Morganna’s Recipe: Umami Chicken, Mushrooms and Gai Lan

Just after I started this series of posts on the topic of “the fifth taste,” Morganna came up to me and said, “Mom, can I make dinner tonight? I had an idea for a recipe.”

“What do you want to make?” I asked.

“I want to stir fry chicken with fermented black beans, black mushrooms, fresh shiitake mushrooms, Shao Hsing wine, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, shallots and chiles,” she reeled off at top speed.

I smiled mysteriously and noted, “We have gai lan in the fridge.”

“Cool! I will put that in, too.”

I nodded. “Sure, why not? We have plenty of chicken, and you know where the rest of the stuff lives.” To myself, I chuckled inwardly, counting up the umami-filled ingredients: fermented black beans, dried and fresh shiitakes, Shao Hsing, and soy sauce. I plotted to sneak some sesame oil in at the end in order to pump up the savory umami flavors.

She scurried off into the kitchen, and set the mushrooms to soaking, and began gathering up ingredients, moving with efficient speed.

She cut everything up herself, while humming and bouncing hither and yon. I followed her and took photographs, offering help and advice, but mostly, I stayed out of the way. She only faltered once, when it came to figuring out how much cornstarch to use in marinating the chicken with the wine, but I added another half tablespoon and all was well.

I saw that she had cut the chicken into fairly large chunky cubes, but I kept silent and let her go on.

Finally, all was prepared, and it was time to cook. With camera at the ready, I watched as she carefully lined up the bowls of ginger, garlic, shallot, chile and fermented black beans next to the wok with the peanut oil. Behind this first array of ingredients came the chicken, a little bowl of combined mushroom soaking liquid (carefully ladled out so as to leave all the grit behind) and chicken broth, and the bottles of Kimlan aged soy sauce and Shao Hsing, already open.

Behind them was the cut, rinsed and dried gai lan in a colander, and the sesame oil bottle.

She took up the wok spatula, took a deep breath, and lit the burner under the wok.

Now, let me explain. Because the burner gets so hot, in order to hold one of the short, earlike handles that are typical of the Cantonese cast iron woks, one has to use a folded side towel. I mean, the blue flame comes halfway up the wok’s sloping sides, so that sucker gets really warm, really fast. So, she had a rolled up towel in her left hand, ready to use. She had very carefully folded it into a controlled wad that she could maneuver easily around the handle to stableize the wok on the burner and to keep it from trying to scoot away as she vigorously tossed the ingredients with the shovel.

She discovered something. When you set down the towel to grab ingredients to toss in the wok, it has a tendency to unfold itself, unfurling like a little flag. The first time she set it down, it only unfolded a bit, so she wadded it back up and kept working.

The second time, she misjudged how well she had refolded it, and a corner of it dipped down into the flame.

It burst into fire in her hand.

I watched in amazement as she very calmly and deliberately turned, set down the wok shovel, turned off the burner, and carefully held the flaming towel away from her body and walked it to the sink. She dropped it in, turned the water faucet directly onto it, then walked back to the wok, turned the burner back on and went back to cooking, all AS IF NOTHING HAD HAPPENED.

I had a camera in my hand, and never thought to snap a picture of the very dramatic proceedings.

I shouldn’t be surprised, mind you. I have taught her to never panic around emergency situations and have always modelled calm, unemotional behavior in a crisis. And she is really pretty sensible herself, so it all turned out well.

The only thing she said to me was in passing. “Mom,” she said, as she took up stir frying again, “can you pour some of the wine into the wok. I don’t want to set this second side towel down.” As I complied, she blushed slightly and said, “Sorry for setting that one on fire.”

The meal turned out quite well. When she asked me how she could improve it, I pointed out that because she had cut the chicken into such large chunks, we had to add extra liquid to the recipe to cook it down without drying it out, or making the outside a crusty mess, so it diluted the flavors. The next time she cooks it, she vowed to cut it into thin slices.

