Trying to enhance flavour is a big trend now. But these days everyone also wants a clean deck of ingredients – no added E numbers or preservatives.
That’s the challenge for chefs, food manufacturers and food designers. If you take these things away you lose flavour – so how do you put them back? That’s where umami comes in.
Umami is not a taste per se but it helps bring out the savoury elements of food. Your body has something called glutamate, and some foods are rich in it.
At first, umami was often associated with molecular gastronomy. Heston Blumenthal was way ahead of the curve.
But now we are starting to have a wider understanding. Most chefs know that Parmesan has a high natural umami, for example.
Very ripe tomatoes are also good – that’s why tomato sauces and bases in Italian cookery are so popular.
Spinach, celery and leeks are wonderful. There’s a lot of umami in some mushrooms as well – shiitake are brilliant. Try taking some normal chestnuts or button mushrooms out of a recipe and substituting with some shiitake. Or add shiitake stock to a dish.
If you want a quick win, you can use soy sauce, dashi or seaweeds. Bonito flakes are also excellent. Another trick is adding Marmite and Bovril to recipes, which have bags of flavour and high umami.
For me, the issue that chefs need to firmly grasp is that umami isn’t the basis of the dish – it is the enhancement of the dish.
You have to start by thinking about what you are actually cooking. If you are braising meats or making stocks the addition of some of these umami-rich ingredients will bring flavour forward. But you can’t use as them a main ingredient.
Exploring umami as chef makes you think more about how you combine ingredients and cookery techniques to enhance the umami-rich flavours of a dish.
For an example of a new umami-product, see iasc Irish shellfish butter.
