What Exactly Is Umami? Experts Weigh In On The Science & Flavor Of This Taste 

You have five basic tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). While the first four are more widely understood, umami is arguably the most important when it comes to developing deep flavor in your cooking.

Have you ever seen a recipe that calls for adding dried shiitake mushrooms, simmering a Parmesan cheese rind, or throwing in a few splashes of soy or Worcestershire sauce? Those are all attempts to add some umami.

Because umami is hard to define, we enlisted the help of Ole G. Mouritsen, Ph.D., DSc, professor of gastrophysics and culinary food innovation and author of Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste.

"Umami is a basic taste (along with sweet, sour, bitter, and salty). Its peculiar characteristic is that it is long-lingering, mouth-filling, and leads to both appetite and satiety," he says. "It is prominent in fermented food (soy sauce, miso, fish sauce, mature cheeses), cured ham, and a range of marine products (fish, shellfish, cephalopods, certain seaweeds)."

Umami was originally "discovered" in 1908 when chemist and food lover Kikunae Ikeda finally put a name to it (even though the flavor had already been part of our palate forever), according to BBC. However, it wasn't until 1990 that it was officially recognized as the fifth taste.

The umami taste mostly comes from an amino acid called glutamate, but two other compounds—inosinate and guanylate—also impart the flavor. Typically, these compounds are found in protein-rich foods (amino acids come from proteins). When you eat foods with umami, these compounds bind with receptors in your mouth and your gastrointestinal tract and send signals to your brain that help you pick up on the flavor.

The name glutamate may be ringing a bell because of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, which is actually a commercially produced umami flavor. Shortly after Ikeda discovered umami—or at least put a name to it—he got to work isolating it in a lab. 

The short answer is: No one really knows for sure. There's some research1 that links MSG to things like anxiety, headaches, weight gain, and metabolic disorders. That's because glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, meaning it turns on your nervous system and revs you up, so to speak. 

But most of the studies that connected MSG to ill health effects used a really large amount—more than you would ever normally consume. And a December 2018 report in Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism2 shows that dietary glutamate doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier and, as a result, doesn't actually increase the glutamate levels in your brain.

Nevertheless, it's hard to ignore the anecdotal stories from people who say they experience anxiety, brain fog, fatigue, and mood swings after consuming MSG. It's possible that some people are extra sensitive to the effects of MSG and others do OK with small amounts.

There's no easy way to explain what umami tastes like, but integrative dietitian Marisa Moore, MBA, RDN, L.D., says, "When I think of umami, I think deep, savory flavor." And that's the most common descriptor across the board. In addition to "savory," other people say umami is meaty or broth-like.

Umami is the least familiar (and probably toughest to explain) of the primary flavors, but most people describe it as savory, meaty, or broth-like. When you concentrate on adding umami to your cooking, your food will almost certainly taste better.