I've come to a small Japanese restaurant in
Manchester's Chinatown here in the north-west of England in search of deliciousness, or to give
it its proper name, umami - the fifth taste. You know about sweet, sour, salty, and bitter - but it's only
in the last 100 or so years that we've come to recognise umami - and this miso soup embodies
it. Yum, delicious. This is The Food Chain from the BBC World Service with me, Ruth Alexander. And
this week, it's all about this fifth taste - umami. We're going to be finding out what it is, how it
was discovered, where to find it, how to maximise it, and what it's got to do with a somewhat
controversial food additive: MSG. The owner of this restaurant, Yuzu Manchester, is Yui Nagami. So
I've been really enjoying the miso soup you serve here! - That's great, thank you. - Thank you! What
is it, how do you make it taste so good? - We use kelp, which is kombu and prawn heads to create dashi stock
and I think they create umami flavour. - And what is umami flavour? What is umami? - I would say it's
savouriness. It's just really difficult to explain what it is. - But when you taste it, you know it. Hard to explain,
but you know it. - Yeah, definitely. If it's just miso on its own, there's no flavour it's just, a boring, salty
thing. - In fact, the whole concept of umami has its origins in a bowl of tasty soup like this. Tokyo-based
food tour leader and trained chef Yukari Sakamoto has been telling me the story. - There
was a scientist named Kikunae Ikeda and in 1908 his wife was making this very simple hot-pot which
was tofu made with a kombu dashi broth. And this basic stock starts with a dried piece of seaweed
kelp, called kombu, and so he was curious about what was it in this water that made this tofu so much
better than tofu that was cooked without this kombu kelp. And in 1908, he found this umami component. He
took the soup off to his lab and did some tests on it, and did some testing and found that there was
this amino acid a glutamate that comes from kombu kelp. And it was this delicious flavour that when
it's on your palette, it spreads all over and it actually makes your mouth start salivating. And
even though we've been using this kombu kelp for hundreds of years, there was something about
it that he was able to pinpoint and say it's it's glutamates, it's something that's delicious,
and the term he coined for it was umami, which means "delicious flavour". - Can you help me kind of
really understand what kind of deliciousness umami describes, what kind of taste? - It's been
called meaty but for me, it's just more this sensation that that fills your mouth, literally,
because you're sensing it all over your mouth. - So it's not sweet, it's not sour, it's not bitter, it's not
salty, it's... is it like, savoury? - It's savoury, and it's enhancing whatever you're eating
it with. So if you're eating carrots that have been simmered in dashi you're tasting the carrots, but
it's a more delicious flavour of the carrots. - It adds a depth of flavour to a dish? - Exactly, yes. - So
for centuries, Japanese had been cooking this way, they knew the kelp was delicious, but this chemist
worked out why it was so delicious? - Exactly, exactly. And if you think about the Japanese diet, many
of our dishes start with this basic dashi, and it's this rich, delicious flavour that's very
subtle. But you can cook vegetables in this, we make a lot of miso soup with this, and it's
used in many dishes in our pantry. And so this delicious flavour that satisfies the palette means
that you don't need as much salt, you don't need as much miso, to season whatever you're cooking, so
you're eating a healthful diet because you're not needing deliciousness from soy sauce or salt. Of
course, we use it, but you can use less when you have the dashi. - It was almost a hundred years after
Kikunae Ikeda's chemistry experiments on his wife's broth that scientists confirmed that his umami
was in fact a whole new fifth taste. Professor Barry Smith, director of the centre for the study
of the senses at the University of London, picks up the story. - We have receptors for sweet, for
sour, for salty, for bitter, to allow us to identify those things in our foods. It wasn't until
the year 2000 that researchers at the University of Miami discovered a dedicated receptor for the
umami taste that responded to what the food stuffs like glutamate were giving us. So it's
terribly important that we've got confirmation of this being an additional fifth basic taste.
