舌头尝到的是辣还是鲜?

在传统认知中，五味是酸甜苦辣咸。而现代医学则认为，我们的舌头只能品尝到酸、甜、苦、咸四味。直到不久前，第五味才在科学世界站稳脚跟。不过这第五味并不是辣而是中国人都非常熟悉、也非常喜欢的“鲜”。英文中没有这个词，现在采用的是日文“鲜”字的罗马拼音UMAMI。

Japan is famous for an immensely rich and varied cuisine. Of course, Japanese food also tastes good. And at the heart of Japanese cuisine is an understanding of Umami.

5th generation chef Murata Yoshihiro explains, along with sweet, salt, sour and bitter, Umami is the 5th element of taste. Accepted by some only at a conceptual level, Murata insists the taste does indeed exist.

"This has been accepted within Japanese culture for a long time, but in Europe and America although the presence of Umami was obviously felt it was not until recently that it has actually been consciously named."

His position is backed by scientific research.

Fushiki Tohru is a professor of nutrition chemistry at Kyoto University. He explains how glutamic acid was first discovered as a constituent element of the umami taste by a chemist at Tokyo University more than 100 years ago.

The Japanese chemist Ikeda Kikunae made the discovery out of curiosity over what it was that made udofu tofu heated in a dashi stock taste so good.

"Despite this it is only very recently that it has been proved scientifically that Umami is a distinct taste in that it can be distinguished in the same way as sweetness, salt, sourness and bitterness. Until then, outside Japan, the existence of Umami as an independent taste was regarded with skepticism and for the most part was disbelieved. Then around 10 years ago it was discovered that there are receptors on an area of the tongue that distinguish Umami. Since then in academic and other circles the idea that Umami exists as an independent taste has spread world wide."

Derek Wilcox is an American chef who has been working at a renowned Japanese restaurant in Kyoto for 3 years.

He believes the reason the Japanese were the first people to identify Umami as an independent taste lies in the country's history.

One significant difference between the development of Japanese and other grand cuisines was a prohibition on eating red meat and an absence of dairy produce in the diet until the middle of the 19th century.

As Wilcox explains, this led Japan's chefs to develop other ways of creating the Umami taste.

"As they developed a grand cuisine and wanted to make everything taste better and taste better and taste better, they were forced to find other ways to increase that Umami that we all crave other than just adding more animal products, other than making a stock from animal products, they had to find different ways."

The most common way of creating Umami in Japanese cuisine is through the use of a stock or broth known as dashi. Usually dashi is made by adding dried skip jack tuna flakes to kelp boiled in water. Kelp generates glutamic acid, a key element in the Umami taste.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.