I read about umami a while back, but then I never heard another peep out about it. However, this week’s Washington Post has an article entitled Umami Dearest that goes a more in depth than the stuff I had read last year. It also sites where the original research came from.
Umami got a big boost in the Western world early in 2000, when scientists at the University of Miami discovered a specific taste receptor for glutamates on the human tongue. That made believers out of a lot of skeptics. And just this year, in the March issue of the research journal Nature, scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California at San Diego and the National Institutes of Health reported their discovery of a taste receptor that is sensitive to several of the amino acids found in proteins, not just glutamic acid.
