Umami Science Part I - How to Think About Umami

So far, we’ve been navigating the basics of ramen here at Ramen Chemistry.  Ramen is our product after all, so that's how I kicked off this blog.  But Ramen Chemistry is not a food blog, per se.  It’s about every aspect of the ramen business.  Once Shiba Ramen secures a physical space (hopefully soon), our lives are going to revolve around getting the business open, and Ramen Chemistry is going to reflect the the diverse things we'll be doing to make it happen.

But here in the last days of (relative) calm before our fire drill starts, I want to take a short detour into the world of science.  Chemical biology and food science, that is.  I want to tell you about the molecular basis for the human umami response.  This is real, current science and it relates to ramen.  Let’s get started!

MSG. Monosodium glutamate. This unnecessarily controversial compound is naturally abundant in many foods we eat every day (see below). 

What Is Umami?

Umami (literally "delicious taste" in Japanese) is, along with sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness, one of the five basic tastes.  It is often described as having savory or mouth-watering quality.  The umami response is triggered by free L-glutamate (one of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids, the building blocks of proteins), usually in the form of its sodium or potassium salt.  The sodium salt is, of course,  monosodium glutamate, MSG.  And, as we'll discuss, the glutamate-induced umami response is strengthened when either of two ribonucleic acids (the building blocks of RNA), guanylate or inosinate, is present.  Foods that contain these chemicals deliver umami.  That's it.

Umami Foods.  Left image shows amounts of glutamate, inosinate, and guanylate in everyday foods.  Right image shows umami-rich foods worldwide.  These images were taken from this very informative article. 

I remember the first time I read about umami. It was in some magazine (I think on an airplane) about a decade ago.  The article described umami as the “elusive Japanese fifth flavor.”  That phrase “elusive” persisted in my thinking for years, in part perhaps because the article’s phrasing—Japanese fifth flavor—left me with the impression that umami was somehow a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.  If that was true, umami may well be elusive to anyone not steeped in Japanese food and culture.  

Umami is elusive, but not because it’s foreign.  Although it’s perhaps more prevalent in Japanese cuisine, with its heavy use of high-umami ingredients like kombu and dried fish, umami has a long history in Western cooking.  The ancient Romans were wild about garum, a fermented fish paste that was full of umami.  A recent article explains that "like Asian fish sauces, the Roman version was made by layering fish and salt until it ferments.  There are versions made with whole fish, and some just with the blood and guts."  The process "creates a fermentation environment that releases more of the protein, making garum a good source of nutrients" and giving "it a rich, savory umami taste."  A food historian is quoted as saying that garum is "very, very flavorful.  It explodes in the mouth and you have a long, drawn-out flavor experience, which is really quite remarkable."

Garum Amphora.  Floor mosaic from garum shop in Pompeii.  The favored condiment in ancient Rome was an umami-heavy paste made of fermented fish guts.

Today, we're wild about pizza, burgers, bacon, roasted tomatoes, oysters, parmesan cheese.  Have you ever eaten at Umami Burger?  Their concept is to make burgers that are umami-maximized.  They do it by invoking non-traditional burger ingredients (and combinations thereof).  They have umami-maximized ketchup on the table, and a very nice appetizer plate of high-umami pickles.  I've eaten there a couple times, and there's a definite difference in how these burgers taste.  Eating one and thinking about its flavor compared to a normal burger is actually a pretty good way of isolating the umami flavor and getting a better sense of what it is.

Umami Burger.  Parmesan frisco, shiitake mushrooms, roasted tomato, caramelized onions, umami house ketchup.

Umami is elusive because of its relative subtlety.  It doesn’t jump out in the obvious way the other four flavors—sweet, salty, sour, bitter—do.  Think about all of the times you’ve thought something was too sweet or too salty.  You probably never thought that something has too much umami.  Umami is also elusive, I think, because we take umami flavors for granted.  We don’t have the “umami” concept in western culture, and we’re just not used to talking about our food in these terms.  

