Cured Egg

There are five main tasting senses: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory, or umami. Kikunae Ikeda was a chemist who wanted to find out what gave dashi, a popular Japanese stock, the flavor it had. He looked at the molecular makeup of one of the main ingredients, which was seaweed. He broke that down until he was left with one substance, glutamic acid, and coined the name for its taste as “umami,” which directly translates from the Japanese word umai, meaning “delic