Seaweeds for umami flavour in the New Nordic Cuisine

Abstract

Use of the term 'umami' for the fifth basic taste and for describing the sensation of deliciousness is finding its way into Western cuisine. The unique molecular mechanism behind umami sensation is now partly understood as an allosteric action of glutamate and certain 5'-ribonucleotides on the umami receptors. Chefs have started using this understanding to create dishes with delicious taste by adding old and new ingredients that enhance umami. In this paper, we take as our starting point the traditional Japanese soup broth dashi as the 'mother' of umami and demonstrate how dashi can be prepared from local, Nordic seaweeds, in particular the large brown seaweed sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima) and the red seaweed dulse (Palmaria palmata), possibly combined with bacon, chicken meat or dried mushrooms to provide synergy in the umami taste. Optimal conditions are determined for dashi extraction from these seaweeds, and the corresponding glutamate, aspartate and alaninate contents are determined quantitatively and compared with Japanese dashi extracted from the brown seaweed konbu (Saccharina japonica). Dulse and dashi from dulse are proposed as promising novel ingredients in the New Nordic Cuisine to infuse a range of different dishes with umami taste, such as ice cream, fresh cheese and bread. Herein we review the concept of umami and deliciousness in a historical context and describe recent advances in the scientific understanding of the sensory perception of umami and the involved taste receptors. The primary sti-mulatory agent in umami is the chemical compound glu-tamate, which is found in large amounts in the Japanese seaweed konbu, which is used to prepare the soup broth dashi. We have explored the potential of local Nordic seaweeds, in particular sugar kelp and dulse, for dashi production and have discovered that dulse is high in free glutamate and hence a good candidate for umami flavour-ing. We describe methods by which to optimise the umami flavour using sous-vide techniques for extraction of the seaweeds, and we demonstrate how dulse dashi can be used in concrete recipes for ice cream, fresh cheese and sourdough bread.