Other than that, it was perfect–a very good summation of how to use various of the umami ingredients I have been writing about for days together in one recipe.

Morganna’s Umami Chicken, Mushrooms and Gai Lan

Ingredients:

1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into thin slices
2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
peanut oil for stir frying–3-4 tablespoons
1 large shallot, peeled and sliced thinly (or one small onion)
2 tablespoons fermented black beans, lightly crushed
1 medium hot chile, sliced thinly
1 1/2″ cube ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
6 black mushrooms, soaked in warm water, squeezed dry, stemmed, caps sliced thinly
8 fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, caps sliced thinly
2 tablespoons aged soy sauce
2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
2/3 pound gai lan, trimmed, and both leaves and stems cut into 2″ lengths
1/2 cup mixed mushroom water and chicken broth
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil

Method:

Mix chicken breast slices with wine and cornstarch and allow to marinate for at least twenty minutes.

Heat wok until it smokes. Add oil, and heat until it shimmers and just starts to think about smoking. Add shallot, black beans and chile and stir fry vigorously until shallots begin to brown and turn golden. Toss in ginger and garlic and continue stir frying about one more minute, taking care to keep it all moving so the garlic doesn’t take it in its mind to burn.

Add both kinds of mushrooms, and stir fry for about thirty seconds, then add chicken. Spread over bottom of wok in a single layer and allow to brown on the bottom for about thirty to forty seconds before tossing hither and yon in the wok rapidly. When the pink is halfway gone, add the soy sauce and wine, and continue stir frying until it is mostly cooked.

Add gai lan, pour in the broth and mushroom soaking liquid mixture and toss. Cover wok with domed lid, allow liquid to simmer for about forty seconds to a minute, take off lid and stir fry until most of the sauce is thickened and clinging to the food, and the gai lan is bright green and crunchy-tender.

Take off heat, drizzle with sesame oil, stir once more, then scrape from wok into warmed serving platter.

Umami : The Power of Fermentation and Fungus

The last category of umami ingredients from Asia contains what at first appears to be a disparate group of food items: wine, kimchee, pickled and preserved vegetables, mushrooms, rice and vinegar.

Believe it or not, all of these items have characteristics in common–they all involve fungi or bacteria in some way, shape or form.

Yeast is a one-celled fungus that metabolizes sugar through a process of fermentation which results in alcohol. If you add yeast (in a controlled environment) to fruit juice or grain cooked in water, you end up with an alcoholic beverage. Umami enters the equation by way of the aging process after the primary fermentation is done, and is the result of some of the protein in the grain being broken down into amino acids by the fermentation process, as well as being a product of the yeast itself. (Aged wines are often left “on the lees,” meaning, they are left in the bottle or the cask to age with the dead yeast cells in a sedimentation at the bottom of the bottle or vat. These cells flavor the wine, adding comlexity to the overal flavor. After the aging is complete, the wine is “racked off” the lees, and bottled into clean bottles.)

There are grape wines produced in China, but by far, the most popular wines are produced from rice. Shao Hsing is one of the most famous of these sometimes potent beverages, and with good reason: a very good Shao Hsing tastes better than the best sherry. It is rounded, full-bodied, crisp, with a rich, sweet finish. Like the fortified wines of Europe, such as sherry and madeira, it gains even more character and flavor when aged; not surprisingly the amount of umami flavor also increases with age.

I always use Shao Hsing in my Chinese cooking; most cookbooks stipulate that you can substitute sherry for it, but since I am lucky enough to have a local Asian market that sells high-quality unsalted Shao Hsing, I am much more likely to substitute sherry with it in a European recipe than the other way around. I do this in part, because I like the flavor of the rice wine that much better, but also, because it keeps the number of bottles I have to store a bit lower. It is particularly good in marinating chicken and pork; its complexity adds a great deal of flavor to chicken, while the sweet finish enhances the sweet nature of good pork.One of my favorite dishes featuring it, however, is a variant on Cantonese lemon chicken I created using it with Meyer lemons that I call “Winter Sunlight Chicken.”

