Why Seaweed is the Secret Ingredient (Hint – It’s the Umami)

ALTHOUGH IT MAY SEEM LIKE A NEW PHENOMENON, UMAMI IS A TASTE THAT HAS BEEN ENJOYED IN EAST ASIA FOR MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS.
Asian Seaweed Salad
WHAT IS UMAMI?
Umami (pronounced u-ma-mi) is one of the five basic tastes, joining sweet, salty, sour and bitter. While we as human beings have developed to sense danger from sour or bitter foods, and energy from sweet foods, umami serves as a signal to the body that we have consumed protein. Sensing umami triggers the secretion of saliva and digestive juices, facilitating the smooth digestion of protein.

WHAT DOES UMAMI TASTE LIKE?
Umami is a naturally occurring flavour enhancer, roughly meaning ‘deliciousness’ in Japanese. It is used to describe the pleasant savoury taste found in mushrooms, parmesan, and of course; Seaweed. Seaweeds, and in particular Kelp, are an excellent source of glutamates, which are amino acids that react with receptors on the tongue to create the umami taste.
Umami was discovered in 1908 by a Japanese professor, Kikunae Ikeda, who was determined to find out what gave his seaweed soup its intense, savoury flavour. He succeeded in isolating this flavour from the kelp-based dashi and named it Umami. Ikeda was keen to commercialise this extraordinary taste, and quickly found a way to combine the glutamates with sodium, to form Monosodium Glutamate, also known as the infamous flavour-enhancer, MSG.
HOW CAN I GET THAT UMAMI TASTE?
Seaweeds (especially dried) are a condensed natural source of umami and are a fantastic way to naturally add that elusive umami flavour into your cooking. Adding dried seaweed flakes into dishes such as broths, soups and stews seems to be the most efficient way to extract umami flavour at home but even the simple addition of some fresh seaweed to a dish can up the umami and therefore overall taste.

New York Times

When food obsessives announce that they have discovered a delicious new thing to eat, generally the first or second thing they’ll tell you is the secret ingredient or special technique that makes it possible. These bleats of discovery can be exciting, at least for those of us who thrill to the sense of opportunity afforded by the next new thing in food. Cooking, after all, is alchemy, the transformation of base materials into something valuable and rare. Who wouldn’t want to know the latest incantations?

I use dulse to impart flavor to my cooking, with no one the wiser.
But it can be equally magical sometimes, particularly in restaurants, to eat in ignorance and bliss, to not be told anything at all about the food on your plate — unless of course you are a food obsessive and need to know why it tastes so good. So it was on a recent night when I ate a little packet of bluefish steamed in red chard at Houseman, the Manhattan restaurant of the chef Ned Baldwin. Let me be clear right from the start: Steamed bluefish was not a promising order. People in restaurants tend to like their fish crisp at the edges, at the very least, not steamed. They like it white-fleshed and flaky, not dark and oily, beneath a soft carapace of vegetable matter.

But Baldwin’s fish was fantastic, almost exploding with flavor: briny, buttery-rich, silky-salty, with a powerful roundness barely checked by the sweetness of the chard that surrounded it. Its preparation haunted me for days, and eventually I broke down and asked Baldwin how he made it. “It’s dulse butter that does it,” he said, laughing: a compound of unsalted butter and the ground, dried sea lettuce that has been harvested on the coast of Ireland and the shores of the North Atlantic for centuries (the word itself is Gaelic in origin). He said he smears each fillet with the stuff before wrapping it in the chard and cooking it slowly in the oven, flipping the packets often, to keep the meat moist.

Photo

CreditGentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.
I started cooking with dulse all the time. Particularly now, when the farm stands near my home are bleak and largely empty, I use dulse (and butter too) to impart big flavor to my cooking, with no one the wiser. I use it as Baldwin does, to anoint fillets of cod and tautog, porgy and weakfish. I use it as a dipping sauce, for steamed clams, and as a medium in which to warm bay scallops before serving them with toast. And I love it particularly in this chowder of root-cellar vegetables, clams and fish, one of the easiest and best things to cook for a winter weekend meal. Using a dulse butter at the base of the soup, for the fat in which I sauté the vegetables before deglazing them, makes each individual flavor in the resulting chowder pop, distinctly and with bright effect, from carrot to leek, parsnip to potato, bacon to clam to scallop to fish.

And I think there is no reason to explain to anyone why this is the case, how the powdered seaweed acts as a flavor enhancer, how it contains a natural version of monosodium glutamate, how it’s harvested off rocks at the bottom of the tide: dulse, Palmaria palmata, bounty of the sea. In part that is because I prefer the magic of the meal to the explanation of the trick that makes it. And in part it is because like a lot of us I cook for children and sometimes people who act like children, for those who quail at the new, at the odd, at the unfamiliar, the poorly branded, the strange. Seaweed people know this well. There’s no reason to court questions. They don’t say they cook with dulse. They just cook.