Umami is ineffable. Technically, it's the fifth category of taste, next to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Also technically, umami-rich foods have high amounts of the amino acid glutamate, often giving them a brothy or meaty quality. But spiritually? Spiritually, umami defies categorization.
And while cooking with umami-packed ingredients makes pretty much everything taste better, I've found it also requires a dose of every Type-A home cook's worst nightmare: guesswork.
I'm pretty far from Type A in other realms of my life, but in my early days of learning to cook for myself, I was a recipe-follower to a fault. These are the ingredients that taught me the benefits of exploring more in the kitchen — and how to make literally anything (yes, I said anything) taste better. |
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