The Chemist Who Pulled Umami Out of Kelp

Kikunae Ikeda, a chemistry professor at Tokyo Imperial University, sat down to dinner in 1907 and noticed that the dashi his wife had made — kombu kelp simmered with bonito flakes — had a savoriness that did not fit any of the four tastes he had been taught. Not sweet, not salty, not sour, not bitter. He had noticed the same quality in asparagus and aged cheese during a stint studying in Germany. He took some kombu back to the lab.

The extraction was brute-force chemistry. Ikeda boiled down kombu broth, ran it through a long sequence of precipitations, and in February 1908 isolated the compound responsible: glutamic acid, the amino acid. He named the taste umami, from umai (delicious). Then he did the practical follow-up. He neutralized the acid into salts and tasted each one, looking for the version that would actually work as a kitchen seasoning. Monosodium glutamate dissolved cleanly in water, did not clump, and held its taste. He filed a patent for its production that April; it was granted on July 25.

A year later, with the businessman Saburosuke Suzuki, he started a company to sell it. They called the product Aji-no-moto, "essence of taste," and gave the company the same name. It is still one of the largest seasoning makers in the world.

The taste itself took longer to ratify. Western sensory science treated umami as a marketing claim for most of the twentieth century. The receptor responsible, T1R1/T1R3, was not identified until 2002, when researchers led by Nirupa Chaudhari and Charles Zuker published the work that finally moved umami onto the official list. Almost a century after the dashi got cold.