Japanese sake and mirin also have some umami taste, particularly with the more aged sakes. I feel, however, that these more young and lightly flavored wines do not pack the characteristic brown umami wallup that Shao Hsing does. (In general–the darker the beverage, the more likely it is to contain umami.)

There is a particularly Chinese ingredient that is worth mentioning: red yeast rice. It is whole grain red rice (the outer rice bran is deep reddish brown in color), which has been fermented by the specific yeast strain Monascus purpureus, which results in a the brilliantly red-colored fermented rice you see in the mason jar in the center of the illustration. This preparation has been used as a food, flavor enhancer and medicine in China for centuries, and recent scientific investigation in the West has shown it to be beneficial in controlling high cholesterol levels in the blood. Currently, the FDA has red yeast rice classified as a dietary supplement, but there is apparently discussion of classifying it as a prescription medication.

The flavor of the rice, however, is of most interest to me; it is complex, deep and rather earthy–all qualities that point to the high levels of umami present in it. I like using it in simmered dishes, like red cooked beef or soy sauce chicken.

From fermented grain, we go to mushrooms. Instead of being flavored by the action of fungus, mushrooms themselves are fungus, and in general, the darker the mushroom, the stronger the umami content. In addition to that general rule, dried mushrooms are more flavorful than fresh; this explains why the Chinese black mushroom features in so many Chinese dishes. Not only do these dried shiitake mushrooms keep forever in a dried state, when they are rehydrated, they never take up as much water as they originally held, so their texture is transformed from soft to toothsome and chewy. In addition, the water or wine you use to soak the mushrooms for their rehydration bath, is deeply colored and flavored with the umami-rich essence of mushrooms. I never waste this liquid; always it is poured into a simmer soup or stew, or is used as the basis of a sauce.

Fresh shiitake are also filled with glutamate, but are not as strongly flavored. However, the tender texture of them is interesting, so combining the two mushrooms in a single dish leads to a double shot of umami along with interesting variations in texture.

Fermentation is not always caused by the action of yeast feeding on sugar and reproducing to create alcohol. There is a second kind of fermentation, known as bacterial fermentation, where beneficial bacteria, typically lactobacillus converts simple sugars into llactic acid. Such fermentation is nearly always used as a preservative agent for a staple vegetable such as cabbages for winter; however, the side benefit is that it enhances flavor and adds nutritive value to the food. Lactic acid and living lactobacillus cultures are beneficial to the human digestive system, and foods loaded with these are considered tonic or medicinal by traditional medical practitioners, a view which is supported by scientific research.

The most famous Asian lacto-feremented vegetable preparation is probably Korean kimchee, which is generally produced from salted Chinese cabbage seasoned with chile, garlic and ginger. I say generally, because there are probably hundreds of different varieties of kimchee, made from many different vegetables other than the standard cabbage. (The reason there is no kimchee in the photograph is because I had recently finished my jar of it and haven’t yet bought another.)

Kimchee is used both as a side dish or condiment on its own, but also as an ingredient in long-simmered meat dishes, like this one for kimchee jij-gae. I am also fond of kimchee in ramen.

While kimchee may be the most famous and varied example of Asian lactobacillus-fermented vegetables, Sichuan preserved vegetable deserves to be just as well known. Used in various recipes of that region as a distinct bearer of flavor and nutrition, I like to pair it with dried shrimp–another umami ingredient–in the justifiable famous dry fried green beans. While the English name sounds quite vague, the Chinese name, zha cai, according to Fuchsia Dunlop, refers to mustard tubers that have a crisp texture and a salty, sour and spicy flavor. You can rinse the vegetable off before using it, but I like to use it as is and use less soy sauce and salt when I cook with it, because I like the sharpness that the chile brings to the flavor, and if you wash the salt off, most of the chile is removed as well.

