SALTED ANCHOVIES- MAGIC UMAMIBOMBS

Food is our common ground

A universial experience. James Beard

 
Salted anchovies contains a lot of free glutamate, the most important umami substance. This little magic fish is a very important ingredient in mediterranean cuisine, it is used as salt and in addition, you'll get the rich, complex umamitaste infused in your dish. Adding salted anchovies to a dish is an old european way of enhancing umami taste, similar to the use of fish sauce in asian food. And like fish sauce, It's not adding a fishy taste to your dish.

salted anchovies in olive oil, rich in umami!

Many known, and even more unknown mediterranean dishes include salted anchovies: Bagna Caôda is famous piedmontese dip with an abundant amount of salted anchovies.You'll find them as toppings on pizzas and in the pizza sauce, in tomatosauce for pasta. Anchovies will be used in sauces together with capers, tuna, tomatoes, but seldom together with the parmesan cheese. The famous dressing for Ceasars salat contains anchovies and/or worchestershiresauce, the latter beeing an anchovy sauce. The provencal anchoide is another example. As the name imply, this paste includes salted anchovies! 

The use of anchovies as a salty taste enhancer has ancient traditions in Europe.  The reminiscences of content in old emphoras from roman time have been analyzed and findings show they were filled with garum, a precious sauce in ancient Roman and Ottoman Empires, and produced in an almost identical way as todays oriental fishsauce!  For more information about the ancient Roman fish sauce, check this article. 

Enjoy anchovies in your food!

glass of turkish made salted anchovies

GOURMET-SALTING -an easy umami enhancing method

Here's an easy tip for giving  any meat a better taste.

Some claim meat should not be salted prior to preparation like frying, searing or braising. Some claim it should be salted in advance while others say that it does not matter, but research show it does. 

Danske Slagterier (Danish Meat Research Institute) have tested the different methods. Blind testing among professional tasters revealed that beef salted at least 15 minutes prior to searing was regarded as more juicy, tender and tasty than the other samples. They also found that the amount of salt can be reduced by this simple method.  This is good news; less salt in our diet is healthy for us too. 

Thus, gourmet-salting is the easiest way to develop good taste and more umami in meat. You can actually salt any meat once you’ve brought it home and even be confident your meat will be better preserved too.

Gourmet-salting is very easy: Use 3-6g (approx. 1/2 to 1 teaspoon) fine grained salt without iodine pr. 1 kg/ 2,2lb of meat.

·      

•  Rinse, prepare and dry the meat thoroughly with some paper towel before salting.     

• Drizzle salt evenly on the surface of the meat

• Store chilled, but be sure to have the meat at room temperature before you start cooking.

Umami rich dishes and food are most popular!

Why is bacalao, boeuf bourguignon, pizza and sushi popular dishes? Why is the ham from Parma and the spanish Jamon Iberico so celebrated and the parmagiano reggiano cheese so incredibly valued?

Is it only the flavors of a superb thai soup, and the balance between sweetness, sourness, salt and bitterness that makes the soup delicious? Or is it the excellent cooking skills?  Do these factors explain why we crave certain food? The answer is no. One more substance is important, the amount of umami in the dish. Popular food and dishes mentioned above, are all rich in umami and I have yet to find one single recipe from our common ground of famous dishes that does not include ingredients and/or methods enhancing umami taste.When you taste signature dishes of the world, you'll find umami.

FREE GLUTAMATE AND PURINES

If you study a fresh cut of parmigiano reggiano, you can see small liquid pearls on the surface of the cheese. This liquid is pure free glutamate, the most important umami tasting substance, an amino acid present also in soy sauce, cured hams, fish sauce and tomatoes, especially sundried tomatoes.

In addition to the content of free glutamate, where parmagiano reggiano has most of all known cheeses, there are a few other chemicals in food that are responsible for the savoury taste, namely inosinate, adenylate and guanylate.  Even in small amounts they will make a dish taste more delicious as long as the free glutamate is present already.