- So why do we like umami? - Umami appeals to us from the get-go, because in human breast milk we've got free
amino acids, and half of those are glutamic acid, so breast milk will have a a deep umami taste
and flavour. So we're picking it up straight away, much more of glutamic acid and much more of that
umami taste in breast milk than there is in cow milk, say, and it's interesting that from the very
start, infants, if you give them solutions with the basic taste to try as newborns, if you give them
a solution with sweet, then they lick their lips, and similarly if you give them umami they're
also contented and they they will lick their lips, so it looks as though, like sweet, we have an
innate liking for umami. - And it may be a signal that something could be good for us. - Interesting that
there's a huge variety of foods that give rise to the umami taste, and why do we bother picking them
out? You know, we pick out foods that are salty, we need salt because the body doesn't produce it
by itself, so we have to, you know, consume salt. Bitter might be a basic taste to help us reject,
as infants, toxins. But what is umami taste for? Well, it seems to be about detecting good
sources, abundant sources of protein. - Soon after Kikunae Ikeda discovered that it was the glutamate
in kelp making his wife's broth taste so good, more sources of umami were found. Yukari Sakamoto
again. - Another scientist five years later discovered that in katsuo bushi, and these are skipjack tuna or
bonito fish that have been smoked dried for about six months, that when you use these flakes there was
another delicious flavour that came from the katsuo bushi but it was different from the kombu kelp, and
he was able to, Shintaro Kodama in 1913, was able to pinpoint that this was a type of
nucleotide called an inosinate and they realised that together with the kombu, you didn't get twice
the amount of umami but there was this synergistic effect, and it has been measured that you get seven
to eight times more the umami by combining these two ingredients. But there is a third major type
of group that we get umami from, and that's from dried shitake mushrooms, and it's a nucleotide called
guanylates, and again it's a synergistic effect when that's combined with the kombu kelp. - So umami plus
umami equals super-umami. Here's Professor Barry Smith. - And you get this fantastic explosion of
flavour, and you get this incredible intensity, and the reason for that is that when glutamate
is sitting on the umami receptors, the arrival of inosinate or guanylate you might get from shitake
mushrooms, or from shellfish, or from beef, when it's added onto the glutamate, those receptors
fire even more intensely, and that's what tells us: delicious, delicious, delicious. And so in food
chemistry and physiology, we tend to say this is a case of 1 + 1 equals 8 in terms of the intensity
you get from combining these two types of umami listing foods. - It's interesting that the science has
been so recent, but of course for many hundreds of years we've been eating umami foods and combining
them to get mega-umami. - So, lots of the foods that we thought of as delicious, bacon and egg, ham and
cheese, tomato and anhovy, pea puree and scallops, champagne and oysters... these are all examples of synergistic
umami, but interesting, you know, we've only just figured that out as scientists, and cooks and chefs
have known this for ages, we're just following them. - But chemist Ikeda was an especially enterprising
scientist. Having discovered the source of umami in 1908, he then worked out how to manufacture it.
- He started to extract the glutamic acid, then to stabilise it, he made the single sodium salt of
that glutamic acid, and that's what we know of as monosodium glutamate. And of course in 1909,
a year later, Ikeda patented the method of making monosodium glutamate, and together with Mr Suzuki
they started a company in 1909 called Ajinomoto, which is now a mass, multinational food industry company.
And there they produced something which was added to soups and it was added to other food products,
and certainly occurring in soy sauce, so it was known for a long time as the third shaker, along
with salt and pepper, you might have a little shake of monosodium glutamate, you might add some
of the crystals of that to boost flavour. It's a flavour enhancer. - The idea caught on. And then arose
a fear. - So, round about the 1960s where there was a rise of people eating Chinese food in restaurants
in the US, in the UK, across Europe, and people started to get very suspicious of any of the side
effects they thought they had from the food. So there was a doctor called Robert Kwok who wrote
not an article, not a scientific article, but a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of
Medicine, and he said, I've noticed that people when they've been eating in Chinese restaurants they
often describe a range of symptoms two hours later that include palpitations, or headaches, or
sweating, or thirst. And he said, this seems to be in reaction to the food. And then people started
to think, well what could it be in the food that was creating this, and there was the use of this
chemical additive monosodium glutamate, so pretty soon people thought, that's what's causing, you know,
these symptoms. And this was, in a very unpleasant and unfortunate way, referred to as Chinese
restaurant syndrome, although we might wonder why wasn't it also Japanese restaurant syndrome.
