In search of balance

Spanish chef Jordi Roca fires up a portable wood-chip burner as an audience of flavourists looks on, gripped by the plumes of smoke wafting over his elaborately prepared Mediterranean vegetables. Delicate balls of green, purple and orange purée, nestling in the anchovy-infused juice of roasted red peppers, and perfumed with olive wood smoke, the dish is not only visually dramatic but also makes an impact during tasting.

"It's very rich, it's more than umami," proclaims Givaudan's head of flavour creation technology, Michael Peters.

It was an inspiring start for the experts who gathered over three days in Hong Kong to brainstorm new sources of umami, the trendy 'savoury' taste featuring increasingly on menus around the world. They also wanted to discover the path to kokumi. A lesser known term, this is not so much a taste, as "a perception of richness and balance", according to Givaudan.

Despite their somewhat mysterious Japanese names, both could be crucial to future product development in the global food industry. Incorporating umami tastes in certain flavours is increasingly seen as a way to compensate for lower salt content in processed foods. Triggering kokumi may go further, recreating the flavours of rich foods without the much-maligned butter and cream.

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) has long been the easy route to umami. But with its negative connotations for many consumers in the West, Givaudan is keen to access alternative, natural sources of the fifth taste.

Away from salt and MSG ​

"We're moving away from salt and MSG, which is like low-definition TV, and going towards high definition," said Dr Laith Wahbi, global product manager for Givaudan's savoury division.

Leading chefs don't often refer to 'umami' but they have unknowingly been using this taste for years. Alvin Leung, the chef behind Michelin-starred Bo Innovation in Hong Kong, says that though MSG is still widely used in restaurants around China, its use has limits. "I don't have anything against it but I like to create extreme flavours. MSG tends to make everything taste the same."

Leung showcased many traditional Chinese foods that are naturally rich in umami taste. Master stocks made with dried scallop and shrimp are the base for wonton and noodle soups, and trigger a predominantly umami taste. Salted Chinese ham is another stock ingredient and umami enhancer.

But though umami is most commonly associated with Asian cuisine, foods from around the world can activate strong umami taste too. Top Brazilian chef Alex Atala introduced his country's traditional 'aged butter' butter that is left in the sun for several weeks - as "pure umami". Roca, who works at Spain's El Cellar de Can Roca, currently number four on the San Pellegrino World's 50 best restaurants list, cooked tuna in garum, a fermented fish sauce common in Roman times. In those days it was made from the intestines of small fish, macerated in salt and cured under the sun for up to three months. The result: a fermented mixture "loaded with umami", according to Peters.

The chefs also proved that umami is not only present in the staples of fine dining parmesan cheese, truffles and seared steak but can be found in a wide range of vegetables including black kale, tomatoes, and onions.

Umami taste​

Research in recent years shows that umami is triggered by amino acids called glutamates, a high concentration of which is found in those vegetables and many other plants. Green tea, seaweed and mushrooms are all bursting with glutamates. The umami taste is further stimulated when these ingredients are fermented, pickled, or roasted, processes that appear to boost the levels of key amino acids.

Much rests on the cooking technique too, says Matthew Walters, group leader for culinary application in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. He pointed to Roca's red pepper juice. The chef first blackened the red peppers using a blow torch and then placed them under a broiler, slowly turning them until fully roasted. The soft peppers were then wrapped up tightly and strained to collect the juice or essence of these rich flavours.

Roca also roasted a variety of other vegetables including green peppers, aubergines and tomatoes, triggering an intense flavour from the burning of the skin. These vegetables were then puréed before being frozen in a mould. Then, he dropped the frozen vegetable balls into an alginate gel. After the liquid inside the gel exterior had defrosted, the purée balls went into a dryer for up to four hours, further concentrating the flavours.

"The processing of the pepper is definitely something we want to look into. The burning of the skin has lots of sweetness coming from it, and a richness and complexity. You would never expect it [umami] to be found in this vegetable but look at the cooking technique," said Walters.

Atala also highlighted the umami note in roasted vegetables in his 'roasted vegetable tears', a frothy, apple green liquid made from vegetables roasted with clarified butter and barbecued. "You always think of the Maillard reaction as being associated with meat, and that vegetables have little flavour," he said, as reactions from the tasters clearly refuted that theory.

Kokumi flavours​

Givaudan, now ready to start building more ingredients with umami taste into flavours, wants to develop kokumi flavours too. The first task is to devise a good definition. "Kokumi has been a buzz word in the industry for 10 years now. But it is not well known," said Peters. He describes it as a feeling or perception of richness, fullness and complexity in food.

Givaudan's partner chefs had other ways of describing it. "I'm having a lot of fun interpreting it," said Leung. "Umami is a sense of comfort while kokumi is a sense of indulgence," he suggested.

Atala attempted an alternative explanation. "Spaghetti in tomato sauce is very umami but you need to eat a nice portion. On the other hand, you always eat small sushi, because it's kokumi."

However it comes to be defined, Givaudan believes kokumi has significant potential to transform food products. "There's a growing trend towards more authentic food. We're thinking about how we can take industrialised food and move it closer to the kind of food you eat in a restaurant or the food made by your mother or grandmother. Kokumi allows us to get very close," said Walters.

Like the dishes created to reveal umami, kokumi dishes were also modern variations of old recipes. For Roca, kokumi needs to have both fat and protein as a minimum. His Comté soup was based on onion soup, a classic, but served as a broth made with rich, creamy Comté cheese and accompanied by a concentrated, sweet onion sauce, the result of almost an entire day's cooking. A selection of herbs, nuts and Amontillado sherry added still more flavour to the dish. Flavourists described the result as kokumi because of the complexity coming from the 'bite' of the cheese, combined with the sweetness of the onion.

Paul Virant, chef at Vie Restaurant in Chicago, and self-proclaimed "old-school chef" because of his fondness for traditional techniques such as pickling, fermenting and canning, combined umami-rich pickled ramps, a wild leek native to the Appalachia mountains, with crispy, oven-baked chicken skin.

"For me, the ramps give the umami taste, with the sweet, fermented, pickled note, while the chicken skin adds complexity," commented flavourist Ann Martin. Despite its fundamental role in food, taste has taken second place to aroma for flavour developers. That's because flavour perception comes predominantly from aromas roughly 90%, say experts so flavour houses have tended to leave taste aside. This is changing, however.

More complex tastes ​

"As customers are asking for more low-salt and low-MSG products, we have to think more about taste," said Wahbi. "But the taste business is still relatively new. For example, we've been using salt for thousands of years but we still don't know how the salt receptor works."

By investigating the flavours created by the world's top chefs, the company hopes to be able to build more complex tastes in manufactured foods. In a first step, Givaudan's internal chefs created a barbecue seasoning containing its chicken enhancer flavour, inspired by Virant's crispy chicken skin. Roca's Comté soup led to an in-house carbonara sauce.

Turning these leads into marketable flavours will take time, typically around two years. Some of the innovative cooking techniques pose problems for industry. Smoke ingredients, for example, need to be declared on product labels, making this a no-go area for European markets. But the company has plenty of leads to follow up on, even without Roca's wood chip aromas. As Walters says, the challenge is to see "how close we can move the industrial sphere back to the kitchen".