Death by Umami

In my quest to educate my senses, I bombed them into surrender with umami yesterday.

It started with an umami explosion first thing in the morning and continued with umami bomblets. An umami hand grenade jarred me at lunchtime and an umami clusterbomb smacked me left and right throughout the afternoon until a bubbling umami firebomb hit me like Pearl Harbor in the evening.

It all ended abruptly in a cool puddle of watermelon juice at the bottom of my favorite ceramic bowl.

OK. I’ve been through worse. After all, in Japanese, umami means something like “yummy.” So, I had saturated myself in “yumminess.”

Culinary scientists have traditionally classified basic tastes into the four categories of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. They have now added a fifth – umami. You can now see the word “umami” on cooking shows, in newspaper headlines, in “Umami Burgers” and on trendy sites on the internet.

“Umami is a pleasant savory taste imparted by glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, which occur naturally in many foods including meat, fish, vegetables and dairy products,” writes the Umami Information Center on its web page. “As the taste of umami itself is subtle and blends well with other tastes to expand and round out flavors, most people don’t recognize umami when they encounter it.”

But that didn’t tell me what umami was. Cake is sweet. Lime is sour. Tonic is bitter. Salt pork is … well … salty. What the heck is umami?

Yummy Umami

I wanted to recognize it. The first four categories are clear, but the fifth was a mystery.

I have always leaned away from sweetness – which tickles the taste buds on the tip of the tongue – and opted for sour, bitter or salty. Well, I thought those were my preferences. After all, there were only four basic tastes, right?

As a child, I saved up money from working at the bottle depot – sorting stubby brown beer bottles from the graceful curves of the once-iconic Coke bottles. I would use my income to buy tins of smoked oysters and aged cheese. My schoolmates were buying Reese’s Pieces, Hubba Bubba and Mars Bars.

When I first read about umami a couple of months ago, it hit me that I was always attracted by umami, without knowing it.

Umami can also be translated as “savory” – marmite, chicken broth, mushrooms and, of course, my smoked oysters and aged cheese. Grilled beef, fish sauce, tomatoes, whole eggs, green tea, soy sauce and seaweed and human mother’s milk.

It seemed esoteric. The ingredients didn’t seem to fit into a single category.

So I decided to pinpoint this “umami” yesterday, using a list of umami foods and ingredients from the Umami Information Center, which maintains offices in London, New York and Tokyo in its quest to spread the word.

Everything I ate was on the list.

At 7 a.m., I had scrambled eggs mixed with chopped mushrooms and a tin of canned sardines sautéed with splashes of soy sauce. A slice of tomato and a chunk of old goat’s cheese accompanied.

 “This taste is powerful,” I wrote in my journal as I chewed. “Almost overwhelming so early in the morning. It’s coating my mouth so I can’t escape it. It sticks to the roof, the back of my throat and all over my palate. It’s a taste that makes me want to suck my own tongue – suck it for taste and suck it to be rid of the taste.”

“If I didn’t have that cold slice of tomato to chill my tongue, it would have been too overpowering so early,” I wrote a while later. “I guess this must be umami. It hijacks my mouth and then sticks around like a friend about to outstay his welcome. Now, half an hour later, I only want to brush my teeth. But my day is set – all umami, all day.”

Throughout the morning, I snacked on umami sheep’s cheese. I still wasn’t entirely certain that I had captured the essence of umami. I knew it was in my mouth, but I wasn’t sure I could readily identify it in random foods.

At lunch, I ate a couple dozen mushroom caps stuffed with parmiggiano cheese imported from Italy. I baked it in the oven until the cheese crusted over the little aromatic ponds of mushroom juices in the hollows of the caps. Yes it was delicious. But by mid-afternoon I was sorely craving something else on the taste scale - dreaming of a ripe peach or a crisp iceberg salad with a blueberry vinaigrette. I felt on the verge of a personal breakthrough and so I stuck with it.

Dinner was a bubbling pot of two whole mackerel with onions and a can of stewed tomatoes. Another umami bomb.

After, over a hot mug of green tea (also on the umami list) I ruminated on my rumination. I had a certain mouthfeel all day, almost smothering – like the reminder of a creamy, moldy cheese.

I was not entirely certain that this was umami but I was certain that I could not go to bed with this lingering taste.

So I grabbed a lubenita – a sweet, usually dark-green type of watermelon grown in southern Romania that has absolutely nothing umami about it. I started to cut it open and it split in half under its own weight with a satisfying crack. I pulled it apart with my hands. A freshness spilled out first in the form of its scent, a chill breeze at the dusk of summer. Then the palate-cleansing taste as I licked my fingers. Bubble-gum makers have the watermelon taste oh-so wrong.

For two weeks, I have been weighing and measuring every single thing I eat – every parsley sprig, poppy seed or roast chicken. I then analyze it for nutrition, carbohydrate content and other factors that may teach me something about my body and its senses. That’s how I know that I gorged on exactly one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of watermelon to end my umami binge, losing myself in the sensation.

As the drops of watermelon juice still meandered off my fingertips and to the bottom of my bowl – I realized that I had defeated the umami taste. And, in so doing, I had truly discovered it.

Umami is a taste that, even now over my morning coffee, I can recall sensually in an instant. Full bodied, at times overpowering, savoury and … well … yummy.

It makes me gag a bit at the moment though.

Yes, I am still very much an umami fan. But I’ll explore the other tastes for a few days before returning to it.  I’ll eventually have a bitter day, a sour day and, I shudder to think, a day of my enemy – the unholy sweet.

I don’t believe much in moderation. But at least I do believe in moderating umami. I cannot survive off umami alone.