Vinegar, such as the aged, black rice Chianking vinegar, is filled with umami in addition to being sour from dilute acetic acid . Another food produced by bacterial fermentation, vinegars can be the result of direct bacterial fermentation of grain or fruit, or they can be produced by a secondary bacterial fermentation of a yeast-fermented alcohol, such as grape wine or rice wine. Rice vinegar and chianking vinegar give the tart flavor to various Chinese dishes, including chicken with garlic sauce, and the classic Hunan-Sichuan (both regions claim origin rights to it) dish, Gong Bao Jiding–Kung Pao Chicken.

Finally, I included in the photograph of this group of ingredients two Asian condiments that are not specifically noted as being bearers of umami taste, but which I think combine beautifully to enhance the existing umani in any ingredient or dish. Sesame paste, which is made from untoasted sesame seeds, ground together, is used as a dressing for a Sichuan dish of cold noodles. It has a light nutty flavor that is like peanut butter, but not as sweet or bold, and to my palate, combines beautifully with preserved vegetables, because the acidity of the vegetables cuts the richness of the sesame paste, while the paste heightens the umami brilliance of the vegetables.

Sesame oil, pressed from toasted sesame seeds, really enhances the umami flavor of any dish that includes chicken, black mushrooms or fermented black beans. Just a few drops, drizzled over the dish at the end of cooking (always add it at the end–it has a low smoking point and will burn otherwise) brings out the very meaty, savory quality of these ingredients. Always remember, however, that toasted sesame oil is meant to be used in minute amounts and as a condiment, not a cooking oil. It is very strongly flavored with a very browned, nutty flavor that becomes overwhelming and unpleasantly sharp when used in too large of an amount. It can easily mask other flavors if used injudiciously, but when used properly, it can make all the other ingredients in a dish jump up and sing each of their distinct notes in a chorus of perfect harmony.

In my next installment, look for a dish loaded with umami ingredients, conceived of and cooked by Morganna independent of my interference. It turned out beautifully, and I thought it was a perfectly wonderful coincidence that she wanted to cook a dish filled with Chinese umami ingredients just as I was starting this series.

Even if she -did- catch a side towel on fire!

Umami From the Oceans of Asia

I think it may be the strong use of feremented condiments, sauces and flavor enhancers in Asian foods that first grabbed my attention. Of course, I didn’t have the knowledge to articulate that thought–I just was of the opinion, from the first taste, that Chinese food was “damned good,” and that I needed some more.

Perhaps it was the umami taste that hooked me, and keeps me coming back.

Soybeans are not the only source of umami in Asian cuisines.

The flora and fauna of the ocean also provide a large amount of umami for the kitchen.

Fish sauce, known in Thailand as nam pla and in Vietnam as nuoc mam, is probably the single greatest source of natural umami in the world. Made from salted and fermented whole anchovies, fish sauce is often looked at askance by ignorant Westerners, but they should learn not to fear it, and instead, embrace it.

I can tell you that many European and American chefs do embrace it, though they may not admit it openly.

A little bottle of fish sauce was often hidden on the back of the condiment shelf in nearly every kitchen at Johnson & Wales culinary–even the kitchens where only European or American regional cuisines were cooked.

Why was it there?

It was the chefs’ secret weapon to use in the case of a sauce, soup, stew or gravy that turned out flat, flavorless or just plain old blah. It rescued many a novice’s culinary effort from the trash bin and made it palatable, if not good. It changed many mediocre efforts into something pretty good. And, in the hands of a master like Chef Hector Lipa, who was well aquainted with the restorative powers of fish sauce, it could turn something good into something great.

Kasma Loha Unchit, noted Bay Area Thai cooking teacher and author of the books It Rains Fishes and Dancing Shrimp has a motto: “When in doubt,” she says, “add fish sauce.”

