishing its fruit character. He likened the effect to that orange-juice-after-the-toothpaste phenomenon and proposed as a corrective that we keep the salt and acid on hand (and in the recipe) to balance the sweet and umami. Who knew you could tame a big Cab with a salt rim and squeeze of lime?

Harold McGee, the author and New York Times “Curious Cook” who’s made food science cool for the masses, was on hand and helped bridge the gap between the foodies and the scientists on the panel, among whom were McGee himself, as well as John Prescott, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Gary Beauchamp, Ph.D., director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center.

The event being part of a meeting of taste and olfaction researchers, much of the talk turned toward the physiology of umami more than the tools we in industry can wield to enhance it. Nevertheless, the discussion whet the appetite, with Prescott mentioning his research into the role of umami in flavor recognition and liking. It seems that just as we can ease a novel flavor onto people’s radars by pairing it with familiar and accepted carbs and fats, we can also gain converts by delivering unusual profiles in the context of well-known and loved umami tastants.

I was really intrigued by what’s simmering in Beauchamp’s lab. He noted that umami appears to give a persistence of salivary flow, creating something of a mouthfeel effect—perhaps through tactile receptors in the taste buds—that, by my lights, would make it unique among the five basic tastes. Beauchamp aims to study how this mechanism works, and I hope he does. When he comes up with some results, maybe there’ll be another such symposium in which he can let everyone know about them. If I can score another autographed menu as part of the package, you can bet I’ll be there.

-Kimberly J. Decker