By Wendy Chan
There is plenty of buzz about umami, or better known as the “fifth taste.” With a string of events from the 100th anniversary Umami Symposium in San Francisco to the exquisite Umami dinner at The James Beard House in New York, many conversations among chefs these days are centered around incorporating umami-rich ingredients into their dishes, and how to showcase this much-talked-about fifth taste to sophisticated as well as curious diners.
The Umami dinner at the James Beard House, billed as “A Modern Japanese Degustation”, goes down in my record book as one of the most memorable meals I enjoyed. It was purely umami-licious.
The first course was a feast for the eyes while the taste sensation was teased. It was dramatically served with the room lights dimmed. Lobster and sea urchin with Tosa vinegar gelee and steamed vegetables were beautifully arranged on a Japanese tray, with a flickering tea candle inside an elegant paper-thin daikon lantern. I refused to surrender the lantern after the first course, and I saved it on the table for the rest of evening. A subtle love message was sent by the chef too – two hearts were piped using a red sauce onto the plate, with tiny croutons in each to add a bit of crunchy texture as embellishment.
The soup that followed was a creamy foamy broth with a gorgeous yolk swimming, accompanied by some delicate shiitake mushroom and smoked chicken mousse. This is chef Hunio Tokuoka’s way to demonstrate his superior culinary skills in global cuisine, and a clever illustration of his cooking style.
The third course was a char-grilled Golden-Eyed snapper from Japan, with an abalone sauce that you actually taste the tender abalone strips. It was accompanied by vegetables and edible flowers, simmered in kombu-butter broth – an attempt to push the umami index over the top.
If you are familiar with Wagyu beef, then imagine something that exceeds that in flavor and tenderness. A rectangular plate housed a beef trio dish as the next course. Two pieces of beef, one Miyazaki steak grilled with sukiyaki sauce, another charbroiled dry-aged sirloin, were very distinguished. Yet the surprise came from the small mount of finely diced and well-seasoned rare beef with a bit of kick from fresh wasabi. Paired with Pahmleyer merlot 2005, I thought I died and went to heaven.
No Japanese chef will let a guest leave without some go-han (rice), and chef Tokuoka delighted us with a kombu-broth risotto topped with outrageously large and freshly shaved bonita flakes by a Japanese contraption on display in the reception area.
You do expect to finish on a sweet note, but how about 3 courses of desserts? The first, green tea ice cream with a few tiny mochi lined straight diagonally, with adzuki bean jelly disguised as a slice of cake on the right. The green tea machi flavor, pronounced yet delicate, easily defeat any other green tea ice cream I ever tasted.
A warm mango-cinnamon sweet soup followed, served with fried mango peel. Finally a caramelized sweet potato with Cointreu-honey strings. By that time, I was already in a full food coma.
While umami was first discovered or classified in Japan a hundred years ago, as the fifth taste after sweet, sour, salty and bitter, it was not until recently that food professionals in the US have begun to pay attention to this term or concept, along with toying with kombu, nouc mam (fish sauce) and shiitake mushrooms – all umami-rich ingredients. If you’re interested to learn more, visit www.umamiinfo.com.