I like to think of umami this way:  imagine the last time you ate a really good slice of pizza.  You were pretty into it, right?  It was hot, the crust was crispy, and it had so much flavor. You had a hard time stopping after a few pieces.  What flavors did you taste?  There was some sweetness and sourness in the tomato sauce, and maybe something was a little bit salty, but of the flavor in that slice of pizza, how much of it can you really assign to sweetness or saltiness, let alone to sourness or bitterness?  All the pizza’s indefinable savoriness, all that flavor that’s not sweet or salty, sour or bitter—that’s umami.  I'm oversimplifying it a bit, I'm sure, but you get the idea behind this thought experiment.  Next time you have pizza or a bacon cheeseburger, think about this formula and maybe umami will start seeming less elusive:

Umami = Total Flavor – (Sweet + Salty + Sour + Bitter)

Maybe you still can’t totally put your finger on it, but by eliminating sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, you see that something else is hard at work making your pizza taste so good.  That’s umami.  

Next time, I'll explain how umami was discovered and how umami happens down at the molecular level.

Ramen 101.4: Everything Else! Noodles, Oils, and Toppings.

Now we’ve worked our way through arguably the two most important components of ramen, soup and tare. The combination of soup and tare goes a long way toward defining the flavor and quality of a bowl of ramen. But the overall experience of a given bowl can—and will—vary wildly depending on everything else that’s in it. Everything else means noodles, oils, and toppings.  

Noodle Basics

Ramen noodles are alkaline wheat noodles, made from flour, water, salt, and carbonate salts like potassium carbonate (K2CO3). The word “alkaline” refers to the basic pH of added carbonates. As this recent column explains, taking the pH to about 9.0 (remember neutral pH is 7.0), natural yellow pigments are released, “giving the noodles a characteristic golden hue. Alkalinity also encourages greater absorption of water in the flour, more starch degradation, and an increase in strength and extensibility. . . . The starch gel within the protein matrix is also strengthened, resulting in a firm, chewy bite.” In other words, it’s the alkalinity that makes a ramen noodle a ramen noodle.

Good old potassium carbonate.  You and I spent a lot of time together during the last Bush Administration.  

The composition of ramen noodles is variable.  Flour can range from 50-70%, water from 25-50%, and carbonates (kansui in Japanese) from 1-3%.  Unsurprisingly, noodles with higher water content are softer.  Noodles with less water are more powdery and have a rougher texture.  They also have a more floury taste.  And they are less springy and absorb water (and become soggy) more readily.  

The type of flour used impacts the properties of the noodle.  This is because different types of flour have different levels of protein content.  The more protein in a flour, the more gluten will be present in the noodle, and the more chewy and elastic the noodle texture will be.  Gluten (in addition to being the leading dietary bogeyman of the past decade) is a composite of two naturally-occurring wheat proteins, gliadin and glutenin, that forms during the kneading process.

Creating Noodle Elasticity.  As the Royal Society of Chemistry explains, "as mechanical work stretches the dough, more hydrogen bonds (black) can form between chains of gluten subunits (orange)."  Great article on the chemistry here:  http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2009/October/Ontherise.asp.  

The shape of the noodle is also important.  The thickness of the noodle influences the sensory experience, the rate of absorption of broth, and the amount of soup that is eaten in a given bite along with the noodles.  Noodles are numbered according to their thicknesses, which are set based on the number and size of the teeth in the noodle machine.

By adjusting these variables--the ratio of water, flour and carbonates, and the thickness and shape of the noodle--you can technically achieve infinite variety in ramen noodles.

Noodle Varieties.  Sun Noodle's product line.  http://sunnoodle.com/our-noodles/

Noodles in Practice

Shiba Ramen is going to buy its noodles, just like most other ramen shops do.  It's easy to buy a wide range of quality and fresh noodles from various wholesalers.  Doing so makes sense from an operational perspective, because you don't have to allocate scarce resources to the non-trivial and constant demands of making noodles.  This is especially case early in the life of the business.  

