There’s now a fifth taste: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter…and now Umami
I got the automatic newsletter from NPR and found this article Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter…and Umami by Robert Krulwich to be extremely interesting. It all started with a French chef Auguste Escoffier who made a veal stock that had a new flavor that wasn’t the taste of sweet, sour, salty, or bitter. But when this magic ingredient was added to anything it tasted better. Scientists insisted there was only the 4 tastes but now with new testing they’ve found that indeed, there is a new taste. They call it Umami since it’s what a chemist Kikunae Ikeda, called it when he posited the 5th flavor years ago. So, now that it’s been proven to exist, Ideda’s name for it will be the one used for this new flavor. (The secret ingredient? Glutamate.) Read the article…it’s very informative and interesting.