Since ancient times, people have re

Since ancient times, people have recognized four basic tastes. One is sour, like a lemon. Another is salty, like potato chips. The third is sweet, like sugar. The fourth taste is bitter, like coffee or unsweetened chocolate.

It wasn’t until the late 1800s in Paris that a famous chef, Auguste Escoffier, made a new discovery about taste. First, he fried beef in a pan at a very high heat until it was brown. Then he added a liquid and browned meat stock wasn’t sweet, salty, bitter, or sour. Escoffier was a chef, not a scientist, but he sure he had found a fifth taste. He used his discovery to create some of his famous sauces.

About 20 years later in Japan, Kikunae Ikeda was eating a bowl of soup. As he ate, he tried to decide what made the soup do delicious. His wife told him now she made it. The basic ingredient was dashi, a stock made with kelp, or dried seaweed. Suddenly, it occurred to him too: three weren’t four tastes. There was a fifth tastes, and this was it-the deep, full tastes in the stock!

Ikeda was a food chemist. He decided to use his knowledge and skills as a chemist. He wanted to know exactly what this fifth tastes was. He went to work in his laboratory and found the answer-glutamate. Glutamate is an amino acid that is produced when living things begin to die. For example, the production of glutamate happens when cheese ages or meat cooks. Its taste is very different from the other four tastes. Ikeda decided to call the taste umami. This comes from a Japanese word that means “delicious.”

Ikeda continued to work with glutamate. He wanted to use this natural amino acid to make food more delicious. He was looking for a way to make umami similar to salt or sugar-an additive to flavor food. Finally, he isolated the glutamate and found that he could add salt (sodium) to it. Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, was the food additive he was looking for. It produced the fifth taste.

Ikeda and another man started a company, Ajinomoto, to make MSG. Soon Ajinomoto was selling MSG all over the world. Today 1.5 million tons of MSG are used every year, and Ajinomoto sells one third of it.

Ikeda’s MSG was a huge commercial success, but some scientists did not believe umami was really a fifth taste. They continued to believe umami was really a fifth taste. They, in 2000, almost 100 years after Ikeda’s discovery, scientists found physical proof. The human tongue contains tiny preceptors, or taste buds, which allow us to tell the difference between tastes. Scientists found they these receptors responded to glutamate in a special way. In fact, they found that the receptors responded in that way only to glutamate, and not to any of the other four tastes.

In turns out that the great French chef Escoffier was right. There are five tastes, not just four. Today, chefs in many parts of the world are using their knowledge if this fifth taste to create a new type of cuisine. The chefs are trying to use less salt and less butter. They are using foods with a lot of natural glutamate. The result is healthy food that is also very tasty. It’s umami