I learned a new word in Japan – umami.  This is the fifth taste. So the taste list should be sweet, sour, salty, bitter or umami. When I learnt this word, I thought it wasn’t used very much. But when I Googled ‘umami’, it got almost 7.5million hits!

Umami is defined in English as a pleasant savoury taste. It is different from salty. A lot of daily Japanese foods contain high umami ingredients – like dashi (Japanese soup stock). Dashi is made from kombu seaweed and dried bonito flakes. Both if these ingredients have high umami.

It seems that the best chefs have always understood umami, even if they didn’t know what it was. These chefs knew that if you put certain food combinations  together, the result was very tasty. So that’s umami, which can be translated as “delicious taste”.

Drinking tea in Japan can be an experience for all the senses.

When we drink Japanese green tea we are supposed to use our five senses:

Look at the colour of the tea and the tea bowl.

Listen to the sound of the water being poured.

Smell the aroma of the tea.

Touch – enjoy the texture of the tea bowl.

And taste – no surprise that correctly brewed green tea is umami!

(P)