The Umami Masters

They were unknown to each other, with an enormous gap between them in terms of physical distance, cultures, food traditions and occupations. Yet in an outstanding example of how great ideas are never truly original but rather float around for anyone bright and ripe enough at the time to latch onto them, firstly Escoffier, and 20 years later Ikeda, via their wildly divergent paths and disciplines, discovered the existence of a fifth taste. Both men did converge upon, and make real, a wonderful and timeless basic truth about food, flavour, nourishment, good health, and ultimately, even happiness. That truth is this: The essentiality of the enzymatic breakdown of nutritional elements in all foods, especially of proteins, before ingestion takes place, ie., in the kitchen, and not in our stomachs.

And whilst Escoffier’s gift to humanity is evident, even revered, in most forms of French cuisine to this day, Ikeda’s legacy is far more dubious, for his excellent work led to the creation of msg, or monosodium glutamate, an excitotoxin and neurotoxin that has plagued human health ever since 1908.

Escoffier’s genius, in understanding, via his sheer feel and focused intensity, how one could achieve maximum flavour in, garner great pleasure from, not only the meal but also the complete dining experience, still robustly influences cooks and chefs today. Ikeda, conversely, founded the Ajinomoto Company, which to this day sells vast quantities of synthesized msg throughout the world. Ikeda had a genuine desire to lift the nutritional levels and food enjoyment of the Japanese people.

He had earlier spent 2 years in Europe, where he enjoyed an amazing range of the very best foods. He may even have dined at one of the Ritz restaurants over which Escoffier reigned as master chef and director of haute cuisine.

In Europe, Ikeda actually tasted tomatoes for the first time, as well as fresh cream, the great raw milk cheeses like Parmesan, Roquefort and Gruyere; he savoured the huge variety of smoked, cured, pickled and fermented meats, the famous pastries and breads, truffles, and of course the exceptional meat and vegetable stocks and broths, items which earned Escoffier great fame, items which served as the foundation for his stellar publication, the lauded textbook of modern French cooking, “Le Guide Culinaire”. In Japan, Ikeda’s everyday diet comprised mainly rice, noodles, vegetables, mushrooms, seaweed and seafood, so his European sojourn was, undoubtedly, a majorly expansive experience.

At this time in history, science could identify 4 types of taste receptors in the human mouth; hence it was held that there were only 4 tastes within food – sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

But Ikeda was an acute and sensitive observer. He had always sensed that there was a fifth taste, which for him was notably present in his simple, everyday dashi, a kombu (seaweed)- based broth, a dish prepared via long, slow and low-heat simmering. Consequently, when he began to experience similar taste sensations in European cheeses, prosciuttos, various fungi, breads, tomato pastes, and stocks, he was now convinced that there was indeed a fifth taste, and that its essence reflected a full-bodied richness which could also be, sometimes, sweet salty and savoury at the same time (as in parmesan and tomato).

Glutamate: The Fifth Taste

However, Ikeda realized that there was much more to this fifth taste than mere flavour. He had observed that the consumption of such foods bestowed a deep and obvious satisfaction upon the diner. He rightly surmised that this induced, pleasant satiety was also integral in the generation of good nourishment, robust health and, by virtue of the brain’s excretion of endorphins in response to fifth taste stimuli, as well as the pleasurable celebration of a fine meal, even happiness!

Ikeda was by now eagerly inspired to prove the source of this mystery fifth taste, and he was convinced he would find it amongst protein reactions. Indeed, he would, by 1907, have been able to isolate the protein amino acid,  glutamic acid, as the central character of this fifth taste, which he would eventually dub ‘umami’, after the Japanese word ‘umai’, meaning delicious, or just plain yummy.

It took almost 100 more years, but finally, in 2007, scientists discovered the existence of 2 extra taste receptors on the sides of the tongue, receptors that do indeed detect the umami taste. So the fifth taste is now universally,  scientifically accepted, and umami is its official title.

In his experiments, so as to access the amino acid glutamate, Ikeda fermented wheat. Interesting. He recognized that the complex gluten protein in wheat contained high levels of glutamic acid.

