Estimating the Blast Radius of the Umami Bomb
We need to go savorier.
I consume too much food media, which means certain food writing clichés and phrases get my hackles up like a wild hyena. Toothsome. Sinful. [X] to perfection.
A sensible person would not concern themselves with these things. But I don’t know many sensible people, and I’m less and less sure they exist. Saddled with any consistent input, the human brain will look for things to criticize. If you locked me in a windowless room for a week with nothing but a 2002 issue of Tiger Beat, I would emerge with a fully-formed essay titled “Male Gaze or Male Maze? Tracing Post-9/11 Masculinity through Recursive Hair Performance in Commercial Photos of Josh Hartnett.”
In recent years, my neck fur has been prickling over “umami bomb.” Maybe it’s the cutesiness of the phrase—the assonance and internal rhyme that evoke other queasy food-world diminutives, like “foodie” or “yummy” or “noms.”
Maybe it’s the idea that savory flavor compounds can only be dispensed through the military industrial complex. With umami, there was no arms race—no escalation from umami atlatl to umami bazooka. We started at scorched earth. Fuck up my taste receptors with those GLUTAMATES, boys. I don’t want to be able to taste anything for a week.
Maybe it’s just the intensity of the rise. The phrase “umami bomb” burrowed its way into The Lexicon with all the subtlety of a Dune sandworm. I heard it once, clocked it as odd, then started hearing and reading it everywhere, often in reference to dishes that contained nothing more explosive than soy sauce. It started to seem like more of a social signal than a descriptor—a wink to a server or chef that we, the enlightened ones, knew about the Fifth Taste.™
Before someone sends me a Wikipedia link to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I pulled the Google search trends data for the term and made this chart:
Google Searches for “Umami Bomb,” 2004–21
I find two things surprising about this chart: the early spike in 2007 and the consistent popularity from 2014 through the series peak in 2019. Here’s my best guess at what’s going on with the two most prominent spikes:
December 2007: The Wall Street Journal releases an article on the “obscure culinary concept” of umami and credits chefs such as Jean-Georges Vongerichten with piloting the food world’s first “umami bombs.” The lede treats chicken soup as the poster child for the taste. Not hard to imagine how media critics would respond to that piece were it released today.
September 2019: Raquel Pelzel’s vegetarian cookbook Umami Bomb is released. I haven’t read it! Let me know if it’s any good.
The bottom line: I’m probably going to have to get used to the phrase.
Lately, I’ve been trying to keep more of an open mind about things that aren’t harmful and are just annoying. In practice, this means I have just as many uncharitable thoughts as always, but now chase them with self-reflexive guilt.
This is progress, I think.
In that spirit, I set out this week to estimate the blast radius of the umami bomb—the speed limit of savory—the terminal velocity of taste. In other words, I set out to consume a shitload of monosodium glutamate (MSG).
A quick digression for anyone who still harbors delusions that MSG is “bad for you” (converts can skip the next four grafs): it isn’t.
The whole confused panic can be traced back to a 1968 letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome,” in which a Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok claimed to experience numbing and palpitations after eating at American Chinese restaurants and hypothesized MSG was to blame. Xenophobia and a couple badly designed research studies reinforced that view. Later studies and meta-analyses have repeatedly debunked MSG sensitivity, but the myth persists.1
Part of the reason the myth is so sticky is that a lot of people don’t fully understand what MSG is. In the most literal sense, it’s the sodium salt of glutamic acid—an amino acid present in most foods. You don’t need to shake a bunch of Accent on your food to consume MSG.2 Odds are, you’re already consuming it multiple times a week, if not daily. Glutamic acid is particularly high in Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, oranges, seaweeds, soybeans, cured meats, gluten, tea, oysters, roe, and scallops.
Before someone writes in to tell me they’re sensitive to added MSG, not glutamic acid, the FDA says:
The glutamate in MSG is chemically indistinguishable from glutamate present in food proteins. Our bodies ultimately metabolize both sources of glutamate in the same way.
When you consume added MSG, your stomach almost immediately breaks it down into a sodium ion and a glutamate ion—a glutamate ion that is chemically identical and indistinguishable from the glutamate ions in tomatoes and Parmesan cheese.
Reclaiming the “Umami Bomb”
That’s enough about ions. Let’s talk about risotto. It was my lazy first choice for an umami showcase because I already have an Instant Pot mushroom risotto in the regular dinner rotation.
Yes, I make risotto in an Instant Pot. I don’t even need to plug it in, because it’s powered by your fury.
The goal with this recipe was to include as many glutamate sources as possible while also including as many eaters as possible. As a result, the only animal-derived glutamate on the ingredients list is Parmesan cheese. You can leave it out for a vegan dish—just up the quantities of one of the other umami sources (or add some Accent).
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
Parmesan cheese: Undisputed king of the Costco cheese cooler. You’re going to want both the rind and the “meat” for this dish, so I recommend going with the real deal over the Kraft shaker if you can swing it.3 A one-inch strip of waxy Parm rind is a soup’s best bud. Do not throw our your cheese rinds, friends! Collect them in your #cheesebag and deliver them to me on my birthday. It’s July 5, so you better get snacking.