As far as I am concerned, those are words to live by. Because, for as fishy as some fish sauces can smell, when they are cooked, all they leave behind is good flavors and aromas, filled with glutamate and other amino acids. When I am in the habit of cooking Thai food once to three times a week, I can go through a bottle of fish sauce within less than a month, but I still use it fairly often when I am just cooking whatever, because I will sneak just a tad bit of it into soups and stews especially, to perk up the flavors and bring them to life.

My favorite brand is Golden Boy–as you can see it has a happy, chubby baby boy on the front, holding a bottle of fish sauce instead of milk. It is great stuff.

But fish sauce is not the only oceanic bringer of umami. There is also a preponderance of dried seafood in Asian cooking. Dried shrimp are used in both Thai and Chinese cooking, and dried scallops, also known as conpoy, are a beloved luxury item in Cantonese cuisine. Both dried shrimp and scallops smell somewhat strong, but their flavor when added to a dish is sublime, and delicious, bringing a much more complex aroma and taste than is possible with their fresh counterparts.

Shrimp are also ground up into sauces and pastes, and at least one very famous cooking sauce, invented in the middle of the twentieth century in Hong Kong, has dried scallops as a main ingredient. Shrimp pastes and sauces are used sparingly in making curry pastes in Thai food and in saucing various meats and vegetables in Chinese food. There is no way around it–ground shrimp paste and sauce is not attractive. Often greyish-pink in color, it is very strongly scented, but, again, once it is cooked into a dish, the very unpleasantly fermented fish odor dissipates and the umami taste blooms, embracing the other ingredients of the dish and marrying them into a happy harmony. I have tried leaving out the shrimp paste from Thai curry pastes and have wound up with very flat tasting coconut milk curries, so I don’t bother doing that anymore. I just open the jar, stick the spoon in and scoop it up with my breath held, until the jar is tightly sealed again.

As for that famous Hong Kong sauce–that would be XO sauce. It is used often in the cooking of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Canton, and is a spicy, very strong-flavored sweet sauce. It is particularly good with pork where its richness combines deliciously with the sweet meat, providing a lovely depth of flavor to it. I also like it with eggplant.

Another famous condiment based on a shellfish is Cantonese oyster sauce. Prevalant in southern Chinese cookery, I have also had it in Thai food, and have found it to be wonderful in many Chinese dishes, particularly ones featuring black beans and gai lan. When purchasing oyster sauce, it is imperative to look at the ingredients and make certain that oyster extract appears near the beginning of the list. Some sauces are mostly cornstarch, sugar and water, with very little oyster flavor at all, while others use more of the extract and thus have more of the delicious ocean flavor that one would expect from the sauce. I prefer Lee Kum Kee Premium, as it is nearly always easily obtained here in Ohio, and tastes quite oceanic, but I recently picked up Amoy brand Oyster Supreme Sauce with Scallops which, in addition to having oyster extract as the first ingredient listed, includes dried scallops, which makes the sauce particularly rich and fragrant.

Finfish, like the anchovies used to make fish sauce, are also endowed with great amounts of natural glutamates. Dried whole anchovies are used in Chinese and Thai dishes as an ingredient, meant to be eaten along with the main ingredients. They are chewy, salty and a bit crisp due to the tiny bones, but they give the sauce they are cooked in a splendid flavor. In Japan, dried, shaved flakes of bonito are used along with kombu, or kelp, as a main ingredient in their ubiquitous dashi stock–the lovely, nose-thrilling clear broth into which miso is whisked to make miso soup. (As I type this, I am having a morning mug of miso soup; that is what Morganna takes for lunch at school once the weather is cold. Her thermos only holds so much, so, I get a mug to help energize me each morning. It is almost as wakefulness inducing as coffee. Almost.) Dashi is not only used in soup however; it is the basis for many sauces, cooking liquids and marinades, so much so that its light flavor is practically the backbone of the Japanese kitchen.

