Umami is the "fifth taste" after salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. Umami translates directly from the original Japanese as "delicious taste" but the dynamic equivalent in English is more along the lines of "pleasant savoury taste"; savoury best capturing what taste, though a bit over-simplified, umami describes. It's a complex flavour; that intense, deep, dark, meaty taste that is found in such diverse foods as seared beef, ripe tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, soy sauce, anchovies, mushrooms, and seaweed. Scientifically, it owes its existence to the presence of glutamic acid in these foods, whether it occurs naturally, or develops during cooking, aging, or fermentation. Just the thought of many of these foods make one's mouth water. While hardly exhaustive, this is a list of umami rich foods, according to umamiinfo.com.
