When I was 10-years-old I was taught in school that our tongues used certain areas for the four different tastes we as humans were capable of distinguishing. Those tastes are sweet, sour, salty and bitter. It must have been some sort of hot topic at the time because not too long after my teacher gave that lesson I saw some food critic on television explaining that he exercised his remarkable palate by rolling certain foods around on certain parts of his tongue. This prompted me to experiment by putting sugar on the “wrong” area of my tongue to try and trick my taste buds but no matter where I put it, it always just tasted sweet. This left me feeling that maybe my palate was broken or that I was incapable of tasting food like other people. I later found that there was nothing wrong with how I tasted my food and apparently the only thing that ridiculous food critic was tasting was his own ass since clearly, that’s where his head was.
It’s now accepted that no particular area of our tongue is responsible for tasting any one of the five basic tastes. Yup five and not four, like a lot of things I learned in school it was simply wrong and they taught it to us anyway because they didn’t know any better… Considering I was 10-years-old in the late 1970’s and the fifth basic taste was realized as early as the 1800’s, why in the late 1970s was it still widely accepted that there were only four basic tastes?
Although the fifth basic taste obviously existed regardless of if it was accepted or not, it wasn’t until the early 1900s when a scientist named Kikunae Ikeda properly identified it. He named it Umami which means “pleasant savory taste” in Japanese. He even went so far as to patent it in the form of MSG or monosodium glutamate which is used to enhance the flavor of some foods including a well known fast food fried chicken chain restaurant that is famous for it.
Scientists debated for years on whether umami existed or not and in 1985 at the first Umami International Symposium in Hawaii, the term Umami was officially recognized as the scientific term to describe the taste of glutamates (and nucleotides).
Umami is often described as savoriness and it is that near indescribable aftertaste you get from things like mushrooms, soy sauce, cheese, tomatoes, spinach and even green tea. All of these foods are high in glutamates sort of like MSG, but you don’t need to use MSG to enhance flavor. By simply mixing foods that both have the umami taste it will intensify and give you that well sawt aftertaste that satisfies your savory cravings.
This is why combinations like tomatoes and cheese, mushrooms and soy sauce, cabbage and chicken broth make up some very well-loved classic dishes around the world.
“Those who pay careful attention to their taste buds will discover in the complex flavor of asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat, a common and yet absolutely singular taste which cannot be called sweet, or sour, or salty, or bitter” – Dr. Kikunae Ikeda, Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry, Washington 1912