What are the basic tastes? sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and the 5th basic taste Savory. Discovered in Japan, it was called Umami or "pleasant savory taste." unlike other tastes, it can be detected by tastebuds at all places on the tongue. There are even Umami receptors in the stomach. Besides its broth or meat flavor, it is long lasting, it triggers salivation, and it produces a coating sensation over the tongue. There is a boat-load of science behind this, like this article, but only a handful of things you need to know.

Umami is produced from 2 types of molecules glutamate, derived from protein, and nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. If you are cooking for humans, or dogs, the umami produced by glutamate is 7 times stronger if nucleotides are present. This is called synergism and you can take advantage of this in your cooking. If you are cooking for rodents, don't worry about it because their tastebuds are different.

By knowing just a little bit about Umami, you can improve your cooking, and you can cut large swaths at parties of wannabe foodies with your linguistic Umami scimitar.

Where does Glutamate come from? The big player is Kombu (seaweed) but other notables are, fish sauce, soy sauce, Worcester sauce, anchovies, shrimp, tomato, aged cheese, potato, carrot, onion, celery, green tea, garlic, cured ham, and egg yolk.

Where do you get the nucleotides? Fish, dried mushrooms, tomatoes, chicken, pork, and beef. Note that tomatoes are in both categories.

What else do you need? Salt! There is a range of saltiness that maximizes umami; too much, or too little, decrease umami.

So how do I put this to use? Easy, just include some umami ingredients in each dish. You are already doing it but don't realize it; for example, have you ever made a beef stew? The vegetables provide glutamate and the beef provides nucleotides.

Here are some ingredients that can turn your food into an Umami bomb.

1. Tomato paste. Put this into a ziplock, squeeze out the air, roll it so that the paste is in a log then freeze it. Add a quarter size chunk in any sauce.

2. Buy tomato paste in a tube.

3. Always have Worcester sauce ready

4. Stack strips of bacon and wrap em in plastic wrap and freeze. for a TBS of bacon bits just slice off the end and add to a sauté

5. Get some high quality fish sauce like this one Red Boat fish sauce

6. Get this Japanese soup stock

7. Get Trader Joes Umami in a tube

8. Dried shiitake mushrooms