Umamification
This is an introduction to our culinary, scientific and cultural research on umamification—one of the three main interrelated methods we use in our culinary R&D, along with fermentation and upcycling.
Table of Contents
i. Diverse sources of umami
Umami (旨味) means ‘delicious taste’ in Japanese, and describes a quality of richness, savouriness, and meatiness.¹ It tastes so good in large part because it signals the presence of compounds—nitrogen and amino acids, in the form of glutamic acid, inosinate, and guanylate—we need to survive.² Seafood, meat, cheese, and some fungi are rich in these umami compounds. They are much less common in plant ingredients, aside from those that have been processed in specific ways, or rare exceptions like ripe tomatoes and certain seaweeds (though, of course technically not a plant).³
‘Umamifying’ more plant foods to be as rich,
savoury, and satisfying as animal products is
a key challenge for the green transition.
Lack of umami in many plant foods is a key reason why they can have limited acceptance—along with texture, mouthfeel, koku sensation and other more idiosyncratic food cultural reasons.⁴ Since eating more plant-rich diets is an important strategy for mitigating climate change in most places, ‘umamifying’ more plant foods to be as rich, savoury, and satisfying as animal products is a key challenge for the dietary green transition.⁵ We envision a future where fewer but better quality animal products are produced in agroecological ways, where every bit of flavour and nutrition is used and valued from those animals that are produced, and the remaining demand gap is bridged with other diverse sources of umami from fungi and plants. These latter sources can have a much lower embodied impact and cost, especially when using upcycled ingredients. All we have to do is develop them.
ii. Traditions and translations
Plant sources of umami are nothing new. In fact many cultures have developed diverse and ingenious ways to maximise umamification through plant-based ingredients and for plant-based diets. Across East and Southeast Asia, there are long traditions of creating umami from soybeans in myriad forms, as well as other legumes, cereals, other plant ingredients, and seaweeds. Fermenting these ingredients transforms them, unlocking deliciousness, by working in partnership with microbes like Aspergillus oryzae, the most common species of kōji, Rhizopus oligosporus, one of the tempe moulds, and many others.
Plant sources of umami are nothing new.
Miso and shōyu (soy sauce) are perhaps the two traditional kōji-based plant ferments best known in the West. Their exact origins are sometimes contested, but they appear to share the same lineage with a common ancestor originating in China about 2,500 years ago called jiang, which was later brought to Japan some 1,300 years ago, before evolving into miso and shōyu.⁶ Regional variations of similar fermented products made with soybeans and other plant ingredients exist across East, Southeast and even South Asia; douchi, doenjang, kinema, thua nao and many more.⁷ A ‘fermented seasoning food road’ analogous to the Silk Road has been suggested to describe this diversity of related products, as ideas, recipes, and practices spread and were adapted by different food cultures.⁸
Perhaps (and regrettably) less widely known and used in the West is the comparable variety of fermented plant sources of umami from sub-Saharan Africa, including a number of traditional legume, cereal and seed ferments like iru, dawadawa, ogiri, and ugba to name just a few.⁹
In comparison, there is a relative dearth of plant sources of umami within Western cuisines. Much can be learned from these traditional Asian and African practices, by adapting them to use regionally and culturally appropriate ingredients while honouring their origins—what we might call ‘translated’ fermentations.¹⁰
iii. Tantalising possibilities
The range of flavours, textures and appearances within many kinds of traditional sources of plant umami, like miso, is already remarkable. For miso, this diversity is influenced by temperature, duration of fermentation, salt content, fermentation vessel, the variety of kōji and different cultural practices.¹¹
Translated fermentations that respectfully build on these traditions only extends this diversity even further. There are between 2-3000 edible species of fungi and perhaps up to 30,000 species of edible species of plants, of which a few thousand are cultivated.¹² The total diversity of varieties within each cultivated species can be vast, though sadly we only widely rely on a small number of varieties of staple crops.¹³ All of these could be explored for their umami potential. When we consider how fermentation and upcycling can expand our perspectives on edibility, this list of potential sources of novel umami only grows. Both the ‘inedible’ fractions of edible plants that we don’t typically consume today, and all the plants that we don’t typically consider edible at all, could all be fruitful avenues of exploration for umamification. Our culinary R&D suggests that some by-products—brewers’ spent grains, coffee grounds and cereal bran to name a few—that are produced in huge quantities today and will likely continue to be produced in a flavourful, equitable and ecological food system have immense promise as sources of umami.