Wheat (oats and rye) proteins are constructed as a chain of 18 interlocking amino acids – tryptophan, threonine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, cystine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, valine, arginine, histidine, alanine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid, glycine, proline, and serine – singly, and together in chain, a prime source of exquisite health functions.

The chief contributor to the unravelling of the amino acid chains, to the breakdown of proteins into a highly assimilable and non-allergenic form (what Escoffier termed the ‘denaturing’ of proteins), is an enzyme called protease, which, when given its head, as say, in an overnite bread dough, does indeed party, all night long, doing its amazing, intended job of enhancement, de-linking, de-toxing and pre-digestion. And the longer enzymes are allowed to play, the better it becomes for us.

The amino acid glutamic acid is tasteless in its raw form. However, after long soaking in water, ie, a slooooow fermentation, a process that de-links, or unravels the amino acid chain, the glutamic acid converts, within food, into a richly flavoursome and nutritious form – L-glutamate.

Glutamate is found in most living things, but when they die, when organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove, when you cure meat, or cook meat over time, when you age a parmesan cheese, or by fermentation as in tamari or miso, or under the sun as a tomato ripens.

We encounter L-glutamate in our food when it starts getting delicious, which helps to explain why wheat, being such an abundant source of this umami factor, is such a popular and tasty grain – and, by the way, totally harmless, but only when timeless, traditional fermentation procedures are observed. Eg., in the making of bread, this simply means that the dough is left overnight and not made quickly!

The Creation of MSG

Ikeda had just one more problem to solve: How to extract the L-glutamate from the fermented wheat; how to isolate it in a form suitable for commercial use? This is the critical moment where Ikeda’s great work turned turtle, where unwittingly, in the creation of his ‘innocent’ flavour enhancer, he managed to create a monster.

He successfully achieved isolation of the glutamate in a reaction with simple salt (sodium chloride) to create a white powder called monosodium glutamate, or msg. MSG – Ministry-Sanctioned Gluttony - a synthetic, flavour-enhancing substance that today is bureaucratically granted the luxury of being deemed ‘harmless’; food merchants are able to entirely avoid having to call it msg on labels, with the added liberty of being able to employ up to 30 different pseudonyms, or disguises on any labelling. One of those many aliases, no doubt stemming from its by-now far-removed connection with an amino acid, is, absurdly, ‘natural flavouring’.

Raw msg powder, apart from being a little salty, is tasteless, but does its flavourenhancement trick, its fake-umami impersonation, when mixed with food, especially in heat.

Msg epitomises, but far more dangerously, the old adage – ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. Quite apart from its neurotoxic, excitotoxic properties, msg’s umami factor gives virtually any dumb cook, lazy parent, fast food and grocery purveyor, or parent the ability to render the most obnoxious, unhealthy trash food not only tasty, but also apparently satisfying. Hence it is added to most fast foods (fried chicken, burgers, pizzas, etc), pre-cooked foods, frozen and canned foods, all types of sauces and stock cubes, vegemite, and many nut pastes, and is added liberally to a high % of normal restaurant fare, especially, but not only, the Asian variety.

MSG is Addictive

And msg is addictive; tolerance is created towards it, hence more and more msg is needed over time to keep achieving the same flavour hit.

In this regard, it is actually a voracity drug - one that encourages gluttony, and ultimately, following that thread, a sickly obesity, a condition rampant today, even amongst children. Msg is a also proven carcinogen, but it’s the area of the brain and nervous system where most damage is provoked, as it assails the delicately splendid hormone-secreting endocrine
system. The major endocrinal glands are the pituitary, the pineal, the thyroid, the parathyroid, the gonads and the pancreas, as well as the hypothalamus, which is a neuroendocrine gland.

In a Jekyll and Hyde scenario, MSG, the imposter umami, stimulates and simultaneously assaults the very endorphin-exuding glands that create the happiness chemicals, elements that naturally-occurring, Escoffier-style umami harmlessly
engenders. One denigrates, denies and destroys; the other is a splendid gift to the human experience.

Complex nutrients, such as you find in wheat, oats and soya beans, are brilliant, the best, for human health. When those nutrients have been properly unravelled, denatured, rendered pre-digestible by long, sloooow fermentation procedures, before ingestion, human digestive systems contentedly cruise.

