Umami? Really?

Have you seen those annoying commercials for Kikoman Soy Sauce? Umami the sexy female voice whispers. The fifth taste.

Excuse me?

Then, during some of our favorite food-related shows the so-called food experts made mention of Umami.

This dish has a wonderful Umami finish that is really nice on the palate.

This is getting a little ridiculous, don't you think? I mean, I'm ALL about the avant garde, I love hearing about haute cusine, which is pretty much elaborate preparations and presentations. But what is this damn Umami suddently everyone is talking (or whispering sexily--and yes, sexily is a word) about?

Well, first I found a wikipedia post that described Umami as something having to do with the presence of glutamic acid. Like you, I wondered exactly what glutamic acid was and why I would want it in my food. And why I would refer to it with some weird Japanese based word? I needed to dig deeper.

Did you know that there is a whole website dedicated to Umami? Yes, there is! And thanks to umamiinformationcenter.com, I was able to provide this diagram. Does this clear it up for you?



Yeah, me neither. Did someone actually spend time putting this graph together?

Finally, I found this and it helped clear things up. Apparently Umami is neither salty, sweet, sour, or bitter. It's meat. It's cheese. It's certain vegetables and combinations of flavor. Basically, umami can be translated to "yummy". Really, we need a super snooty word not only to sell soy sauce (which already has a claim on one of the 4, now 5, tastes--SALTY), but also for super snooty intellectual people who call themselves foodies to make us regular eaters feel inferior when they say things like "wonderful umami quality"?

So again, I say that I'm glad to be halfway gourmet if it means I get to say yummy instead of disecting the very act of eating into glutamic acids, glutamates, and taste receptors. As Ina would say "How fun is that?" Not fun at all, Ina. Not fun at all.