The Mystery of Taste: Beyond Sweet, Sour, Salty & Bitter
Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio
00:00
The Unpleasant Taste of Bitter
Bitter was discovered a hundred years ago in Japan, but there was this century long delay and the paper that was published in 1909 wasn't translated in English until 2002. It's an amino acid called glutamate that sticks to the receptors in your tongue and in your brain and gives you that kind of brothy, meaty feeling. The Japanese chemist who was trying to isolate that taste used kombu, which is native to Japanese cuisine. He distilled that seaweed and distilled and distilled until a single substance began to crystallize and it's called glutamate. That's what umami taste is.
Transcript
Play full episode