As we note above, Western cultures currently derive most of their umami from animal sources, and overall from just a handful of animal species.¹⁴ They provide much deliciousness but constitute only a sliver of possible umami flavour profiles. It’s exciting to think of all the as-yet-undiscovered possible forms of umami and other flavours that could result from the untapped potential of the plant and fungal kingdoms—and how these new sources of deliciousness might also incidentally help us eat more sustainably and build more flavourful, equitable and ecological food systems.
iv. Our work
Through fermentation, upcycling, and other techniques, we explore and develop new sources of umami from diverse plant ingredients to help ‘umamify’ our diets. In this series of articles, we will share some of our culinary, scientific, and cultural research findings. We are far from the only people working on umamification, and we hope our work can contribute a culinary, flavour-oriented, culturally sensitive approach to this growing field.
Some of the topics that we are currently working on (articles will be linked here when finished):
A series of articles on our research on potential upcycled sources of plant umami, using by-products such as stale bread, coffee grounds, brewers spent grain, wheat bran, plant milk okara and fruit and vegetable skins
An exploration of the microbial ecologies of different translated novel misos (in collaboration with Restaurant Noma and former Restaurant Inua in Tōkyō, Japan)
An exploration of the politics of naming translated plant sources of umami
Experimental kōji evolution (in collaboration with Restaurant Noma, Empirical Spirits, and the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at KU)
Wild kōjis and their relation to domesticated ones (with Marika Groen)
Ecological, evolutionary and cultural comparison between kōji, nuruk and qu—starter cultures from Japan, Korea, and China respectively (with Marika Groen, Mara King, and Dr John Gibbons)
A potential new species of Exiguobacterium found in nixtamalised pea miso (with Restaurant Noma)
Nesashi miso—a rare kind of miso (with Marika Groen)
Space Miso—an investigation into how fermenting in space influences the microbial ecologies and flavour of miso, and how it could help future space exploration (with Maggie Coblentz at MIT Media Lab and others)
Contributions and acknowledgements
Eliot wrote the article, with contributions and editorial feedback from Josh.
Eliot created the header image using the generative AI tool, Midjourney.
Endnotes
[1] Ole G. Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbæk (2014), Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, Columbia University Press, New York City, USA.
[2] Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez (2021), Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, USA.
[3] Ole G. Mouritsen (2023), ‘Umamification of food facilitates the green transition’, Soil Ecology Letters.
[4] Ana San Gabriel and Tia Rains (2024), ‘Umami Taste as a Component of Healthy Diets’, in: Ana San Gabriel, Tia Rains, Gary Beauchamp (eds.) ‘Umami: Taste for Health’’, Springer, Cham, Switzerland; Alexandra Alcorta et al. (2021), ‘Foods for Plant-Based Diets: Challenges and Innovations’, Foods.
[5] Ole G Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbæk (2020), ‘Design and ‘umamification’ of vegetable dishes for sustainable eating’, International Journal of Food Design; Walter Willett et al (2019), ‘Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems’, The Lancet cf. this is not universally true, for example Aviaja Lyberth Hauptmann's work highlights how 'plant-based' foods as dictated by western institutions are not food culturally appropriate in Greenland.
[6] William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi (1983), The Book of Miso, Ballantine Books, New York, USA.
[7] P Hajeb and S Jinap (2015), ‘Umami Taste Components and Their Sources in Asian Foods’, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition.
[8] An admittedly not very catchy name, not helped by Google Translate’s attempts to translate from Japanese to English. From here.
[9] Yemisi Obafemi et al. (2022), ‘African fermented foods: overview, emerging benefits, and novel approaches to microbiome profiling’, Nature.
[10] Josh Evans (2022), ‘Taste Shaping Natures: a Multiplied Ethnography of Translated Fermentation in the New/er Nordic Cuisine’, Oxford University Research Archive.
[11] William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi (1983), The Book of Miso, Ballantine Books, New York, USA.
[12] Food and Agricultural Organisation (2023), ‘The plants that feed the world’, FAO.
[13] For example, the astounding diversity within Brassica olaracea has inspired a whole sub-genre of vegetable memes. What future flavour possibilities await if we continue to select and develop other crops in the inspired ways that our ancestors did?
[14] Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosada and Max Roser (2019), ‘Meat and Dairy Production’, Our World in Data. Just 5-8 animal species make up >98% of the meat we consume: cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and poultry (data for the latter is typically aggregated, this number is mostly chickens, but also includes duck, turkey, goose and others).