To Understand the Role of Umami in Cooking

Appears in
Umami: The Fifth Taste
Umami

By Thomas Keller, Harold McGee, Michael Anthony, Heston Blumenthal, Alexandre Bourdas, David Kinch, Virgilio Martinez, Nobu Matsuhisa, Yoshihiro Murata and Pedro Miguel Schiaffino

Published 2014

  • About

Adding monosodium glutamate (MSG)—crystals of the purest umami—to the undercooked soup will help you to understand the role of umami in cooking, in an easy experiment you can conduct in your own kitchen.

Preparation: First, keep a part of the vegetable soup already mentioned before. And then prepare another portion with 0.1% to 0.2% MSG by weight.
Tasting: You will probably find the flavors of the ingredients in the broth without MSG to be somehow dispersed, giving an unbalanced impression. Next, try the broth with the MSG is added. The taste should be more balanced. By comparing the undercooked broth to the broth with added MSG, you will understand just how much umami contributes to improve the compatibility of different tastes.