Kombu, the aforementioned dried kelp that is the second pillar of dashi alongside bonito, is so filled with glutamate that sometimes, when you purchase long planks of it dried, a white powdery substance is evident on its surface. That is naturally crystallized glutamate, and should not be washed away, but instead, should be allowed to simmer gently into the dashi. All ocean vegetables, or seaweed, have the umami taste in greater or lesser concentrations. These include wakame, which is used to make salads and to garnish soups in Japan, and nori, or laver, which is used to wrap sushi rolls.

There are other sea creatures and plants that contain umami to greater or lesser extents, of course, but these are the ingredients that are most commonly found in Asian markets everywhere. All of them are very useful in giving whatever they are cooked with a flavor boost by pumping up the umami present in the dish, which not only adds to the taste profile of it, but also boosts the nutritive value by adding essential amino acids to the diet. All of these ingredients are worthy of investigation and use in the kitchen, whether one makes a habit of cooking Asian dishes or not.

Got Umami? Soybean Ingredients of the East

Believe it or not, I did not grow up eating Asian foods.

I was in high school before I ate at a Chinese restaurant.

Thirteen years ago or so is when I had my first taste of Thai food.

Korean–that was around a decade ago.

Japanese and Indian–I started eating those regularly about a decade ago as well.

However, though I may have been a late bloomer, I made up for lost time by taking to Asian cuisines like a duck to water, and learning to cook them forthwith, and then eating them as often as once or twice a day. I now have a pantry filled with an array of ingredients, condiments, sauces and preserved items that are used to create delicious and mostly healthful Asian foods.

In looking at them mindfully, I realize that many of these items are loaded with naturally occuring glutamate and amino acids, and when used as they have been in Asia for centuries, as flavor enhancers, they make good foods taste great.

One can group these ingredients into several categories, and in order to talk about them in some sort of sensible way, that is what I have done. The largest grouping is that which is derived in some way from soybeans, but the next largest group, the ocean-derived ingredients, includes what may be the single greatest source of natural umami ever, the queen of the Thai kitchen, fish sauce. A third group is one where I put together condiments and ingredients based on fermented grains, fermented and preserved vegetables, fresh and dried mushrooms, and finally, toasted nuts and seeds.

Soy Based Umami

Soy sauce is the first obvious member of the umami-bearing fermented soybean products in this group, and is most likely to be found in everyone’s kitchen. As many a casserole-combining Mom in the 1970’s discovered, soy sauce enhances the flavor of just about anything, except maybe cold breakfast cereal and cookies. (However, when I put duck sauce into a batch of cookies on a whim once, it contained soy sauce, and the cookies tasted awfully good.) There are various types of soy sauce, all serving different functions. I think that I have about seven different kinds in my kitchen, and while that may be a bit much for most people, they all serve different functions. For Chinese cooking, I prefer the Kimlan premium aged soy sauce, and their dark soy sauce. I keep a jar of Koon Chun brand thick soy sauce, which is dark soy that has been mixed with molasses, in order to make fried rice dark and reddish brown. (That is how it is done in restaurants, btw–if you add enough thin soy sauce to make it that color, it will taste like you are eating rock salt.) I also have tamari soy sauce for when my gluten-sensitive friends come over–it is made only with soy, and no wheat, and I have both Japanese soy sauce and Thai black soy sauce, which is similar to Chinese thick soy sauce, but it has a different flavor.

Many people identify soy sauce as the primary source of salty taste in Asian cooking, but that is only part of the story. As a fermented product, it is loaded with natural glutamate, and it acts to enhance the natural flavors of foods, and brings a savory quality to everything that is marinated in it or sauced with it. In my experience, most Japanese soy sauces have purer, clearer salt flavors, with less of the umami character that defines Chinese soy sauces. I say most–there are some preium Japanese brands that are just as complex and filled with umami as the Chinese types. As for what brand of tamari I use San-J and for regular Japanese soy sauce, when I use it, I use Kikkoman’s premium, naturally brewed shoyu.

