Umami

2023-01-31 00:00:00 / episode: 14

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Hi and welcome to the les Perras dot com podcast.

I'm Les.

This podcast is a short daily monologue that you can listen to use it to practice listening to english.

Use it to stimulate ideas.

Use it for B G M Hello again and thanks for coming to the 14th episode of the Les Perras podcast.

This episode is about umami.

Yesterday we talked about body language, but today I'm jumping over to a culinary affair.

Let's learn a bit about umami, which many people don't know much about.

Umami.

Do you even know what this word means?

It's a word that doesn't come from English,

Although it's an English word now, it originally comes from Japanese

because the original discoverer of Umami was Ikeda,

a scientist in Japan and he discovered it back in 1908

back then, people said there were four basic tastes

hat people could sense salty and sweet and bitter and sour

and Mr Uchida said pardon me? Mr Ikeda said there's actually five flavors because umami is a basic flavor.

The funny thing is Umami isn't really a flavor by itself, it is caused by certain ions in the food.

The most famous one is the glutamate ion.

Everybody has heard of monosodium glutamate or msg

well there's a few other compounds that have the same power as glutamate

and monosodium glutamate (or some of the other glutamate ions)

doesn't actually taste very good by itself.

The peculiar thing is it makes other food taste better,

It brings out the flavor. So for instance,

if you're going to put meat in a stew,

you should really brown the meat and get in a nice dark brown

before you put it into the Stewie water.

Because that browning is gonna bring out the umami flavor.

Now this isn't Monosodium glutamate,

but this is some of the glutamate and other compounds in the food

that will make all the stuff in your stew taste better.

But it doesn't come out unless you really brown the meat.

Now it isn't just found in only meat.

It's also found in plants like the seaweed that we call help in japanese.

It's called kombu.

And that's the place where Mr Ikeda actually first discovered umami

Umami can really make your food taste better.

Go and do a little bit of research and see how you can make umami in your cooking today.

Thanks for listening to the end of the podcast.

I certainly don't know much about umami, but I learned a bit in this podcast.

I hope you heard something interesting and new too.

Be sure to come back tomorrow when I talk about invasive species.