When I compare Japanese foods and American foods, I always feel the big difference between those two cuisines is umami flavor. Umami is one of the five basic tastes, sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness and umami. According to Umami Information Center, “Umami is a general term used mainly for substances combining the amino acid glutamate, and/or the nucleotides inosinate and guanylate, with minerals such as sodium and potassium.”

American people are not good at using umami flavor when cooking. A lot of dishes in the US lack umami flavor while Japanese foods have a lot of umami. I always feel Japanese foods are more delicious than American foods in general. According to my Japanese experience, umami is like the bass in music which functions as a foundation of overall music. You would feel that something is missing without enough umami flavor.

I wondered what foods have much umami flavor generally and I checked the statistics about umami ingredients and made a figure. 3 main substances for umami are glutamate, inosinate and guanylate. Using the statistics from Umami Information Center, I made a graph below to show how much of the each substance the foods have. I calculated the average for the foods that have a range of substance by adding the lowest and the highest number and divide the sum by two. Also, “Kombu” in the figure below is calculated by averaging the data of Rausu kombu, Ma kombu, Rishiri kombu, Hidaka kombu, and Naga kombu.











Here is the ranking of 10 foods based on the amount of umami substances in descending order.

1st Kombu

2nd Parmesan cheese

3rd Dried shiitake mushroom

4th Soy sauce

5th Nori

6th Nampla

7th Dried tomatoes

8th Oyster sauce

9th Anchovies

10th Katsuobushi

Summary

Kombu is the king of umami ! I use kombu a lot when I cook. I love kombu. I did not know that there were a lot of umami substances in parmesan cheese, which was surprising for me especially since I didn’t like the smell or taste of parmesan. Soy sauce is at the 4th in the ranking. Soy sauce can be used for almost any meal in my opinion. When I feel that something is missing in American foods, I often put some soy sauce in the foods, which sometimes makes the foods taste better. It does not work all the time. But, a lot of umami substances in soy sauce help the meal to have more delicious flavor. Please try it if you have the chance！





