Umami is a way to make dishes compelling yet keep them restrained. Discovering umami gives us a chance to create dishes that are irresistible even with just a few ingredients, because it brings the natural deliciousness of those ingredients to the fore.

Human breast milk is rich in umami. The high glutamate content of breast milk is the same for all humans, regardless of race.
From a young age, we have all been exposed to umami, and honed our taste for it. Even if we are unaware of it, umami is a taste familiar to us all from birth.

I don’t think that umami is something uniquely Japanese that Japan has transmitted to the rest of the world. It’s true that perhaps the West was not conscious of the umami taste, but I think that now recognition for umami is widening, and it’s being used in cuisine to a great extent.

The first time I ate tamarillo I could feel something was different from other fruits. I later realized that thing was umami. Maybe I was the first one to discover umami in the tamarillo! Out of that discovery came the idea for a new dessert.

In Japanese the word umami can mean either the fifth taste umami, or “deliciousness,” and right now the former is becoming an internationally-recognized term. Umami is not just about providing delicious food to the world community: I think it’s got more potential than that. By having our children learn about and experlence umami now, in the future, they will be able to contribute to the development of food, and help improve the health of the global community.

Umami is found universally in foods around the world, rounding other tastes to offer a smoother, more subtle flavor experience. Using foods particularly high in umami results in dishes with mellow taste.

There is really no good culinary way of doing what time (aging, fermentation or curing) does, unfortunately. So when it comes to cooking and umami at least from my perspective it is really a matter of choosing the right ingredients to begin with and then not losing it once you have got it.

As a chef, discovering the umami taste changed my way of thinking about cooking. I play with umami a lot more in the cold preparations, to enhance the taste of raw seafood with just a little seasoning and using the taste of the product to my advantage.

What I always keep in mind when using umami in cooking is maintaining a balance with the other four tastes. Combining umami in a balanced way with other basic tastes such as sour and sweet gives flavors a wellrounded quality.
I intend to keep spreading the word about umami internationally, while incorporating local ingredients and flavors.

The umami substance glutamate is one of the amino acids and is contained in many foods such as breast milk. Our research made clear that newborn babies innately like umami. In addition, by being fed with breast milk and eating traditional foods, fondness for umami is enhanced.

The umami of glutamate is the taste that humans, who learnt how to cook with fire and preserve food, have pursued throughout history. Therefore, umami is the most human taste.

In Nordic countries, we have utilized umami in traditional cooking more or less unconsciously. In recent years, umami has become a well-known concept and is used to enhance and describe deliciousness in e.g., cheeses and fermented products. Most recently Nordic seaweeds have been proposed for preparing dashi.

Interest in umami is blossoming among top chefs overseas. Umami is a part of Japanese culture of which we can be proud, that we should feel confident taking to the world. Umami is poised to explode on the international gastronomic scene.

While each ingredient here has its own distinct character, none dominates: thus balance is maintained. Tastes change as you eat, with umami lingering afterwards. Desserts that feature all five basic tastes are satisfying because umami compensates for any reduction in sugar.

Most of our dishes use tomatoes, stock, and vegetables that are sources of umami. I think that Western consumers have been very familiar with umami quality, but have used the term ‘savory’, which most likely reflects not only the taste component (umami) but also the odour/flavour component. It hasn’t been clear to most people that there is a distinct taste like sweetness that is umami.

Italian cooking has no dashi concept, but does make generous use of umami foods such as tomatoes, cheese, cured ham and porcini. An opportunity to grapple with Buddhist vegetarian cooking for an Italian recipe book using Kyoto vegetables gave me a new appreciation of the influence of umami and kombu dashi, and transformed my view of cooking.

The big misunderstanding is that because umami is a Japanese word used to describe ‘savory deliciousness’ that umami must therefore be a Japanese or a Far Eastern concept. This is simply not so. To taste umami is like experiencing the feelings of love; the experiencing of umami is absolutely universal and does not, and cannot possibly belong to any single culture, but is shared, enjoyed and appreciated by all those in possession of a tongue.

Umami creates deep taste and harmony. By combining umami ingredients, I can come up with dishes that are balanced and full of rich flavor. There are a lot of Peruvian ingredients rich in umami, and I love using them in the food at my restaurant.

Umami allows you to create dishes flavorsome yet light. It also strikes me that umami can be used to keep food appetizing in environments where impact on sense of taste is a concern, such as inflight meals. I imagine that from here on, chefs will need to learn increasingly more about umami and how to make the most of it.

I believe we Japanese have the instinctive ability at cellular level to detect umami. Accustomed from a young age to food made with dashi, we naturally learn to sense subtle, delicate umami flavors wherever they may be. You could say that umami is in our DNA.

The important thing to understand is which foods can be combined with umami, and how to eat them. Understanding umami allows you to try out new ingredient combinations. It’s the entwining of multiple ingredients that produces taste of depth and intensity.

Tang in Chinese cuisine comes in more variations than the dashi in Japanese cooking. Different types are skillfully divided into different uses, and blended to produce well-balanced, sophisticated stocks. These stocks can transform even a bland ingredient like harusame into an elegant, flavorsome dish. This is the secret of braised dishes in Chinese cooking.

In French cuisine, seasonings are prepared from the foods. When the tastes of various ingredients expand from point to line to surface, it is umami that draws out the flavors of those ingredients and renders them harmonious. Umami plays a huge role in the creation of unique French recipes that excite and astound.