I’ve heard people say that it’s the feeling of “Satisfaction” while tasting something. It’s supposed to be present in a lot of unrelated foods like tomatoes, mushrooms, MSG, soy sauce, etc. How does a human “taste” Umami?
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Umami is a taste, the same as salty or sweet or sour. While the story isn’t *quite* this simple, you can think of it as a fifth kind of taste bud. In the same way that “sweet” is the taste of sugar and “sour” is the taste of acidity, umami is the taste of glutamates and related molecules.
Subjectively, it’s a “meaty” flavor, one you’ll find in a lot of broths, many processed foods (if you see “hydrolyzed yeast” in a label, that’s what they’re adding), most fermented sauces (soy sauce among them), etc. These foods contain lots of glutamates that easily dissolve into your saliva. If you’ve ever tasted a bit of pure MSG, that’s as close as you’ll get to a pure umami flavor (MSG is also slightly salty, since it releases the same sodium ions that regular table salt does).
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