Umami Meaning: The Word, the Taste and How to Describe Flavour

The kanji: delicious plus taste

Umami is made of two parts. Umai is an adjective meaning delicious, tasty, and it can be written 旨い or 美味い. The second part, mi, written 味, means taste or flavour, and appears in words like aji, taste, ajimi, tasting food while cooking, and shumi, a hobby, which is literally a taste for something.

Japanese turns many adjectives into nouns with the suffix mi. Amai, sweet, becomes amami, sweetness. Nigai, bitter, becomes nigami, bitterness. In the same way umai becomes umami, the quality of tastiness. Knowing this pattern helps you understand a whole family of flavour nouns at once.

Umai vs oishii

Both umai and oishii mean delicious. Oishii is the safe, polite, neutral choice for anyone in any situation. Umai is more casual and direct, and traditionally sounds more masculine, although many people of all genders use it among friends, especially with an exclamation: umai!

Umai written 上手い also means skilful, as in e ga umai, good at drawing. The two meanings share a sense of something done well. In polite conversation, including with a chef or host, stick to oishii desu and use umai with friends.

Where the word came from: kombu dashi

In 1908, the Japanese chemist Ikeda Kikunae isolated glutamate from kombu, the kelp used for dashi, and argued that its taste was distinct from the four tastes recognised at the time. He proposed the name umami for it, and his work led to the production of monosodium glutamate as a seasoning.

Later researchers in Japan identified other umami substances: inosinate, abundant in katsuobushi, the dried and smoked bonito used for dashi, and guanylate, found in dried shiitake. Cooks had long combined kombu with katsuobushi, and science later showed that glutamate and these other substances strengthen each other, which is why a combined dashi tastes deeper than either ingredient alone.

Umami took a long time to be accepted internationally as a basic taste, but it is now standard in food science, and the Japanese word is used in English, French, Spanish and many other languages without translation.

• Glutamate, gurutamin-san: kombu, tomatoes, aged cheese, soy sauce, miso.
• Inosinate, inoshin-san: katsuobushi, niboshi, meat and fish.
• Guanylate, guaniru-san: dried shiitake and some other dried mushrooms.

Dashi vocabulary

If umami has a home, it is dashi, the stock at the base of miso soup, noodle broths, simmered dishes and many sauces. Japanese has a precise vocabulary for it. Making dashi is dashi o toru, literally taking dashi, because the flavour is extracted from the ingredients.

Ichiban dashi, first dashi, is the delicate first extraction, used for clear soups. Niban dashi, second dashi, is made by simmering the used ingredients again for stronger, everyday cooking. Awase dashi combines two ingredients, usually kombu and katsuobushi. Many households today use dashi no moto, instant granules, or dashi packs, and that is completely normal.

The basic taste words: amai, karai, suppai, nigai, shoppai

Japanese describes the basic tastes with short, common adjectives. They are among the first food words children learn, and you will hear them constantly in restaurants, supermarkets and cooking shows.

Karai needs special care. Its main meaning is spicy hot, as with chilli or wasabi, but it can also mean salty, especially in western Japan and in the compound shiokarai. If you want to be clear about chilli heat, pirikara, pleasantly spicy, and gekikara, extremely spicy, are common on menus.

Amai also has figurative meanings: a lenient person is amai, and a naive idea is amai kangae. Nigai can describe a bitter memory, nigai omoide. Learning these extensions makes the core words stick.

Richness, lightness and koku

Beyond the basic tastes, Japanese food talk leans heavily on words for richness and lightness. Kotteri describes heavy, rich food such as thick pork-bone ramen; assari and sappari describe light, clean-tasting food. Many ramen shops let you choose between kotteri and assari broths.

Koku is a word for richness, body and depth, and koku ga aru, it has body, is a very common compliment for curry, stew, coffee and beer. Food scientists use the related term kokumi for a sense of richness and lingering depth linked to certain compounds, but in ordinary conversation people rarely say kokumi. Say koku ga aru and you will sound natural.

How Japanese people use umami today

In everyday Japanese, umami appears mostly in cooking and food writing. People say that simmering draws out the umami, that dried ingredients concentrate it, or that a good tomato is packed with it. Supermarket packaging and recipe sites use umami seibun, umami components, and umami ga gyūtto, umami packed in tight.

The word can also be figurative. Umami can mean the profitable or attractive part of something, as in a deal with a lot of umami for one side. The related umai hanashi means a deal that sounds too good to be true, and people warn each other: umai hanashi ni wa ura ga aru, there is a catch behind every sweet deal.

Going beyond oishii

Learners often use oishii for everything. It is never wrong, but combining it with one specific word makes your Japanese sound far more natural and makes the cook happier. Try naming one quality of the food, then giving your overall verdict.

• Texture words: sakusaku, crisp and flaky; mochimochi, chewy and springy; torotoro, meltingly soft; fuwafuwa, light and fluffy.
• Aroma: kaori ga ii, it smells lovely; kōbashii, toasty, roasted aroma.
• Temperature and freshness: atsuatsu, piping hot; shinsen, fresh.
• Balance: amasa to shoppasa no baransu ga ii, the balance of sweet and salty is good.
• Umami: umami ga fukai, the umami is deep; dashi ga kiite iru, the dashi comes through.

A natural pattern is one detail plus oishii: sakusaku de oishii, crisp and delicious, or dashi ga kiite ite oishii desu, the dashi really comes through and it's delicious.