Of course, some ramen shops do make their own noodles. They use noodle machines: big pieces of equipment that cost between $10K and $30K in Japan.  These things can make 100-300 servings/hour.

Cooking the noodles the right length of time is critical. Noodles that are overcooked or waterlogged are hard to eat, and can ruin an otherwise good ramen. It’s just as important to serve (and eat) them quickly after cooking them. The longer the noodles sit in the bowl, the more soup they’ll absorb and the soggier they’ll get. Quality control is achieved by using a restaurant-grade noodle or pasta cooking machine with a timer.  And, of course, by paying attention to what you're doing!

Noodle Machine Catalogue.  http://www.yamatomfg.com/item/richmen/

Oils

Oils are often used to enhance the sensory experience of a bowl of ramen. It makes sense—fats are full of flavor, after all. Because the oil sits on top , it's the first thing to hit your spoon when you scoop up some broth, and the noodles pass through it as you eat them, too, picking up flavor along the way.

You can pretty much make an oil out of any ingredient, so oils are a great way to add some flavor punch to a bowl of ramen. You may have seen blackened garlic oils or spicy chili oils (like la-yu) at ramen restaurants. You can even use the clear, golden chicken oil that rises to the top when making a chintan soup. Pork back fat can also be used. And have you ever had shio butter ramen? It's served with a chunk of butter dropped into the hot soup. Yes, it's good.

Toppings

If you've eaten very much ramen, you already know there are no real rules for topping ramen. Slices of pork chashu, soft-boiled egg, menma, negi (green onion), and nori paper are pretty conventional, and it might be expected that one or more of these ingredients will come with a bowl of ramen. Some of Shiba Ramen's menu items will feature these standards.

There's a ton of flexibility, though, and chefs are hardly limited to this traditional set of toppings. As Ramen Chemistry develops, I'll make sure to show a lot of ramen, both ours and others, so readers can get a sense of the range that's out there.

Chashu.  This article has a great recipe and discussion: http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/03/the-food-lab-ramen-edition-how-to-make-chashu-pork-belly.html.

Ramen 101.3 - Tare

Now that we know all about soup, let’s take a quick march through the rest of ramen’s core elements. Today, we’ll talk about tare.  

When you go to a ramen ya (that’s the Japanese term for ramen restaurant), you’ll often see ramen categorized by the type of tare used in a particular bowl. We’ve all seen shio (salt), shoyu (soy), and miso ramens. This is not to say that ramen is always named according to its tare. When you see tonkotsu ramen, for example, the reference is to the soup, not the tare. And when you hear tonkotsu shoyu, the reference is to both.  But the point remains that if you’ve eaten much ramen, you’re already familiar with tare, even if you didn’t appreciate the details until now.

The most basic function of tare is to bring saltiness to the ramen. But tare can do a lot more than just deliver salt.  It can be a vehicle for additional umami, sweetness,  sourness, or spiciness.  For example, shoyu and miso are both salty, but both are also sources of umami, and each brings its own unique flavor profile to the ramen. 

Shoyu is a fermented soy bean product.  There are tons of different kinds, with different flavor profiles.  Here in the U.S., we can only get a snapshot of the shoyu variation found in Japan.  Photo credit: http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/do-you-know-your-soy-sauces-japanese-chinese-indonesian-differences.html.  

Importantly, just calling a ramen “shoyu” or “miso” doesn’t tell you anything about what else is in its tare. In those examples, soy sauce or miso paste might be the main ingredient, but it’s not at all uncommon to have 5-10 other ingredients, as well. A good ramen shop isn’t just dumping a load of soy sauce or miso into the ramen simply to have done with it. Other common ingredients include mirin (explained below), dashi, vinegar, sake, spices, garlic, ginger and oils.  The reality is that you can add a lot of different things, and everything can be adjusted to taste.  There aren't hard and fast rules here.

