Eat Out Eat Well

Food for Fun and Thought

What The Heck Is Umami?

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Simple answer:  The fifth basic taste (the other four are sweet, salty, sour and bitter).  It term comes from the Japanese words for “essence” and “delicious,” and its taste is often described as savory.

It can be difficult to really identify umami – which is actually what caused its discovery more than a century ago.

A Japanese chemist couldn’t figure out  what gave his dashi (Japanese seaweed soup) such a delicious taste. With testing, his laboratory found out that glutamic acid (glutamate) was what was responsible for the hard to identify taste in his soup. Although his discovery was published in a Chemical Society of Tokyo journal in 1908, umami wasn’t accepted as the fifth taste until 2002 when glutamate taste bud receptors were identified.

What Makes Gives Umami Its Taste?

The glutamate that is responsible for umami is an amino acid that is found in many foods, from meat to vegetables.  When glutamate becomes “unbound,” or free from proteins — like when oysters are steamed, red wine ages, or soy sauce ferments —  it reacts with taste bud receptors to make food umami, or “delicious.” When a dish has more than one umami producing food in it the effect can multiply, making something really, really delicious.

What Foods Have Umami?

Many of the foods that we eat every day are rich in umami like shellfish, fish, cured meat, mushrooms, ripe tomatoes, spinach, and certain cheeses, red wine, and fermented foods.  Our first taste of umami is often breast milk.

The taste of umami is subtle.  It blends well with other tastes helping to expand and round out flavors.  Most people don’t recognize the savory taste of umami even when they are eating foods that are rich in it  — they are just enjoying its “deliciousness.”

Dean & Deluca’s Umami Paste, shown in the photo, is a puree of tomato, garlic, anchovy paste, black olives, balsamic vinegar, porcini mushrooms, parmesan cheese, olive oil, and just a touch of sugar and salt – a combination of a number of umami rich foods.   Directions say it can be used in sauces, gravies, and risottos; added to pastas, soups and stews; or smeared on fish, meat or vegetables.

Pesticide In Your Food – Or Not

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What has happened to the iconic apple?  According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the apple is the produce item with the greatest amount of pesticide residue.

EWG’s 2011 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce lists the Dirty Dozen, or the produce with the most pesticide residue (which they suggest buying organic), and the Clean Fifteen, the produce with the least residue.

Dirty Dozen 

  1. Apples
  2. Celery
  3. Strawberries
  4. Peaches
  5. Spinach
  6. Imported Nectarines
  7. Imported Grapes
  8. Sweet Bell Peppers
  9. Potatoes
  10. Domestic Blueberries
  11. Lettuce
  12. Kale/Collard Greens 

Clean Fifteen

  1. Onions
  2. Sweet Corn
  3. Pineapples
  4. Avocado
  5. Asparagus
  6. Sweet Peas
  7. Mangoes
  8. Eggplant
  9. Domestic Cantaloupe
  10. Kiwi
  11. Cabbage
  12. Watermelon
  13. Sweet Potatoes
  14. Grapefruit
  15. Mushrooms

Food As Love, Joy, And Energy

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The other night I went to a talk and book signing by Lisa Oz (married to Dr. Oz), for her new book, US:  Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most.  During the course of the evening there was a lot of discussion about the healing power of energy.

As a nurse I began to think about how nurses use the power of touch – the “laying on of the hands” – to help their patients.  I believe that this is also true for any parent who uses a gentle touch or a hug to convey energy and healing to a child – or for other healers who appropriately and with discipline use the power of touch and energy transfer for healing purposes.

As a nutritional counselor I started to think about the energy we gain from both food and the act of eating.

We Get Energy From Food And From Eating, Cooking, And Sharing

Food supplies calories and a calorie is a quantifiable, measurable unit of energy.

But food – and the act of eating and sharing – supplies energy in another unquantifiable way, too. Think about the energy you can get from sitting around the kitchen table hashing out issues – over food —  or the great feeling to be had after sharing a phenomenal meal with someone special. What about that very special jolt of love and energy you get when you cook or share something as special as a homemade cookie with your child?

As Craig Claiborne, restaurant critic,  food writer, and former New York Times food editor said in Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer: “Cooking is at once child’s play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.”

 

 

Ouch, I Cut Myself: 5 Knife Safety Tips

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Do your hands look like they’ve been holding onto barbed wire after a weekend filled with some heavy-duty cooking?  From Chow and Jeffrey Elliot, coauthor of the Complete Book of Knife Skills, here are five knife safety tips to help your hands ready for a hand lotion commercial rather than one for antiseptic and bandaids.

Five Tips:

  1. Don’t wear jewelry in the kitchen – your knife can get caught on a ring or its handle hung up in a bracelet.
  2. Make sure your knife is visible – how many times have you tossed it into the sink where it gets covered up by dirty dishes and pots and pans?  You don’t know who is going to reach into the sink — stick a hand in and whoops!!!
  3. Don’t walk around your kitchen with a knife in your hand.  If you do — don’t hold it in your dominant hand because if you slip and start to fall the tendency is to reach out to grab onto something or to break your fall with that hand.  Bad news if you have a sharp knife in it.  Hold it in your less dominant hand with the point down and the blade facing backwards.
  4. When you hand a knife to someone it should be presented with the handle facing him or her so the handle can be grabbed.  The best way to hand off a knife is to put it down with the handle facing toward the other person. If you can’t put the knife down, still offer it to the other person with the handle of the knife, not the blade, facing him or her.
  5. Make sure your knife is sharp.  A dull knife is a dangerous knife because your have to force it through food.  A sharp knife cuts cleanly and safely.