Translating umami

The charm of Japanese cuisine has conquered the world, and continues to do so. It’s not by chance that last December, Unesco included washoku – the traditional Japanese cuisine – in the World’s Heritage list. During a series of events in Milan, taking place between February 14th and March 13th, the Maff – the Japanese Ministry for Agriculture, forests and fishery – is illustrating the beauty of a nation that uses its natural resources, its seasonality and its art of hospitality as the secrets of its cultural tradition.

These elements were finely expressed during an event which took place in Milan, together with master Akira Oshima, a real authority on Japanese high cuisine. Since 2006, Oshima is committed in spreading the Japanese food culture, a commitment thanks to which he was awarded with the title of Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands. The event, organised inside Milanese cooking school InKitchen, represented a unique chance to understand and deepen the knowledge of Kaiseki Ryori, Japanese high cuisine, and the art of hospitality connected to this.

This is more than simple traditions, it’s a cultural heritage rooted in the 16th Century and which was initially linked with tea ceremony. Kaiseki is based on an essential concept, that is to say umami. In the kitchen, 4 commonly classified flavours exist: sweet, savoury, sour and bitter, which are common to all gastronomic cultures. Only the Japanese one has classified umami, through detailed scientific studies, which in Italian is translated more or less with "squisitezza" (deliciousness).

As finely explained and demonstrated in a two-hour-long lesson by chef Oshima, umami is obtained thanks to the perfect harmonization of the ingredients that, by nature, enclose it. It was important, in this sense, being able to follow the chef as he prepared a basic kaiseki dish, namely dashi, a soup created by combining kombu sea weeds, katsuobushi (dried and fermented tuna flakes), niboshi (dried sardines) and shiitake dried mushrooms. Each one of these four ingredients contains inosinic acid, guanylate or glutamic acid. All these elements generate the umami flavour and can be found in some Italian ingredients such as beef and veal meat, carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes…

Deliciousness, however, is not only the right balance between inosinic acid, guanylate or glutamic acid but has an important value for the health of our body. Kaiseki cuisine, in fact, is based on cutting and boiling ingredients that do not contain any fatty element, such as oil or butter, because they are rich in umami. Beside boiling, and therefore beside the different ichiban eniban variations of dashi, sashimi is also at the heart of the Kaiseki Ryori cuisine – in this case, both good raw materials and technique, in fact, the art of knowing how to prepare and cut fish, are important.

The beauty admired in the small aperitif prepared by Oshima at the end of the lesson was in the gesture through which, each time, he illustrated the story of his nation and his territory too. The kombu sea weeds, a citrus fruit such as yuzu or the fresh wasabi root represent that part of Japan that bestows deliciousness in the dish. It is indeed the search for a definition of umami that guided the comments made by the audience throughout the event. The common grammar of Italian flavour could not offer satisfying similes, though umami will surely remain, at least in the personal baggage of the person writing this article, like and emotion given by satisfaction and stupor, the offspring of “delicious” food.