Umami is the Fifth Taste

What is umami?  Umami, meaning savory, or meaty,  is the “fifth” basic taste.  it’s the savory, brothlike taste you experience from foods like parmesan cheese and mushrooms.  The more mature the food the more savory the umami.

In Chinese cuisine its known as xianwei.  It has been as much a staple for Japanese cuisine as seaweed.  

The savory taste results from the presence of glutamates, commonly found in protein-heavy foods such as meats and cheese.  Since umami receptors detect glutamates in food, monosodium glutamate (MSG) often has a hearty fuller taste.

Umami: Cooking with the Fifth Tast” by David Kasabian, explains the benefits of cooking with umami.

“The truth of the matter is foods that have umami we find to be vry delicious and very satisfying.  Foods that don’t have umami we tend to find very insipid and very thing and not very satisfying.  And as a result we eat more food.  So, umami rich food creates satisfaction.”

"Also, umami makes salt taste saltier. So, if you want to reduce the amount of sodium that's in your diet, you make sure you have a lot of umami in your food and you don't have to salt it as much. Finally, umami creates a sensation that chefs call mouth-feel. We tend to think of mouth-feel as the sensation we get from eating fat. So, again, we can reduce the amount of fat that's in our food by making sure that we've got enough umami in that food."