Hipsters rejoice!  In Japan, artisinal shoyu-making is a nationwide industry.  Photo credit: http://www.yuasashoyu.com/eshop/item.html

The key thing with tare is to use the right amount. Typically, tare is combined with soup in an approximate 1:10 ratio. Miso, however, is something of an exception.  It's common to use more than 10% miso, because miso is contains less salt per unit weight than soy sauce.  To achieve the same level of saltiness in a miso ramen, the amount of miso must be relatively larger.  The point is that no number is absolute, and in practice everything is optimized to taste.  

Miso is yet another fermented soybean product (how about that soybean, eh?).  Like shoyu, there are many kinds of miso, and many distinct flavors.  Photo credit:  http://www.crunchyroll.com/forumtopic-674040/how-to-make-miso-soup.

When it comes to ramen, the soup is the most important and fundamental ingredient.  The tare should be viewed as an additive that is there to support and enhance the soup.  It's not something that should become too overwhelming in its own right.   

Tare book.  In Japan, you can buy whole books on tare. We got this tare textbook in Japan (you can get it on Japanese Amazon here). 

A note about mirin.  According to Wikipedia, mirin is an "essential condiment used in Japanese cuisine."  It is a type of rice wine that is low in alcohol content and high in sugars, and is commonly used to add sweetness to ramen.  After seeing a lot of Japanese foods being cooked at our house, I've come to realize how important mirin is as a basic culinary ingredient.

Where Does a Guy Go for Chicken Feet, Anyway?

So now you've figured out that, when we're thinking about making ramen, we're dealing with pretty large quantities of animal products that are not typically used in American kitchens.  Most people aren't too familiar with going out and buying chicken feet or pork femurs. You might not have a good idea about where to go to get these things. It turns out that Chinese and Asian groceries are key, because these ingredients are Asian cuisine staples, especially in soups.

When we did our first ramen experiment, I went by myself to Oakland Chinatown, where I picked a random market and waded in. Heading straight to the butcher counter, I was confronted with a scene quite divorced from that of the meat aisle at Safeway! Pigs on hooks, whole chickens in bags, and a large self-service box of chicken feet. I'm pretty sure I heard the sounds of livestock coming from the back of the store (could have been a “moo,” more likely an “oink”). But because the employee I tried to hale didn’t speak English, another customer had to translate for me (and inform me that they don't actually provide service at the butcher counter). I ended up helping myself to a chicken in a bag after hand-filling a bag of chicken feet. To Hiroko’s great dismay, that bagged chicken came fully equipped with its head still in place. It fell to me to see it off before the experiment could begin. 

The next time out, we headed somewhere more mainstream, 99 Ranch. Here we were able to get pork femurs and back fat right at the butcher counter. 99 Ranch is an interesting experience, by the way.  Feels like a big chain supermarket in most respects, but you get periodic reminders--such as the packaged off-the-rack pork uterus (etc.) in the meat section--that you are, in fact, not in the neighborhood Safeway. I like going there.  Good prices on ITO EN green tea and dungeness crab, etc. etc.  

Among the Wonders of 99 Ranch.  ITO En's Oi Ocha green tea products.  I've had a long-running addiction to the one on the left.  For me, it sits at the pinnacle of non-alcoholic drinks.  

For the past six months, we’ve done most of our meat shopping either at 99 Ranch or at Berkeley Bowl, which is a good example of a non-Asian grocery that is helpful. You just need to find a place with a good butcher counter and ask what they have. Sometimes you can’t get pork femur, for example, but you can substitute backbone or neck bone. Fortunately, all these seemingly unusual cuts of meat are readily available from standard meat suppliers, so when you open a restaurant, it’s a lot easier to get what you need on a regular basis than it may be doing ad hoc retail shopping for your own kitchen.

Next up, meatless soups. . . . But first, here's a photo of our Halloween weekend ramen experiment.  Would be more effective with a cauldron, but still seasonally appropriate in a Calphalon stockpot:

Double, double toil and trouble.  Is making ramen always this spooky?