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.
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What we call “flavour” has two components: smell and taste. Smell is sensed by the olfactory bulbs in your nose, taste is sensed by the tastebuds on your tongue.
While your nose can sense thousands of smells, your tastebuds can only sense five different tastes. The first four have been known for centuries: salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. The fifth was discovered so recently that we’re still using the Japanese name, as the discoverer was from Japan. That fifth taste is umami.
Umami is what gives things like meat and tomatoes their flavour.
If you can’t taste umami it’s not really possible to explain it any better than this, it would be like trying to explain colour to someone who is blind.
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