The Little Book of Japanese Living by Yutaka Yazawa

Author:Yutaka Yazawa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dashi: the umami of everything

Truth be told, we Japanese should doff our caps to China for anything culinary. They have been at it for over 4,000 years. Constant effort has been poured into their pursuit of gastronomy, coupled with the search for a healthy diet. Chinese vocabularies are full of cooking-related words.

Compared to this cooking titan on our doorstep, Japan’s food traditions are naturally modest. That said, nothing compares to home cooking, and we take pride in what we have to offer.

Chief among our proud traditions is the discovery of umami (旨味). Umami is usually translated into English as ‘savoury taste’, but it is so much more than that. It is the taste in foods that is neither sweet, sour, salty, nor bitter, but nevertheless forms an essential part of a full palate. It comes from the variety of amino acid combinations.

Japanese people use various ingredients to extract umami. Usually, we boil sea kelp seaweed (kombu 昆布), or dried bonito fish (katsuobushi 鰹節) to make a broth which we call dashi (出汁). Dashi, literally meaning ‘extracted soup’, is full of umami and is used as a base in a number of dishes.

We have been using dashi for centuries, but umami was only discovered and scientifically analysed at the beginning of the 20th century by chemistry professor Kikunae Ikeda (池田菊苗 1864–1936). He co-founded a company to produce the umami seasoning called Ajinomoto – the original producer of monosodium glutamate (MSG).

Compared to other tastes, such as saltiness and sweetness, umami is subtle. Perhaps for this reason, it is regarded as a sign of a sophisticated palate to appreciate it.

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