Wheat contains not only gluten, which is a double whammy of the 2 very elastic proteins, glutenin and gliadin, but the starch in wheat is actually called ‘complex carbohydrate’. There are also sugars in the malts, and oils, fibre and high levels of minerals and vitamins. Wheat is almost a total food, and when you throw in its considerable and yummy glutamate dose, extremely tasty and satisfying. It’s no wonder wheat has been so deservedly and universally popular for aeons – a fabulous gift from nature that is now being unnecessarily and ignorantly spurned.

When we ingest enzymatically pre-digested foods and meals, our bodies thrive. In normal fast-made foods, our body functions become shackled to the difficult drudge of having to do all that conversion within, a task impossible to achieve without side-effects, allergies. When you look into a morning bread dough that has stood overnight to ferment, and observe its cauldron-like quality, standing up double, surface bubbling on the gases emitted during the all-nite digestion doof (‘hubble-bubble, play, no trouble’), you may consider yourself very fortunate that all of that intense foreplay and significant gaseous emission did not happen inside your body, for if we consume food that has not been assisted via the ways outlined in this yarn, that food must still undergo breakdown, and it will happen in the body – anyway – with inevitable toxic results.

Apart from protease, there are several other digestive enzymes raging in that wizard’s pot – amylase, to break down the carbs, maltase for the maltose, lipase for the fats, cellulase for the fibre, and even one to deal with the troublesome anti-nutrient, phytic acid – phytase. Phytic acid is actually an enzyme inhibitor, because its natural presence and task, in all seeds, is to protect that seed against predation, intended to thwart digestion, assault by bacteria, insects, animals and humans. Hence phytates act as protectors of the future germination of its seed. During the digestion of our foods, we certainly don’t need an active enzyme-inhibitor running free in that complicated inner process, and the only way to de-nature phytates is via various fermentation procedures that activate phyate’s enzymatic nemesis, phytase.

The precious work of all enzymes is facilitated, encouraged, celebrated in a low-heat, sloooow, long-soaking, fermenting situation. Conversely, enzymes are permanently zapped in fast, unsoaked, quick-cooked scenarios – such as in 99% of today’s breads and fast foods. Note: Oats also contain gluten, which is also easily unravelled and denatured by soaking the oats in water for a whole day and night. Strain off water and cook slowly in fresh water and
you have porridge that even a Scot would enjoy, because that’s how they have made it forever.

Fermentation Assists in Gluten Absorbtion

The reason that gluten is a problem for many is that the body cannot efficiently deal with protein digestion whilst the proteins remain in the compact, original chain form. And the best way to facilitate the unravelling of proteins in food is via long-soaking, culturing, fermentation and/or long-sloooow cooking; which is, by the way, how most foods were prepared before the quickening began - during the 1950’s and 60’s. Moreover, nutrients linked as in a protein chain are indeed intended to remain in proximity to one another, even after a healthy unravelling. They are a balanced force. They serve and bounce off each other in miraculous ways. Amino acids are a healthy tribal unit, and become rogue in isolation, as with msg and aspartame.

Note in the list of amino acids above the innocent-sounding aspartic acid. Well, it was another chemist, one who worked for Donald Rumsfeld’s (then) Searle Pharmaceuticals, who chose aspartic acid to tamper with. He discovered that the unravelled form, aspartame, when separated from the amino chain in an isolate, white powder form (sound familiar?), has a sweetness hundreds of times greater than sugar. This became yet another monster, given the identical, absolute bureaucratic green light and anonymity permitted to msg. Aspartame is today ubiquitously employed as a ‘sugar alternative’ (a phrase intended to indicate a healthy option) in sports and ‘diet’ drinks, all
diabetic foods and many kids’ foods, its alias in Australia being ‘neotame’. It, like msg, has many other label disguises. It too is an appalling neurotoxin and excitotoxin, and its grave side-effects are well enough documented to spare me the need to go into them here. And so, with the creation of msg powder, Ikeda’s work was complete; he would have died a rich man. I guess the consideration of the possibility of severe side-effects and/or allergies
were not such a great concern for science, even then.