Miso is another soy-based staple in my kitchen. It is a thick, fragrant paste made from soy beans and often grain, inoculated with a beneficial bacteria which then ferments them, creating an end result with a fantastically complex flavor and character that is highly variable depending on what sort of conditions it is fermented under, how long it undergoes fermentation and how it is treated during fermentation. There are lots of different types of miso, and they are all different, but it is simplest to categorize them into “aka” or red miso, and “shiro” or white miso. Aka miso is very deeply colored–usually a brick reddish brown, highly salty and very, very flavorful. It is strong, and is used in soups and simmered dishes. Shiro miso is either a creamy color, or yellowish, and it is much lighter in flavor and fragrance. I like to use it in marinades for chicken and sauces for eggplant and fish, or in miso soups with mushrooms and wakame seaweed.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese have many fermented soy bean sauces and pastes of their own, all of which taste and smell different and add different characters to the dishes they are used in. Kung Chun has many different varieties, but one of my favorites are hoisin, which is a mixture of feremented soybean paste, sugar and fruit, and is used not only in cooking but as a table sauce with roasted duck and bao bing pancakes with mushu fillings. Hoisin is a delightful sauce, but it can be overused, and in many Chinese American restaurants, in my opinion, it is, and often, it is the reason that the brown sauces all taste the same–sweet, thick and somewhat gloppy. Overuse of hoisin will quickly turn me off of a restaurant. Bean sauce, sweet bean sauce, and ground bean sauce are all medium brown sauces based on fermented soy beans. They are responsible for bringing the characteristic flavor to zha jiang mein–noodles with Beijing meat sauce. I remember when I first tried to make the dish, I substituted shiro miso in the sauce.

It was not right.

Fermented black beans are my personal favorite umami-filled ingredient in the Chinese kitchen. I only started using them this year, but I have made up for lost time. A characteristic feature of Cantonese cuisine, they are just black soy beans salted and lightly fermented, often with slivers of ginger for its fragrance. They should be moist, and somewhat leathery in texture, with a pronounced “cheesy” smell and with a salty, umami-laden kick of flavor. The best kinds are sold in small cellophane packets; the ones in the larger cardboard containers are usually dried out and not as strong. They lend their flavor particularly well to chicken with bitter melon, where their umami helps balance the bitterness of the melon. (Scientists have studied the effect of umami taste on bitter taste, and have found that it does lesson the bitter flavor of foods, though, as of this moment, they are not sure how.)

Black beans pair naturally with the strong flavors of garlic and onions, and in fact, there is a jarred sauce available under many brands that can be used to give the flavor of both black beans and garlic–garlic black bean sauce. (Original name, huh? What you see is what you get.) I don’t use it much, except when I am doing up a super quick wokful of leftovers or to flavor up a bowl of ramen, as I like more control over how much black bean and how much garlic go into my cooking, but lots of people love the sauce.

People wouldn’t think that the very bland flavor of tofu has much in the way of umami, and that is true of most sorts of tofu. The glutamate in soybeans is bound up and needs to be fermented to be released, so plain old regular tofu is just as pure and simple in flavor as edamame–steamed or boiled soybeans. But, if you ferment tofu, you get a number of different products, variously called “stinky tofu,” “red tofu,” and “fermented pungent tofu.” It is often highly spiced with garlic, ginger and chile, and is sold in small packets or jars, tightly sealed, because it is rather on the stinky side. It is considered to be an aquired taste, and it can be cooked on its own, or chopped up and used to season a dish composed of other ingredients.

Zak accidentally bought fermented tofu once when I sent him to get pressed tofu. When I opened the package, I figured the mistake, but I put it in the dish of pork stir fried with choy sum.

Neither Zak nor Morganna could abide the tofu–it was too stinky for them. So, I ate it. And at first, I found it to be nose-wrinklingly icky, but later, as I continued to eat, I began to feel it become very moreish in flavor–the more I ate, the more I wanted it. The stink lessened and the umami kicked in, and it began to taste at once both sweet and savory and downright good.

