A regular guest blogger for 'livelighter' & flexitarian cook, Bindu Grandhi, tells us what it is and shares a delicious tomato and carrot appetiser recipe from her cookbook.
Most of us learned in school that our sense of taste is based on four primary tastes: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Those taste receptors are located in different areas: sweet flavours on the tip of the tongue, bitter in the back and sour on the sides.
Well it turns out there is a fifth taste and that ‘tongue map’ we were taught is wrong. Japanese scientists recently identified umami, which represents the savoury flavour of soy sauce, tomatoes and other foods high in glutamate.
Glutamate (a type of amino acid) and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, occur naturally in many foods including meat, fish, vegetables and dairy products. Umami is subtle and blends well with other flavors so we don’t even recognise its presence in food, but it plays an important role in making food tasty.
Any area of the tongue can pick up any taste, although sensitivity does vary across the tongue. Umami receptors are not only located on the tongue but also throughout the digestive tract, but their role in digestion and nutrition is still a mystery.
By the way, those bumps on your tongue aren’t taste buds but ‘fungiform papillae’ which house 50-100 buds. Scientists believe there are only a few receptor types, each for sweet, sour, salty, and umami, but there are a lot more for bitter.
So I hope you’ve learned something about taste. After all, it’s one of the key senses that influence how delicious a dish tastes.
Experience the taste of umami in tomatoes and carrots with this umami rich recipe: Tomato Slices Topped with Sweet Onion and Carrot. Cheers!
About the Author
Author of Spice Up Your Life, Bindu Grandhi is passionate about healthy and flavourful cooking, especially when it’s flexitarian. She shares her health knowledge with the world by providing practical, healthy and tasty recipes as The Flex Cook
Author Info
0 Responses to Indulge your Umami