Umami fermented fish sauce a top pick of chefs from Southeast Asia to Italy and Hong Kong for the ultimate flavour kick
- Literally meaning ‘essence of deliciousness’, umami, or ‘the fifth taste’, has been achieved around the world for millennia by fermenting fish and seafood
- Vietnamese nuoc mam, Malaysian belacan, Filipino bagoong, and Italian colatura are among the fermented seafood sauces that chefs use for a flavour injection
When you nibble a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, bite into a slice of pizza topped with tomato and anchovies or dip your sushi in soy sauce, you’re indulging in the intoxicating “fifth taste”, otherwise known as umami.
It translates from Japanese as “essence of deliciousness” and was first identified by Japanese scientist Dr Kikunae Ikeda as he tucked into a bowl of kombu dashi, or kelp broth.
He discovered that umami is a glutamate, an amino acid that occurs naturally in all of us. In food, the flavour spreads across the tongue – what some call “mouthfeel”. It lasts longer than other tastes and provides the undeniable sensation of making you salivate. In other words, it distils deliciousness.
One food that delivers umami in concentrated form like few others is fermented fish sauce, beloved throughout Asia and around the world.
“Fermentation has been an integral part of many traditional food cultures to develop flavourful foodstuffs,” says Dr Ana San Gabriel, who specialises in umami taste receptors and physiology at food and biotech company Ajinomoto.
The science behind the flavour bomb characteristics of fish sauce is the “controlled process under which proteins from the flesh of fish [myosin, troponin and titin] are broken down to produce multiple umami compounds [peptides and free glutamate] as a result of microbial metabolism,” San Gabriel explains.
