Today I’m going to share a chef’s secret with you. It’s how to get that certain “je ne sais quoi” into your cooking with almost no effort and very little expense. We all know about salty, sour, sweet, and bitter flavors, but there is a fifth flavor, more recently identified, called umami. More accurately, scientists have recently identified it, but chefs have known about it for centuries, even if they didn’t know the word.
Umami is Japanese for “savory taste” and that’s about the best way to describe it. It is not easily perceived in and of itself. Its rock star status in the kitchen comes from its ability to elevate other flavors to new heights.
Here are some foods that naturally contain umami:
- Parmesan cheese
- Blue cheese
- Cured meats
- Wine and beer
- Tomato
- Wild mushrooms
- Cured olives
- Worchestershire sauce
- Asparagus
- Sauerkraut
- Pickled fish
- Anchovy paste
- Soy sauce
- Fish sauce
- Seaweed and kelp
Adding any of these will bring a new dimension of flavor to an old recipe. Try adding an olive tapenade to plain steamed fish, tomato paste to a soup, red wine to a beef stew or blue cheese to a sauce and you’re on the way to exploiting the potential of umami.
And now, finally, to my Product Pick of the Month: Red Boat Fish Sauce. Fish sauce is an indispensible ingredient in Vietnamese and Thai cuisine and it’s widely available here in the U.S., but the quality of most fish sauce is anywhere from mediocre to poor. Many inexpensive fish sauces found in Asian markets are full of unhealthy ingredients, like hydrolyzed vegetable protein, a very close cousin of MSG. Even my formerly favorite fish sauce from Thai Kitchen, while it has no suspect additives, is made from anchovy extract rather than fresh fish.
I love that Red Boat Fish Sauce is made in the traditional way from wild black anchovies, salted while still on the boat to keep them fresh. It is then slowly fermented in huge wooden barrels for at least a year. Only the first, or virgin, pressing is sold as Red Boat Fish Sauce. The video tour of the Red Boat facility in Vietnam is delightful to watch.
Red Boat Fish Sauce is a bit more expensive than other fish sauces I’ve used ($6.99 at my local Whole Foods), but given that most recipes call for no more than a tablespoon, it’s an affordable luxury. In my quest for seeking out traditional foods that kept our ancestors healthy and vibrant, Red Boat Fish Sauce fits the bill.
You needn’t delve into complex Thai or Vietnamese recipes (though it is fun!) to enjoy the kick-it-up-a-notch flavors that fish sauce can impart. While writing this post I decided to add 2 teaspoons of Red Boat Fish Sauce to a zucchini and tomato quiche. It needed to be dairy free, so I used coconut milk and hoped the fish sauce might add some umami that aged cheese would otherwise provide. There was no fishy taste at all. Think of fish sauce as a subliminal message for your taste buds. You don’t really know it’s there, but it’s influencing the dish, all the same.
Here’s an all-American dish made even better with umami:
(And stay tuned later this week for another way to use fish sauce for a fast, nutritious weeknight take on take-out Thai!)
Umami Burgers
- 2 pounds ground beef (preferably grass-fed and 20% fat)
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- 2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Mix together and let marinate for half an hour. Make patties and grill – preferably medium rare.