On the other hand, Auguste Escoffier’s work, his love, was all about effects, both the direct, and side effects that his food would have upon his clients, on all levels of participation, right up to bliss. One of his quotes goes: “La bonne cuisine est la base du véritable Bonheur”, or “Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.”

Escoffier understood the totality of the culinary experience and its consequent effect upon health and heartiness. He pioneered a la carte dining, for he saw that clients would prefer a choice of meals, hence he created the first menus. He was the first chef to undertake indepth study of techniques for canning and preserving meats and vegetables. He had the most remarkable empathy with the diner. Until his time, meals were not necessarily served
hot, but he changed that, seeing that it was a greater sensual and taste experience to eat hot food. He pioneered the searing of meat to retain the tender juices. In his Ritz chain of restaurants, he created superb ambiences, again understanding all facets of a pleasurable dining event. And such was Escoffier’s great sensitivity and empathy, he refused to serve food made in anger by any of his staff, grasping clearly the full implications and imperativeness of love in the kitchen. The X factor in food. An old French proverb goes – “the fire of love is lit in the kitchen”.

Following is a quote from someone who had the pleasure of eating Escoffier’s food: “It didn't just taste good, this was an epiphany! This was the best food you ever tasted in your life”. But because it was neither sweet, bitter, sour, salty nor any combination of those four, as far as the scientists were concerned, it wasn't real. People may have drooled, savoured, even swooned, paid enormous amounts of money to M. Escoffier, but what they were tasting wasn't really or officially yet there. It was all in their heads. True. It was about endorphin-release. This is when the elevated and elusive qualities of umami were being consciously encountered for the first time.

In his quest for optimum flavour and satisfaction, Escoffier devised the principle of deglazing. In order to create the tastiest gravies, he would, after the meat was fried in a pan, toss in some of his ever-ready stock to soak up those flavour-rich, caramelised burnt meat juices and fats (denatured proteins also). This alone made him famous. But it was his focus upon stocks where he would deeply revolutionise French cooking, and where he would, co-incidentally, arrive at the same understandings about the essential pre-digestion of nutrients that Ikeda was doing elsewhere.

Escoffier would always use fish-heads and veal bones (marrow) in his stocks, as well as all the scraps of vegetables that accrue in a kitchen. And his ‘secret’ always also involved the wonderful meat fats we’ve been wrongly told to avoid. It’s no surprise that butter has the umami taste also. He would cook his stocks long, sloooow and at low heat, and he began to understand that it was the slow denaturing of the proteins over a long time that would bestow the brilliant full flavour that he became famous for. He did not have the scientific grasp that Ikeda had; he did not understand L-glutamate, but he had realized, through his love and focus, his art, that there was indeed a fifth taste that actually created satiety dimensions way beyond taste, and into the realms of joy.

In his new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, author Jonah tells eight stories that share a common theme. In each case, (he chooses Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, George Elliot, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Wolf and, yes Auguste Escoffier) an artist is busy about his/her work and happens to observe something or sense something about the real world that scientists have not yet noticed, or that scientists say is not true.
But because artists are so good at describing what it's like to experience the world, so intent on delivering the truth of what it feels like to be alive, so intuitive, in each of these eight cases, the artists learn something that the scientists don't discover until years later. Since 2004, I have learnt to fully appreciate my own sloooow kitchen, and those of others. My staples have been my home-made, 15 hour-fermented, plain (not wholemeal) wheat bread, fermented (whole) buckwheat pancakes (both umami-rich) – both employed with a fantastic array of toppings. Along with some fruit, activated nuts, umami-rich bean dishes that take up to 4 days to complete, and raw milk, it’s an extremely simple, but utterly delicious, and dare I say, epiphanous fare.

After almost dying of severe neurotoxic poisoning in 2002, I have not needed a doctor nor naturopath for the last 6 years. No allopathic medicines nor even natural supplements. But this, of course, is not only about physical  well-being. More crucial, more primal is the reality that I am a healthy, positive, happy, centred soul, and so I simply attract regimes and experiences that enhance that.

Not only do I no longer suffer gluten-intolerance, I love gluten, I thrive on gluten, as have all sloooow-food traditional societies for millennia. Speed maims and kills, in the kitchen too. Take the pace down and contentedly cruise