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CCT #11:
Todays CCT is basically all about chemistry, I won’t go too deep, I promise. While tasting the food you are making, you are usually trying to adjust based on your taste, to do that, you have to know what you are actually tasting. I know, this seems very trivial,...
Todays CCT is basically all about chemistry, I won’t go too deep, I promise. While tasting the food you are making, you are usually trying to adjust based on your taste, to do that, you have to know what you are actually tasting. I know, this seems very trivial,...
...but let me get to the basics. Depending on who you are asking, you are able to taste 5 to 6 flavours. Those are sour, bitter, sweet, salty, umami and fatty (this one is still in discussion). The 4 basics in sour, bitter, sweet and salty are pretty much...
...self-explanatory (at least I hope so), but umami isn‘t necessarily, so how excactly does umami taste now? I’ll try to make it comprehensible: Umami is Japanese and means „tasty“ and it ranges from meats to tomatoes, so basically everything where you might think:
„This is delicious, I am just not sure how to describe it“ falls under the category umami, or to say it in chemistry terms: The sensation of „umami“ results from you tasting glutamic acid, so every produce that has reasonably high contents of glutamic acid tastes umami.
Now, that you know this, what can exactly can you do with it in the kitchen? Let me explain: knowing how to use umami (and the other flavours ofc, but lets focus on umami for simplicity) is vital in being a good cook, luckily for you, there are many practical examples for this.
The best example for this is the homecountry of the word umami: Japan. Japanese cuisine has a really high focus on using umami correctly, just to name some core ingredients of Japanese cuisine: Kombu, Beef, Katsuobushi, Shiitake Mushrooms, etc..
These ingredients are essentially pure umami bombs, because of their incredibly high glutamic acid content, or (and this part is important) are of a synergistic nucleotide, what essentially increases your sensetion of umami in combination with a glutamic acid (Katsuobushi and...
Shiitake Mushrooms are a examples for this). To make it simple, they are another possible source of umami and the thing that makes umami so special is, that two different sources of umami multiply their respective effect and boost your sensation of umami tremendously (up to...
...8 times). An example for this would be combing glutamic acid (tomatoes for example) and inosine acid (different fishes for example). So try and combine different sources of umami to elevate the flavour of your dish drastically!
At this point I apologize to everyone who thought this was boring or too complicated. I could have made it much easier, but I felt something would have been lost. I want everyone who likes my content to learn and take away something important everytime, I hope I managed to do...
...that today! I am enjoying to share some of my knowledge in a field I sincerely love and hope you guys are enjoying it yourself! Thanks for reading this thread and keep on cooking!
