june-2010

Flavor of the Month
UMAMI, A DECIDEDLY ENIGMATIC QUALITY FOUND IN
CERTAIN FOODS, IS THE HOTTEST THING IN COOKING. BUT IS
THIS TRENDY TASTE SENSATION THE REAL DEAL?
BY ADAM BAER // ILLUSTRATIONS BY RODRIGO CORRAL AND SABINE DOWEK
LAST JANUARY, I LOST MY ABILITY TO TASTE. That would be bad
news for anyone. It’s even worse if, like me, you make a
living writing about food. I had just undergone endonasal
surgery, which tweaked the nerves that helped me detect
fl avors, and the doctors predicted that my oh-so-discerning
palate would not return for a month.
Ironically, friends kept showing up with edible get-well
gifts. During my recovery, I found I couldn’t taste carby
snacks—the donuts and cupcakes didn’t do much for me.
But after a few weeks, more complicated fl avors did begin to
register: pizza with parmesan cheese; shiitake mushroom
and bacon quiche; soy-marinated cod. Gradually, I
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM | JUNE 2010
food&drink
developed a craving for this profoundly fl avorful stuff . There
was a certain hard-to-defi ne quality linking these dishes—
not quite saltiness but something more nuanced, a deep
savoriness. It turns out this wasn’t a gustatory illusion. With
my surgery dampening the stronger taste sensations (sweet,
bitter), I had fi nally discovered the “fi fth taste”: umami.
The trendy word, which roughly translates from Japanese
as “deliciousness,” wasn’t altogether new to me. I regularly
watched the Food Network and couldn’t escape its onslaught
of Kikkoman soy sauce ads hard-selling the term. There
was even a new restaurant in my neighborhood called
Umami Burger, and—as it happened—its special contained
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