- What does the science show? - Well, the science has rather rescued monosodium glutamate because
some very, very good studies were done with double blind tasting, where people who'd described
themselves as being hyper-sensitive to MSG were given samples of food and they were not told
which samples contained MSG and which didn't, and it turned out that they were not showing any
reliable pattern of reaction to the MSG food. In fact, many of them saying they they can't eat food
with MSG in it might have been eating tin soups and being perfectly happy. So it looks as though
people were, when they knew or thought there was this food additive in, they were then thinking, oh
that's responsible for a reaction in me. Now, there was some scientific evidence to suggest that, you
know, there might be risks with huge doses of MSG, so for example there were mice studies where mice
were given huge quantities of MSG and they did in fact have adverse health reactions, but if you were
to replicate those in humans you'd have had to give humans half a kilo of MSG in a single sitting,
and of course nobody's going to take that, nobody thinks that's good for us. So MSG came out of these
studies with a fairly clean bill of health. And it may be there's one or two per cent of the population who
are very reactive to it, but I suspect they're also highly reactive to many other ingredients
in their foods, natural and artificial. The food safety authorities of the United Nations, the
United States and Europe all consider MSG to be generally recognised as safe. The US Food and
Drug Administration recommends people consume no more than three grams without food in a day. The European
Food Safety Authority, no more than around two to two and half grams, depending on body weight, a bit
less than half a teaspoon. - I think it's as well to be cautious with any addition to our food, we
wouldn't want to overdo it on salt, we wouldn't want to overdo it with sugar either, and so I think
the same is probably true of MSG. - Despite the green light from international bodies, and half a century
after the doctor's letter first triggered a scare, suspicions remain. - Very interesting why people are
suspicious of monosodium glutamate, partly the name, it sounds like a piece of chemistry, and
even though it mimics a naturally occurring additive, the very fact that people think of it
as a chemical additive created in the lab and not in, say, seaweed or a plant, that's what makes
people skeptical of it. - Professor Barry Smith. In some people's kitchens though, like Tokyo food
tour leader Yukari Sakamoto's, MSG is a staple. - In our spice drawer, the two that I grab the
most are this bottle with the Ajinamoto, and they're crystals that are made from plants I believe, sugar
cane is one of the main ingredients that they make it from, but anytime I'm cooking in the kitchen and
I'm using salt, I most always start with some MSG, monosodium glutamate, and then I add salt, but
I can use less salt. - Because it's monosodium glutamate, it contains sodium. - Yes. And it enhances
the flavour of the salt that's in the dishes so you do need to use less salt. - Is this commonplace
in kitchens around Japan, that people would have salt and pepper but also MSG to add umami to the dish, now?
- Yes. My mother is Japanese and we grew up with it in our house. I go to my friend's house
or to my family's house, and everybody has it, it's on the kitchen counter, it's just part of
the traditional kitchen here. I don't think we had in Japan this scare that you had in the
States, where somebody had said that, you know, I got headaches from eating out at Chinese restaurants.
So in my experience, everybody has it in their kitchens and you just grab it like you're grabbing salt.
- Is there an art to cooking with MSG? I mean, is it OK to just, you know, just sprinkle it on and
it'll be good, or do you really have to know what you're doing? - There's no art. It's very simple,
just add it like you're sprinkling salt. So, do it with scrambled eggs, if you pop popcorn at
home, sprinkle that on. I love it on meats, like on chicken, on steaks, pork, everything we cook, sprinkle
it on. You know, don't go too heavy, you can always add more. - OK here goes. Producer Beatrice Pickup
has kindly invited us into her kitchen, where she has a big bag here of monosodium glutamate,
MSG. It looks just like salt and it tastes like... hard to say, sort of like a kind of
savoury taste, but not one I recognise. Have you tried it? - It tastes like chicken to
me. - Hmm, chicken flavour crisps. Well, Yukari recommended we try it on popcorn and it's
always nice to have an excuse to pop corn. Here it goes! [Sound of popcorn popping] OK, it's ready. So, two bowls... right, salted...
