MUSHROOM AND UMAMI (THE FIFTH TASTE).

MUSHROOM AND UMAMI (THE FIFTH TASTE).

Did you know that we have 5 basic tastes– not four? It was once thought that our four basic tastes were comprised of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter; every food that we ate was a various combination of these four tastes.
However, as early as 1910, a Japanese researcher found that we actually have sensory cells that detect a fifth taste, called savory or umami. Umami is a meaty or savory taste. The word umami is the Japanese name for this taste, a term that has gained in popularity and is now commonly used to refer to this fifth taste.
The “umami” taste, which is somewhat similar to the taste of a meat broth, is usually caused by glutamic acid or aspartic acid. These two amino acids are part of many different proteins found in food, and also in some plants. Ripe tomatoes, meat and cheese all contain a lot of glutamic acid. Asparagus, for example, contains aspartic acid. Chinese cuisine uses glutamate, the glutamic acid salt, as flavor enhancers. This is done to make the savory taste of foods more intense.

Mushrooms are perceived to have a similar flavor to meat. For example, oyster mushrooms, shiitake, have a similar flavor to meat, lion’s mane to seafood, and crisped shiitake mushrooms to bacon. For this reason, in addition to the fact that mushrooms contain protein (350 calories of oyster mushrooms contains 33 grams of protein or 340 calories worth of shiitake mushrooms contain 22.4 grams of protein) that many people are turning to mushrooms as a meat substitute. Now we can see why mushrooms are becoming one of the fastest growing, healthy, unprocessed meat substitutes.

Don’t take our word for it, though. We encourage you to see for yourself. Try eating your own shiitake or oyster mushrooms at home to make the umami flavor a regular part of your meals.


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