Green Salads and Raw Vegetables

A green salad is an example of food that is fairly uninteresting on its own. It is lacking something, and that something is often umami. The classical example is a Caesar salad made with leaves of plain green romaine. Its taste is due almost entirely to the dressing and toppings that accompany the lettuce. These can be Parmesan cheese, cooked eggs, anchovies, ripe tomatoes, crisp bacon bits, or Worcestershire sauce, all ingredients that impart umami.

Many people choose not to eat vegetables because they consider them to have little taste or simply because they do not know how to prepare them so that they are palatable. Just as with a plain green salad, there is probably little that is less appealing than a collection of vegetables to be eaten raw—wholesome, but bland. Once again, one can take a lesson from the Buddhist monks and their use of dashi to make delicious, strictly vegetarian temple meals. Finely sliced vegetables can be simmered in dashi, infusing them with an immediate jolt of umami, which may even interact synergistically with the small amounts of glutamate and ribonucleotides in them to enhance their taste.