Any more suggestions? I googled and found Taste No. 5 which is fermented red bean curd, which looks intriguing, but I can’t get hold of that where I am at the moment.
I’d want to avoid it being too salty. Umami often comes accompanied by salt, but it’s not vital - mushroom ketchup isn’t salty at all. However Marmite, nam pla, and anchovy sauce are all salty, so I need something else, perhaps a little sweet, to offset that. Any ideas?
I might add some truffle just because, truffle.
Finally, what would be the best way to deliver this? I’d rather have something solid than liquid. Maybe a paste of some kind, or a sausage?
I hate to break it to you, but the “Taste No 5” you linked to is already what you’re trying to make. It’s not - and doesn’t even contain - fermented red bean curd (the article was badly written - that’s what you get for reading the Torygraph :p) . Apparently its ingredients are
Tomato purée
Garlic
Anchovy Paste (anchovies, salt, sunflower oil)
Black Olive
Balsamic Vinegar
Porcini mushrooms
Parmesan cheese
Olive oil
Vinegar
Sugar
Salt.
Why in the world the bizarre inventor thought she needed to add extra salt, I don’t know. However I have used it, and it is tasty. I wouldn’t suck it straight from the tube, though.
I’ve got the Taste Number Five. A bt too much achovy paste and olive for me, but the other ingredients are good. My favorite taste additive now is black truffle salt…heavenly on eggs.
Savoury (my spelling) already means ‘opposite of sweet’ and also implies saltiness. In the culinary world and scientific community, umami has already been accepted as a loan-word. It’s also in the Oxford English dictionary, with a very specific meaning relating to the taste of glutamates.
I’m sure high horses do bear a large amount of umami, they’re not something I wish to include in my ‘bomb’.
So I have slept on this and decided that as a foodstuff on its own it might be rather overwhelming, as sucking on stock cubes and eating miso powder would indicate - though both of those are needlessly salty.
So I decided my bomb might be best as something that can be added to something bland like rice and beans to make it tasty. Which it appears, on returning to this thread, Taste No. 5 has already done. (Is it me or are they deliberately aping Chanel in their packaging? Kinda indicates their target market of yummie mummies and Nigella wannabes.) Damn. Teacake I bet the extra salt is to preserve it while ruining its taste.
Sister Vigilante, mushroom ketchup is an amazing thing. British product, concentrated essence of mushroom that tastes nothing like mushrooms, but added to dishes gives a lovely roundness and depth to their flavour. Here’s a DIY recipe from Heston Blumenthal.
Savoury (however you want to spell is) never meant “salty”. Salty is salty, and that’s why we have a different word for it.
But whatever, I can’t fight the rising tide. Just make sure you don’t perpetuate the idea that someone ‘discovered a new flavour’, like the author of this article claims:
Take whichever item on that list is the most umami (I’m pretty sure that would be MSG), and use 100% of that. Adding anything else that has less of the flavor is just diluting it.
Just go to Umami Burger and order the umami burger and the truffle burger and some fries. Wash it down with a nice beer. All the rest is just extra work.
Savory and umami do not mean the same thing. Umami is one of those fantastic words that gets sucked into English because they do a great job of precisely describing something that was not precisely described already. Another: schadenfreude. Awesome.
Japan is running out of words and he’s trying to conserve them? (I’d love to continue this discussion but I’m going out to sing at an empty-orchestra bar. Well, there is a loan word for that, but I wouldn’t want to abuse it.)
