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11-07-09, 10:24 AM
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#1
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Call me crazy, but why don't remember ever being taught about this part of my sense of taste when I was a kid, in elementary school?
Umami
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Umami, popularly referred to as savoriness, is one of the five generally recognized basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human and animal tongue. Umami (旨味?) is a loanword from Japanese meaning roughly "tasty", although "brothy", "meaty", or "savory" have been proposed as alternative translations. In as much as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar to Brillat-Savarin's concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock.
The umami taste is due to the detection of the carboxylate anion of glutamic acid, a naturally occurring amino acid common in meats, cheese, broth, stock, and other protein-heavy foods. Salts of the glutamic acid, known as glutamates, easily ionize to give the same carboxylate form therefore the same taste. For this reason they are used as flavor enhancers. The most commonly used of these is monosodium glutamate (MSG). While the umami taste is due to glutamates, 5'-ribonucleotides such as guanosine monophosphate (GMP) and inosine monophosphate (IMP) greatly enhance its perceived intensity. Since these ribonucleotides are also acids, their salts are sometimes added together with glutamates to obtain a synergistic flavor enhancement effect.
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~String
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iceaura
Registered Senior User (10,455 posts)
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11-08-09, 02:40 PM
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#4
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Originally Posted by string
Call me crazy, but why don't remember ever being taught about this part of my sense of taste when I was a kid, in elementary school?
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Western science didn't know about it - as a fundamental taste with its own receptors - until just a few years ago.
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The discovery of umami receptors, taste receptors for L-glutamate, using methods of molecular biology is one of the recent highlights of taste research. In 2000, a modified glutamate receptor of the brain was found, the taste-mGluR4. It is a G protein-coupled (metabotropic) receptor. The taste variety of mGluR4 has a truncated N-terminal to which L-glutamate still binds, albeit with reduced affinity. Presumably, therefore, the truncation adapted the receptor to the high glutamate concentration in food (Chaudhari et al., 2000Go). More recently, another umami receptor was discovered. Interestingly, this one is a heteromere built of the G protein-coupled receptors T1R1 and T1R3. In mice this heteromere responds to many amino acids contained in food, but in humans its response is preferentially to L-glutamate and is enhanced by IMP (Nelson et al., 2002Go). Shortly after Nelson et al.'s publication, these results were strongly confirmed by another group (Li et al., 2002Go). The sequencing and functional expression of a human taste receptor for glutamate determined by these studies provides a first molecular basis for Ikeda's pioneering work.
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Orleander
Don't make me use UPPERCASE!! (21,864 posts)
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11-09-09, 01:50 PM
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#8
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Originally Posted by Anti-Flag
Aren't you still making the mistake of looking at a westernised view of the tastebuds?
Umami, the taste you get when biting into a scotch egg. 
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mmmmm, scotch eggs. 
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Michael
kabuki theater (10,239 posts)
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11-09-09, 10:55 PM
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#9
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Originally Posted by superstring01
Call me crazy, but why don't remember ever being taught about this part of my sense of taste when I was a kid, in elementary school?
Umami
~String
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yeah, it's a sense - research into graded potentials discovered it a few years back but Japanese have known about it for a long time.
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