In 1985, the biochemist Kikunae Ikeda’s discovery of glutamic acid as the source of the savouriness he detected in kombu dashi was finally given an English name: umami. The translation was controversial among food scientists — ‘deliciousness’ is a subjective claim to make for a chemical compound — but it was also inevitable. The concept needed a name Western food culture could use, and ‘fifth taste’ was too clinical to travel.
Travel it did. By the 2010s, umami had become the most successful single concept exported from Japanese food culture to the global cooking conversation. Restaurants, product labels, food writers, cooking shows — all deployed it, with varying degrees of precision, to indicate a quality of depth, of savouriness, of the particular satisfaction that comes from food that lingers on the palate.
What happened to dashi in this process is instructive. Dashi — the stock made by steeping kombu kelp and katsuobushi (dried, fermented tuna) in near-boiling water for a few minutes — is the primary vehicle for umami in Japanese cooking. It is extraordinarily simple to make: two ingredients, fifteen minutes, nothing simmered or reduced or clarified. It is also extraordinarily difficult to make well, in the sense that the quality of the kombu matters enormously, the temperature matters, the timing matters, and the difference between good dashi and excellent dashi is immediately perceptible to anyone who has tasted both.
Western food culture largely absorbed the concept of umami and largely ignored dashi. This is not surprising — concepts travel faster than techniques, and techniques that require specific ingredients travel slower still. But it produced a curious situation: a generation of cooks who understood, at least rhetorically, the importance of umami, but who reached for Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan rinds, and mushroom powder rather than the substance that most precisely expressed it.
The chefs who worked directly with dashi — Heston Blumenthal’s team at The Fat Duck, René Redzepi at Noma, later a wave of Japanese-trained cooks opening restaurants in European cities — found that it changed not just the flavour of their cooking but its architecture. Dashi-based broths and sauces require less fat, less salt, less reduction to achieve depth. They are, in a technical sense, more efficient. In a culinary sense, they suggest a different relationship between ingredient and technique — one in which restraint and precision take the place of accumulation and force.
“Dashi teaches you to listen,” says chef Yoshiko Tanaka, who trained in Kyoto and now cooks in Paris. “The technique is almost nothing. The attention is everything. If you are not paying attention, you miss the moment, and the moment does not come back.” She is speaking of the precise window — a matter of seconds — in which the kombu reaches its optimal extraction point and must be removed from the water. Miss it and the dashi becomes bitter. Hit it and you have something clear, savoury, oceanic, specific, and unlike anything else in cooking.
That specificity is, perhaps, the deepest lesson dashi has to teach. In an era of technique-as-spectacle, of cooking that announces its complexity, dashi is a reminder that the most profound flavours are often the most naked. You cannot hide behind it. You cannot correct it at the end with butter or acid. You either paid attention, or you didn’t.
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