Mmm, very nice. Right, in this bowl... salt and MSG. Mmm, that's nice. It's... it's like there's
just more to it. There's just more taste. I can't tell how it's different it just
is different. I just got a really big bit! I got the meaty taste then! That was
definitely like chicken crisps! Maybe I've not put enough in. Should we
try a bit more? I like both! Now, eggs! Right, OK, so um... on one egg, salt
and pepper, and on the next one, salt and pepper, and
MSG... a pinch. Maybe two pinches. Salt and pepper first... oh, that
looks good. Oh, very nice, if I do say so myself! OK, salt pepper and MSG. Oh my goodness, that's gorgeous, that's amazing!
It's just so eggy. Mmm... So, there you go. Some beginner steps in cooking with MSG. Meanwhile, I've been
speaking to a chef who's taking cooking with MSG to a whole other level. - So, I'm Calvin Eng, and I'm
the chef and owner of Bonnie's in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. We use it in drinks, we use
it in our savoury food, of course, and even our desserts. Because it's like using salt to enhance, like,
baked goods, kind of bring out the sweetness. And I find that adding a pinch of MSG along with salt
takes it to a totally different level. Like, we'll season our buttered peanuts with a salt, sugar and
MSG seasoning, we use that to top our ice cream sundaes. - That sounds delicious. What drinks are
you using it in? - So, we have MSG martini on the menu, and when I drink martinis, I love them
to be very savoury, very dirty martinis, we make like a olive brine solution with a little
vinegar, the olive juice, and then with a dash of MSG as well, and that really makes it very, very
umami, very savoury, and it's either like you love it or you hate it kind of thing. - So how did you
discover MSG? Is it something you used at home growing up, was your mom using it? - No, growing up
my mom was actually one of the people against using MSG, but we used it in her home whether she
knew it or not because she seasoned things with chicken powder, chicken powder obviously contains
MSG as well. - So she was using it unknowingly? - Yeah, exactly, and I didn't know it either as a kid. - Why
was your mom against MSG? - Um, just the negative connotations it had, obviously, like she didn't
know better, there wasn't enough information out there 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, people were
still believing that it wasn't something that you should be consuming and it was bad for you. I
feel like nowadays, in the last probably five years specifically, there's been a big push to use
it and destigmatise it, and younger chefs like me and my colleagues and my peers are the ones
really pursuing it and wanting to use it and trying to educate guests that it isn't bad for you.
- The myth that was once perpetuated that MSG was bad for your health was called Chinese restaurant
syndrome... I wonder, do you feel, as a Cantonese chef, do you feel like on somewhat of a personal mission to
set that record straight? - Yeah, absolutely. Like the restaurants of the past, or restaurants that are
still open now, a lot of them are proud to post these signs that say "no MSG" or MSG with like the X
through it on their menus and on their storefronts, and we're like the total opposite, like we
put it on the menu, we call the drink the MSG martini, like we advertise that we use it. I have a
tattoo of it on my arm, right here, like we... - oh, wow! - ...we're proud use it, and we're proud to showcase
it and educate guests. - And what do guests say, I mean do you have people not realising, turning
up, seeing it on the menu and saying oh excuse me, what's this? - Yeah, I mean, we have a very
young crowd who is much more open to things and are much more educated on this, on this topic
specifically, but we still get a like an older crowd sometimes who will email before they come,
or call before they come, to ensure that there are things that they can have that don't have it but
there's not many things that they can have without it that we have on the menu so... and a lot of
times they do come in and they still have it and they feel fine. And it's not like we're pouring
like spoonfuls of it in dishes, we use it very sparingly, we treat it like a seasoning, like we do
with salt and everything. - So might MSG be staging a comeback? I asked sensory perceptions expert
Professor Barry Smith whether he thinks we're ready to become more accepting of it. - That's a very
good question, of how ready we'll be to accept it having had some negative press, I think unfairly
as a scientific evidence shows, we are still quite cautious and these days, rightly, so we're very
concerned about what additives are in our foods that have been chemically produced, artificially
manufactured, and what job are they doing, are they there to make really rather bland food taste
more delicious, are they there to make it softer, are they there to emulsify the food and make
it easier to digest... so the skepticism about food additives is high at the moment, but the thing
to remember, which may help the fortunes of MSG, the thing to remember is this is the most tested
food additive we've had. The scare raised about MSG led to serious scientific research that found
it wasn't as harmful as people thought it was, in fact, very few people will be affected by it.
