"When I cook at home, I don't use too much salt, cream, cheese, or oily sauces and dressings," writes chef and author Sonoko Sakai. "I use dashi. It's the fragrant stock that forms the base of miso soup and seasoning for many Japanese dishes. The most popular ingredients for making dashi are dried bonito flakes and konbu seaweed. When you combine konbu and bonito flakes, the natural occuring amino acids in the konbu and bonito flakes have a synergistic effect on the umami scale."
And when you add dried shitake mushrooms to the bonito and the konbu, Sakai says by phone from Seattle, the umami does more than triple in taste, it "accelerates."
"I want all three amino acids to react to each other and give the deepest flavor it can attain," Sakai explains. "If a food has any protein in it, you have a way of adding umami flavor to your food. It's just more subtle."
Umami is the so-called fifth taste, after sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. The word is derived from delicious and scientists recently "discovered" it; the Japanese have known it for centuries. Umami forms the taste basis of the best beloved Japanese cooked foods. Sakai will show how to make dashi and shio-koji in a March 29 umami workshop at SHED and will showcase those flavors at a March 30 dinner she's cooking with Seattle chef Mutsuko Soma.