Is "Umami" the taste of mineral? and if not, what is the word for THAT taste?

Factual Questions
1

Umami is often described as having a distinctively “meaty” quality to it. Blood is often said to taste like copper. Spinach is usually on any list of foods said to have an “umami” taste, and spinach is high in Iron. Is “Umami” a metallic flavor?
The word that immediately comes to mind when thinking of that metallic taste, the taste of a penny, or a 9-volt battery, ir mineral water, is “Tangy”. But Tangy isn’t on the list of five basic flavors. It goes:

Sweet
Sour
Bitter
Salty
Umami

So I guess my question(s) is/are this: If “umami” isn’t “tangy”, then what exactly is “umami”? and Why isn’t “tangy” on the list of basic tastes?

2

No, umami is the taste of glutamates and nucleotides. Just like sweet is the taste of sugars, sour of acids, bitter of bases, and salty of [del]sodium[/del] alkaki metals similar to sodium.

I’m not sure what to call the flavor you are referring to, other than “metallic.” A quick look at the Wikipedia page doesn’t show that one, either, even though it lists a lot more tastes besides the five basic ones.

3

I’ve never heard spinach described as having an umami taste. Umami describes a rich “savoury” flavour, not a metallic one.

4

When people talk about the four/five tastes, they’re talking about what your actual taste buds react to. Like most flavors, the taste of metal actually comes from scent, not your taste buds.

5

The allegedly high amount of iron in spinach is a myth, commonly said to have been established by a wrongly placed decimal point. This origin seems to be a myth itself, and the exaggerated iron amount in spinach was probably caused by inaccurate scientific methods in the 19th century. But either way, the bottom line is that spinach isn’t an extraordinary nutritional source for iron.

Anyway, I don’t find spinach to be tasting metallic, let alone umami.

6

I don’t see how metallic taste can be a scent, since it actually leaves a tingly feeling on the tongue, and is much more unpleasant than merely smelling it.

7

Presumably, like most real-life flavors, the metallic taste is a mixture of some of the five basic types of taste listed in the OP. My guess would be that it is a mixture of sour, bitter and salty in some proportion.

Just because there are only 5 types of receptors, it does not follow that we can only distinguish 5 different flavors. Our eyes only have three types of color sensitive cone cells but we can distinguish hundreds (maybe thousands) of distinct colors, because they stimulate the different cone types in different proportions.Taste works similarly.

8

It’s the naphthenic and palmitic aluminum salts that give napalm its distinct umami flavour. When applied outside, particularly in the early part of the day when the dew point is reached, its victory-like scent contributes to the underlying taste.

9

That was sweet.

10

No, it was umami.

11

Get yourself a can of Accent or other MSG food enhancer. Taste it. That’s umami.

12

That’s astringent, in my opinion.