However, the smell of it lingered in the house for a couple of days so Zak and Morganna put down their collective feet (which they liked the tofu smell to) and said that I wasn’t allowed to cook with it any more.

So, that is one umami-filled food that will no longer be gracing our kitchen.

What they don’t know, but clever readers can see from the picture above is that I have one lonely jar of it I sneaked into the cart at the Chinese market the last time we were in Columbus. I figure that I can have a sneaky few bites at least, now and then in a bowl of soup or noodles, if I am careful not to breathe on anyone until I have brushed my teeth.

Otherwise, Morganna will take to calling me Aunty “Abacus” Fong. (Extra points to folks who get the Hong Kong wuxia film reference.)

Look for a continuation in this series later, when I outline the umami flavors from the oceans of the East.

Until then, happy tasting!

Do You Know Umami?

When we were growing up, there learned that there were four basic tastes: salt, sweet, sour and bitter. We were told that our taste buds had special taste receptors in particular zones on our tongues that detected these four tastes and that all other components of flavor came from our olfactory sense–the sense of smell.

Well, it turns out that what we learned in middle school about tastes, our tongues and noses, was not quite complete or correct.

There is a fifth basic taste.

It is called “umami,” and a Japanese scientist named Kitunae Ikeda isolated one compound which contibutes this taste back in 1908. Working with a seaweed broth, he isolated the amino acid, glutamate, as one of the sources for the taste which is described as “meaty, rich, savory and satisfying.” Glutamate itself was already a known substance, having been discovered in 1866 by a German chemist named Dr. Karl Ritthausen who discovered it while studying gluten in wheat.

“Umami” itself is a compound Japanese word, from the root words, “umai” meaning “delicious,” and “mi,” meaning “essence,” and while it is often used to describe the flavor enhancing ability of the salt form of glutamate, ,monosodium glutamate, that is not the only proper context for its useage.

In fact, researchers have found that umami accurately describes the flavor of many amino acids and proteins. In 2000, researchers at the University of Miami discovered the taste receptor for umami, which essentially proves that umami is a basic taste, for which humans had evolved a hunger. This receptor, named “taste-mGluR4” responds not only to glutamate, but in greater and lesser degrees, to every other amino acid and nucelotide.

Considering the myriad of uses to which amino acids are put in the human body, it is no wonder we are programmed to enjoy their flavors. Amino acids are necessary in building muscles, enzymes and other chemicals necessary to bodily function.

So, what does all of this mean to cooks?

Does this mean we need to study chemistry and put MSG in everything?

No.

It means we just need to look at what foods have large supplies of naturally occurring glutamates and amino acids and combine them with the principles we already know of good cooking, to help us make our dishes even more delicious.

It isn’t like any of these ingredients are new or anything.

People all over the world have been cooking with glutamate and amino acid rich foods for thousands of years.

Take a look at the foods surrounding the new cookbook, The Fifth Taste, above, and think about how many of them you have in your kitchen right now. If you are like me, you probably have plenty of umami sitting in your cupboards, refrigerators, shelves and countertops, just waiting to add goodness to your next meal. A quick glance at my illustration should identify soy sauce, nori, dried and fresh shiitake mushrooms, red wine, truffle oil, parmesan cheese, sun dried tomatoes and tomato paste.

Every serious cook in the world is bound to have one or two of those ingredients in their kitchen at any given time. The concatenation of jars, bottles, tubes, packages and loose items above are just what I pulled off my shelves this morning when I went on a mission to find good examples of umami-rich foods.

Over the next few days, look for posts specifically listing and identifying umami rich foods from both the East and the West, recipes featuring my favorite flavor and a review of the new cookbook, The Fifth Taste: Cooking With Umami by David and Anna Kasabian.

The upshot of all of this is, if you don’t know umami now, you will by the time I am finished with you.

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