What Is Umami Seasoning? Natural Sources and How to Use Them

What is umami?

Umami is one of the five basic tastes, alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter: the savory taste of a good broth, aged cheese or ripe tomato.

Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda identified it in 1908. He traced the savory taste of kombu dashi, the seaweed broth at the heart of Japanese cooking, to glutamate, and he named the taste umami. In 1913 his student Kodama found a second umami compound, inosinate, in dried bonito flakes. In 1957 Kuninaka identified a third, guanylate, in dried shiitake mushrooms (Kurihara, BioMed Research International, 2015).

Those three compounds work as a team. When glutamate is mixed with inosinate or guanylate, the umami taste is far stronger than either one alone. In human taste tests the mixture produced roughly eight times the response of glutamate by itself (Kurihara, 2015). That synergy is why kombu and bonito are cooked together for dashi, and why mushrooms and parmesan taste so good together.

What is umami seasoning?

"Umami seasoning" is a loose label. Depending on the jar, it can mean:

• MSG. Monosodium glutamate is purified glutamate in salt form, the most direct umami seasoning there is. Ikeda patented a way to make it, and the FDA dates commercial production to the year after his discovery. Modern MSG no longer comes from seaweed broth; manufacturers ferment sources like starch, cane or beet sugar, or molasses, much as vinegar or yogurt is made by fermentation.
• Mushroom-based blends. Grocery stores sell seasoning mixes built on ground dried mushrooms, often with salt, chili, onion or herbs.
• Yeast or seaweed mixes. Some blends rely on yeast extract, nutritional yeast or seaweed.

Read the label. Some ingredients, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and yeast extract among them, carry free glutamate of their own. The FDA lets those ingredients appear by name without a separate MSG warning, but it also bars any product that contains them from advertising itself as MSG-free.

Natural sources of umami and how to use them

Many foods are naturally rich in glutamate or the umami nucleotides. Drying, aging and fermenting tend to concentrate glutamate: dried tomatoes, for example, carry several times the glutamate of fresh ones. Glutamate figures below are approximate ranges from the Umami Information Center and vary by sample.

Nutritional yeast is yeast that has been heated so it is no longer active. Cleveland Clinic points to its savory, cheese-like taste as a source of umami, which is why it turns up on so many vegan dishes.

Is MSG safe?

The FDA classifies MSG as "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) when added to food. The agency also points out that tomatoes, cheese and many other foods contain glutamate naturally, and that your body cannot tell the glutamate freed from digested protein apart from the glutamate in MSG, because the molecule is identical.

What about "Chinese restaurant syndrome"? The idea was first described in 1968 after symptoms were reported following a Chinese meal, and most reports since then have been anecdotal (Geha et al., Journal of Nutrition, 2000). Controlled studies have not held it up. In the largest double-blind, placebo-controlled study, 130 people who believed they reacted to MSG were given 5 grams of MSG or placebo. Large doses taken without food produced more symptoms than placebo in some people, but the reactions were not consistent on retesting, were not serious, and did not appear when MSG was taken with food (Geha et al., Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2000).

For scale, the FDA cites a scientific review that tied brief, mild reactions in a small number of sensitive people to doses of at least 3 grams of MSG on an empty stomach. A normal serving of a food seasoned with MSG has under half a gram.

How to make your own umami seasoning

A homemade blend lets you control the salt and skip anything you would rather avoid. This simple version takes five minutes:

1. Grind 1/2 cup dried shiitake (or other dried mushrooms) to a fine powder in a spice grinder.
2. Stir in 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes.
3. Add 1 teaspoon kelp granules.
4. Add 1 to 2 teaspoons fine salt and, if you like, 1/2 teaspoon sugar to round it out.
5. Optional: a pinch of garlic powder, onion powder or black pepper.
6. Store in a sealed jar away from heat and moisture.

Use it like a finishing salt on eggs, popcorn, roasted vegetables, rice and soups. For a salt to mix in, see our guide to Celtic sea salt, and for warm spices that pair well with savory blends, see Kerala spices.

Go easy on the kelp. Seaweed is very high in iodine, and the amount varies widely: whole and sheet seaweeds have been measured from 16 to 2,984 micrograms of iodine per gram, while the adult upper limit is 1,100 micrograms a day from all sources (NIH Office of Dietary Supplements). People with thyroid conditions should ask their doctor before using kelp regularly. Our kelp guide covers this in more detail.

Find it at William's

We carry three of the building blocks for a natural umami seasoning:

• Now nutritional yeast flakes, 10 oz: savory, cheesy flakes for sprinkling straight on food or mixing into a homemade blend.
• Starwest organic Atlantic kelp granules, sold in bulk: a coarse texture that works well in a shaker blend or stirred into soups and beans.
• Starwest organic Atlantic kelp powder, sold in bulk: a fine powder that disappears into dressings, broths and spice mixes.

Kelp is sold by weight, so you can buy a little to try. We don't currently list dried shiitake, miso or MSG online; call the store to check what's on the shelf. If tangy flavors are next on your list, read our guide to what tamarind tastes like.

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