I’m falling in love with cooking and I see on all these shows talk about Umami with ingredients. I get the idea behind the flavor but they don’t excite my taste buds. I feel like I’m missing something.
In: 26
Your body needs certain nutrients in amounts greater than nature provides in ordinary plant and animal-based food. Your taste buds evolved to help you find them: salty is for sodium (it was a lot harder to come by for early man), sweet is for sugars, sour is probably to find things safely fermented (not an avoidance: even young children and chimpanzees crave sour foods), Bitter is more likely for avoidance… And umami? That’s for compounds containing nitrogen. There may be additional taste buds for fats, calcium, and water.
For more info, read the book Flavor by Bob Holmes.
Latest Answers