Umami

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

American Public Media

Food, Arts

4.3 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2006

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you've always suspected that taste goes beyond science's big four of sweet, sour, salt and bitter your instincts are right. This week we're looking at umami. It's what food types call the "fifth taste." Our guest, David Kasabian, tells us how to use this wunderkind to make everything we eat taste better. Coq au Vin Nouveau, from The Fifth Taste: Cooking with Umami by David and Anna Kasabian, demonstrates the principle.

For the Sterns it's retro burgers, fabulous hand-cut fries and malts at one of Lynne's favorite haunts: Convention Grill in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Anya Von Bremzen talks Spain's surprise national dish and it's not paella. It's Cocido from her latest book, The New Spanish Table.

Wine critic Matt Kramer, author of Matt Kramer's New California Wine answers the controversial question: can you actually get cheap good wines? We go to Mexico for vanilla—the most labor intensive food in the hemisphere—and stop by Cake Man Raven Confectionery, a bakery in Brooklyn that claims to be the official home of the classic Southern Red Velvet Cake—and so much more.

Broadcast dates for this episode:

March 25, 2006

Transcript

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0:00.0	Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.
0:08.1	We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature and get closer to the things we're missing.
0:24.4	Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts.
0:31.8	It's Lynn Rosetta Caspers with the splendid table.
0:48.2	Today our guest has a guaranteed way of making everything you eat taste better.
0:52.7	He's David Kasabian, author of The Fifth Taste, Cooking with Umami.
0:56.2	Now, for we eaters, umami equals pure pleasure.
1:01.6	While the Stearns are into great retro burgers, malts, and fries at one of my haunts, the convention grill in Minneapolis, Anjavon Bremsen talks Spain's little-known national dish.
1:06.8	It's not paella.
1:08.3	Wine critic Matt Kramer answers the controversial question,
1:11.6	Can you get really good wine cheap?
1:15.3	And then we check out the vanilla bean in Mexico.
1:18.5	Would you believe that it's tucked into bed every night?
1:21.6	All this and your calls coming up on the splendid table.
1:27.3	But first first this.
1:29.3	This.
1:31.3	The I'm going to be. I'm the I'm the I'm I'm the I'm the I'm the I'm I'm I'm I'm the I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm The
2:20.3	The The
2:37.0	The The
2:53.6	The The
3:10.3	The The
3:27.0	The I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm. I'm. I
	...

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