I often get my blog topics from things that pop up in everyday discussions – amusing links, interesting comments and so forth. Basically, my originality and innovativity is sometimes lower than pre-teen humour; and today is no exception. There are two reasons for this blog entry’s existence: my picky taste, and a link to a Tasteline article. Don’t bother going there unless you know Swedish, though.

Say hello to Mr. Umami – the complex and elusive “fifth” flavour, which accompanies the four primary flavours of sweet, salty, sour and bitter. As this article explains, umami was discovered thousands of years ago and is used extensively in Asian cooking. It adds a depth of flavour which apparently brings out all the tastes present, unlike Western cuisine which concentrantes on fat as a flavour enhancer in order to bring out specific tastes.

So, where’s the beef? We’ll get to the literal beef later; in the mean time, here’s the interesting part: I’m a very picky eater. In some ways I’m an omnivore – I can eat half-spoiled food, I can eat burnt food, and so on. But there are many foods I either refuse to eat or choose not to eat, and among those are mushrooms, fish, shellfish, mashed potatoes, most types of cheese, vegetables like broccoli and some cabbages, and much more. I’m very selective with my food, but I don’t really view it as being spoiled. Not really. Spoiled implies (in my opinion) that one receives alternatives; if I’m faced with foods like this I prefer to simply go hungry. Maybe that’s just some weird masochistic tendency to punish myself for being spoiled though – who knows. But guess what? Most of the foodstuffs above contain large amounts of umami, according to the article above. Maybe there’s a connection?

Umami is the hip new word for something more common: glutamate, or glutamic acid. Apparently, there are three nucleotides that contribute most to the umami taste: inosinate, guanylate and, to a lesser degree, adenylate. According to this list, it seems that many of the foods above contain large amounts of glutamate, but also things I do like such as beef, pork, chicken, tomatoes and carrots. Maybe I’m just picky after all?

I have three different theories concerning this:

1. Adenylate is abundant in fish and shellfish, and guanylate is abundant in plants; it might be possible that I have some sort of sensitivity toward these particular nucleotides.
2. As you can read in the article mentioned in the second paragraph, umami can act in several ways: flavour partner, flavour balancer, flavour catalyst and flavour layerer. It might be possible that certain uses of umami simply does not work for me. Balancing or layering the tastes might be okay, but bringing out new flavours might be a complete no-no to my tastebuds.
3. I’m a spoiled bastard who’s trying to avoid responsibility.

In all probability it’s a combination of all three options.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Observations, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.