- Do you have MSG in your cupboard? Would you have an MSG shaker on your table? - I don't, no. I'm on
the hunt for, you know, good natural examples of of glutamate, so I'm much more interested in
finding those foods which have it. I do, however, have foods that have MSG in them, and soy sauce in
particular, wouldn't be without it. So it's not as though I'm resistant to it, I'm just trying to find
other sources of it. - And what about Yui Nagami, the Japanese restauranteur in Manchester whom we heard
from at the start of the programme? - Uh, no we don't use MSG because the flavour will be too strong, you
can taste this synthetic flavour, it's not the same as umami flavour that you can extract naturally.
It hasn't got the softness of, or natural flavour. I've been eating Japanese food all my life, I can
tell the difference. If it's synthetic flavour, then I know it is. - Is it a bit of a cheat to use MSG
to get umami? - I would say so, but I think in busy modern life, making dashi stock takes hours, so it
makes sense for some people to use a, you know, ready-made synthetic MSG flavour. - But someone like
you can tell if they have done? - Yeah, if I drink somebody's miso soup and if MSG is used, I can
definitely tell, yeah! - I wondered what Calvin Eng, the chef in New York with MSG advertised on his
menus, would say about the idea that it's a cheat's ingredient? - Even when we use it to season like
a super broth at the end it doesn't mean we're just mixing water with salt, sugar, MSG, like we're
still making stocks, we're still making broths, we're still making all these things with bones and
kombu and citrus and parmesan rind, like we're still developing all that flavour and depth and, like, body
that a stock and broth really need, that take hours to develop, but we will season at the end with salt,
sugar, MSG. And yeah, I mean it is a cheat if you're just mixing it with water but that's not what
we're doing. - So OK, so it's not a complete shortcut in that you've still got to do some cooking
to appreciate MSG in a dish. - Absolutely. Yeah it's definitely used sparingly, like I said, we're
not dumping cups and spoonfuls into things. - Calvin has a book due out next year: Salt, sugar and MSG.
It made me realise, I don't remember ever seeing a single recipe mentioning MSG. I asked Calvin, am
I just reading the wrong recipes, or am I right that there aren't many recipe writers who'll talk
about it? - Yeah, you are right. There are not many at all, I mean, I have a wall full of cookbooks and I
can't even think of one right now off the top of my head that that says that. - Why do you think that is?
- Because of the reputation that it has. Everyone's here trying to sell books. I mean, so am
I, like obviously I'm here to sell books, but also I'm here to educate and I'm proud to advertise it,
like again, it's literally in my title of my book, so I think if there's certain people out there
who are against it, or don't like it, they're not going to be the ones buying the book, unfortunately.
But hopefully we can get them to change their mind. Do you think putting it in the title will give it
a little bit of shock-factor and that'll probably get the book more attention than it might have otherwise?
- Yeah, I mean definitely, but we don't use MSG as like a gimmick or a shock-factor, it
it's just something that we truly love and use. The restaurant that you opened is named after your
mom. So what does she think now of you adding MSG to the dishes, does she enjoy it? She's not against
it, like she was... she thinks it's obviously like a younger thing, because people her age are
probably still against it and don't understand it fully yet, and don't understand why we we
use it so much. - When she comes, does she say "go easy on the MSG"? - Yes, she says go easy on the salt,
specifically, because I like things very well seasoned. - I love that is she your most, um...
what's the word... not "difficult" customer... um involved customer? - You could say difficult! Um, so
you could say that she she's very, very intuitive and a very, very good cook, a lot of it comes very
naturally to her, so that's why I take all her advice and tips I can get. - What does she think of
the MSG tattoo? - Oh, she doesn't like any of my tattoos! I think we're getting into the swing
of this now, Beatrice. - One MSG martini, coming up! - Cheers! ...to Calvin Eng, and to everyone we
spoke to for today's programme. Do you think about umami when you cook? You can let us know
your tips, recipes and flavourful combinations by emailing thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk. From me
and producer Beatrice Pickup, thanks for listening. And cheers! [Music]