THE TASTE

With a little training, you'll be able to feel the umami taste as a pleasant savoury sensation in your mouth.  Once identified you’ll learn to taste the difference between a creamy dish from an umami rich dish, the latter having a watery complex mouthfullness that lasts longer than sweet, salt, bitter and sour and fatty. 

A FEW GUIDELINES

To know how to work with umami in your kitchen, you'll need some knowledge of umami enhancing methods and which ingredients and condiments you should choose. Here is a few tips: 

Umami taste is potentially present in protein of foodstuff. The taste develops when proteins are subject to i.e. drying, curing, fermenting,smoking, brining,salting, marinating, braising and cooking.

• Homemade stock is excellent umami and should be used whenever called for in a soup and sauce recipe, and for braising and poaching as well. (Dashi serves the same function in asian cooking.) Stock and dashi cannot be fully replaced by water and industrial made bouillon cubes.

• ·       Gourmet salting is scientifically proved to enhance umami taste in meat. Fresh meat should always be gourmetsalted for better taste.

• Fish sauce, salted anchovies, soy sauce, shrimp paste & sauce, worchestershire sauce are examples of umami bombs. They are often used because of their saltiness, but that is only partly true. They add lots of umami taste, more than you realize. If a recipe calls for one of these condiments, it is critically important to use them, you cannot replace umami by fat or spices, bouillon cubes or any other flavor.

• Meat should be matured naturally, not by mechanical methods.

• ·       Sun riped tomatoes, grown in natural soil in temperate climate are rich in umami, cherry tomatoes have most, romano tomatoes (San Marzano) comes next. Use good quality canned tomatoes if the fresh tomatoes are not in season. Sun dried tomatoes and tomato paste can also rescue a bland tomato dish.

• Fresh cheese has little umami. Matured cheese has more umami with the parmesan on top.

• Dried fungi has more umami than fresh, with shiitake being most precious. Dried shiitake has 10 times more umami substance (guanylate) than any other dried fungi.

• Umami synergy is superbly created when combining proteins from vegetables, fish/seafood and animals in the same dish (beef in oyster sauce, miso soup, thai shrimp soup, spanish paella, norwegian bacalao and japanese sushi. 

Umami dearest!

"Food is our common ground, a universial experience". James Beard   

"Umami" is a japanese term meaning "essential savoury taste " or "essential meatlike taste".
Umami taste, however is universial and can be tasted in many signature dishes from around the world. In sushi, beef with oystersauce, in pasta puttanesca, pizza, hamburgers, bacalao, demi glace (french essence of a complex sauce), in bacon, hams, various cheeses and in fungi and sun riped tomatoes.


The "common ground" in all umami tasting essences, condiments, ingredients, and dishes are the result of a process of denaturated or somehow changed protein chains, forming into smaller amino acids. Free glutamate (GLU og L-glutamate) is the  most present amino acid in most food, and also for bringing to you and me, the savoury taste universally known as umami. But the most interesting aspect of the taste, is when you combine free glutamates with a few other taste components ( known as purines) to create synergistic umami. This blog will deal with that. And thsi is not an asian taste, not european either. Beware, and  stay tuned! 


Umami has a mild, complex taste that lasts longer in the mouth compared to the four other basic tastes, beeing sweet, salt, sour and bitter. The umami taste receptors on our tongue, in the mouth and  in the intestinal tract,  capture the glutamates in a trap, then signalling that important nutrition is on its way. The mouth waters, and thenerve signals go down through thousands of nerves to our stomach and further back into our brain in an area not far from the happiness and sugar centre. So, umami rich food is transforming you into a mouthwatering happy fool, craving for more of the savoury stuff. 

And it starts with breastmilk. Human breastmilk has enough umami to make you an addict, once you identify why you crave certain food. Join me on the journey of umami sensation. You're very welcome to share!

Regards Elisabeth