Kombu: Dried kelp fortified by Hokkaido winters, rendering it as tough as it is delicious. Kombu is the ur-umami, the grande-dame, the Ms. of Ms.G. In 1908, Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda discovered crystallized MSG clinging to dried kombu and coined “umami” as a fifth taste. Imaging discovering a taste! I’ll never do anything that cool, and I’ve been to Winnipeg.
Miso: You can buy a dozen different varieties of this fermented God paste, but if you’re shopping in a non-specialty market in the States, odds are you’ll have a choice between white, yellow, or red. Red will get you the biggest, brassiest flavor payoff, but they’ll all work in this recipe. If you end up with white miso, you can use the leftovers to make one of my favorite cookies.
Tomato paste: Your best bet for adding concentrated glutamate without screwing up the moisture content of your risotto. It looks weird in this picture because I freeze my leftover tomato paste in ice cube trays (#coldtip). If you want to use fresh tomatoes, you can, with one caveat: don’t seed them. The pulp and seeds of the tomato are where the umami happens.
Soy sauce: You can use whatever variety you want, but I prefer light soy over dark for a more neutral flavor boost. If you have tamari, all the better—tamari has a higher concentration of glutamic acid than most other Japanese soy sauces.
Oyster mushrooms: I used these because I’m lazy and already had them in the fridge, but you can use any fresh mushrooms you want in this recipe. Shiitakes, which naturally have more glutamic acid than other shroom types, would be a great choice—but portobellos, chanterelles, or even white button mushrooms (or a mix) are all fine. Mushrooms are especially well-suited to this experiment because they have a second source of umami: guanosine monophosphate (GMP), an amino acid that enhances the umami punch of glutamic acid in a #synergy that would make any Six Sigma alum moist.
Note: I like to rinse my mushrooms whole in a salad spinner and then spin them dry before slicing. The people who tell you not to wash mushrooms are dirt-guzzlers, and you do not need to listen to them.
Dried mushrooms: Why use dried and fresh? For starters, dried mushrooms are just convenient—they keep in the pantry forever, and you can do double-duty making mushroom stock while you rehydrate them. But some mushrooms are also just hard to find fresh. Porcini mushrooms have an intense, humid earthfunk I adore, but I rarely see fresh ones in the store. Dried, on the other hand…I can find those at the Westport Sunfresh just as easily as at the Chinatown Food Market (though you’ll get much more for less at the latter).
…to the recipe!
Instant Pot4 “Umami Bomb” Risotto
300 grams mixed fresh mushrooms, cleaned and thinly sliced
40 grams dried mushrooms (a mix is fine; include some porcini if you can find them)
1 strip kombu (mine was about 1.5” wide by 5” long)
3 cups water
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 shallot, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup arborio rice, unrinsed
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon miso
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1/2 cup dry vermouth (or any dry white wine)
1 2” hunk of Parmesan rind
1 teaspoon kosher salt (yes, really)
1 ounce grated Parmesan
Minced chives for garnish (optional)
Add three cups of water, dried mushrooms, and kombu to a saucepan and set over medium heat. Monitor and adjust heat so that the water maintains the baaaarest of simmers while you prep the remaining ingredients.
Turn InstantPot to the sauté function and add one tablespoon of the olive oil. Add mushrooms and kosher salt and sauté until the mushrooms are well browned and most of the liquid has evaporated.
Remove mushrooms from the InstantPot and set them aside for now. Add remaining tablespoon of olive oil to the Pot, followed by the shallot and garlic. Sauté about 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Add arborio rice and continue to sauté, stirring frequently, until the outer edges of the grains start to turn transparent (~3 minutes). Add tomato paste and miso and stir until incorporated.
Add vermouth and scrape the bottom of the Pot with a wooden spatula while it bubbles. With a slotted spoon, remove the dried (and now rehydrated!) mushrooms from the saucepan. Chop finely and add to the Instant Pot.
Transfer the kombu and two cups of the mushroom-infused broth to the Instant Pot, supplementing with more water or wine if you come up short. Toss in the Parmesan rind and soy sauce, add a little more kosher salt and pepper to taste, and seal the Instant Pot for pressure cooking. Cook on low pressure for 7 minutes with a quick release. If the risotto looks too soupy, switch on the sauté function and stir until it reaches your desired texture. If it looks too dry, add some of the reserved mushroom stock or steaming water. Fold in Parmesan, ladle into bowls, and top with more grated Parm and chives.
The finished risotto should be creamy, savory, earthy, dusky—and not especially salty. That’s the umami promise.
What else I’m writing
I have a feature out in The Pitch this month on the cultural rise of a different kind of bomb—Da’Bomb—a deliberately painful hot sauce made in KC. I have a mostly full bottle of this sauce in my fridge now, and I already resent it. Send ideas for how to use it that don’t involve me having violent diarrhea in public. Been there, done that.
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Here’s one of the better journalistic attempts to unpack the controversy and competing studies for anyone who’s still unconvinced / doesn’t want to read anything with a “Methodology” section.
But you can, and I do.
I love freshly grated Parmesan more than any of my imaginary children, but I’m not going to sneer at Big Parma. Powdered Parm is its own food with its own distinct pleasures and applications. If I’m eating a greasy slice of pizza, I’m reaching for that packet of powdered cheese dust and cellulose every time.
(You can make it in on the stovetop just as well, of course, but you’ll need to use more broth and experiment with the timing a bit.)