--- The Cook Up with Adam Liaw airs weeknights on SBS Food at 7.00pm and 10.00pm, or stream it free on SBS On Demand. Watch Chase on the umami episode on 14 January. ---
One of Australia’s leading Japanese chefs, Chase Kojima, grew up in San Francisco with an intrinsic understanding of mankind’s ‘newest’ core taste: umami.
Kojima is the son of renowned Japanese chef Sachio Kojima. As Chase tells SBS, his father cared deeply about the quality of food his children ate. Although Kojima didn’t know it at the time, this helped him to comprehend savoury flavours and ascertain why certain foods taste good.
“I was raised in the USA in a Japanese household,” says Kojima, executive chef at Sokyo in Sydney and Kiyomi on the Gold Coast. “In Japanese culture, we refer to ‘umami’ a lot.
“I also remember how people on Japanese TV would always explain how beautiful a dish or piece of food was, describing it as ‘umami’. They’d say ‘this food or dish is umami’. That’s because umami basically means delicious.”
They’d say ‘this food or dish is full of umami’. That’s because umami basically means delicious.
Understanding umami
Although the concept of ‘umami’ may be commonplace throughout Japan, it’s a relatively new term for the western world.
Umami was first scientifically discovered in 1908 by a university professor in Tokyo who identified it as a glutamate responsible for the palatability of kombu seaweed broth.
But it wasn’t until almost a century later in 2002 that the global scientific community accepted findings identifying umami taste receptors on the human tongue. Since then, the word ‘umami’ has been used across the globe to denote one of five taste categories. Translated from Japanese to English, the term umami means 'the essence of deliciousness'.
Umami (the taste of glutamate) occurs naturally in many of the foods we eat like aged cheeses, soy sauce, mushrooms, steak and fermented products. However, it can also be achieved by adding synthetically produced monosodium glutamate (MSG) to food.
RECIPE
Umami sauce
Kojima recalls how his chef father was very particular about using MSG, which was quite taboo when he was a child.
“I lost my mother when I was quite young,” he recalls. “So we had a babysitter who would have to make food for me. I clearly remember my dad telling her ‘you may not use instant dashi (or soup stock) as it contains MSG’. He’d make everyone make their own stock from scratch.”
When an ingredient is in season, like a beautiful ripe tomato in summer, you taste it and think ‘wow. This doesn’t need any seasoning’. It’s probably the best tomato you’ve ever had.
Although Kojima believes MSG use is fine in moderation, personally he prefers not to use it. Instead, he opts to cook “food in a way that highlights its natural beauty”.
MSG is naturally occurring
Why are we still worried about MSG?
“The aim of Japanese cuisine is to achieve a umami flavour. So we focus on how we can execute umami in the purest sense. This is why we [Japanese people] often eat food at certain times of the year, at the best moment when that particular food is in season.
“When an ingredient is in season, like a beautiful ripe tomato in summer, you taste it and think ‘wow. This doesn’t need any seasoning’. It’s probably the best tomato you’ve ever had. It's umami.”
RECIPE
Mapo eggplant
Kojima demonstrates his understanding of umami by making mapo eggplant on SBS’s The Cook Up with Adam Liaw. Traditionally a Sichuan dish featuring meat, Kojima uses vegetables and his personal Japanese flair to accentuate natural umami tastes.
To do this, he adds sun-dried tomatoes, fermented black beans and dried mushrooms to eggplant – ingredients that are all full of umami – to give the dish a flavour punch.
“People automatically think you have to use meat to achieve an umami flavour but you don’t," he says.
“With this dish, you get a total flavour bomb without having to add any meat. Now that’s what I call umami.”
