A quick primer on taste and flavor: For the most part, we perceive the five components of taste — sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami — with our tongues. Taste works together with the sense of smell to help the brain see the total flavor “picture.” The feel of food in the mouth — spicy heat, temperature, texture — helps complete the picture, give its more depth.

Of the five tastes, umami (a Japanese-coined name) is my favorite to think about when cooking. Its taste is often described as savoriness, roundness or richness. It’s usually matched with salt to add depth and complexity to foods. Traditional examples (see map above from the Umami Information Center) include soy sauce, miso paste and bonito flakes in Asian cuisine; and cured ham, cheese, tomatoes, ketchup and mushrooms in Western cuisine.

Let’s leave the origin of taste to evolutionary biologists and just agree that our tongues have evolved to make us want the things we need to live. The compounds that exude umami form the essential building blocks of proteins, which we need along with sugar and salt to survive. Somewhere along the line, we developed an aversion to bitter and sour tastes, probably to help us avoid dangerous substances. But we’ve learned to overcome those aversions and often enjoy those tastes, too.

Books like Sybil Kapoor’s Taste: A New Way to Cook have helped us think about taste and flavor when developing recipes for Cookthink. Kapoor offers recipes that isolate and explore the five basic tastes, in turn showing how a consciousness of them can make you a better cook.

Knowing umami helps us understand our cravings. It also helps explain why crumbled blue cheese on a roasted beet and arugula salad or Parmigianno Reggiano grated over penne with white beans and zucchini or a dollop of tomato paste stirred into a stew or a splash of soy sauce in a stir-fry all make a meal more satisfying.

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