10 Easy Umami Flavor Boosts

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• 🤷‍♀️ What is the umami flavor?
• 👩‍🍳 10 Ways to Add Umami to Dishes
• 3 Umami Foods You Might Not Have on Hand
• Using Multiple Umami Foods in One Dish

So what's all the fuss about umami flavor and what is it? Well, if you want to cook vegetarian (or vegan) dishes that you love, you need to know.

🤷‍♀️ What is the umami flavor?

Umami is commonly known as the fifth taste.

For many years, people acknowledged only four basic tastes when it came to food. Sweet, salty, sour and bitter. But in the early 1900's a Japanese scientist identified what's now call umami, bring the count to five basic tastes.

Umami is a Japanese word translated as "a pleasant savory taste". Simply put, umami is the deep savory flavor that we associate with meat and other proteins.

On a chemistry level, the flavor comes from a food's glutamate content, which is an amino acid. And amino acids are the essential building blocks for complex proteins, which are released by cooking, curing or aging.

Think a steak seared, especially on a grill. Cured meats like bacon, aged cheeses, green tea, soy sauce and cooked tomatoes or mushrooms are more examples. This flavor lingers on the tongue longer than other flavors, and encourage salivation.

In other words, think of umami as a flavor bomb. And when vegetarian and vegan foods lack umami, we feel there's something missing in a dish.

👩‍🍳 10 Ways to Add Umami to Dishes

Whether you want to add more vegetarian dishes to your weekly menu, or are exploring how to become vegetarian, umami is a big deal. So how do you add this vital umami flavor to your vegetarian and vegan dishes?

Here are some of my favorite umami foods.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are one of the best plant-based sources of umami flavor. In fact, their sweet-yet-savory flavor comes from their high glutamic acid content.

And when dried, they're even better, so sun-dried tomatoes are a fabulous way to add umami flavor to a dish. Add them to casseroles, soups, stews, and curry. Or make this Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto.

Slow roasting them is another great approach, and especially with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Here's the recipe if you want to make your own balsamic tomatoes. I keep them in sealed jars in the refrigerator.

And don't forget tomato paste. It's not dried, but it's super-concentrated.

Mushrooms

Just as dried tomatoes have more umami flavor than tomatoes fresh from the vine, dried mushrooms are superior to regular mushrooms. David Chang famously pulverizes dried shiitake mushrooms into a powder. He then adds this "umami dust" to many dishes, such as vegetables and his ramen broth (and yes, meat).

An easier way to do this is purchase Porcini Mushroom Powder or one of Fresh Cap Mushroom's mushroom powders.

Add it to vegetable dishes or add to breadcrumbs for a pasta topping.

Miso

Miso is a soybean-based fermented paste often seen in Japanese cooking. And it brings a rich, salty umami backdrop to many dishes. I particularly like to add it to mashed potatoes, dressings and soup. 

Miso packs a lot of flavor in a small amount, so start with a small amount when adding it to a dish.

Olives and Capers

Other fermented foods that add umami flavor are olives, especially kalamata olives, and capers.

I add kalamatas to a lot of vegetable dishes, pastas and salads, like this Moroccan Citrus Salad. This Easy Swiss Chard Sauté with Quinoa, one of the long-time popular recipes here, uses both olives and capers! 

Fermented Sauces

Hoisin, an excellent vegetarian substitute for Fish Sauce in Chinese food recipes, is packed with umami. Soy and Tamari sauces are great options too for adding a deeply flavored "meatiness" to dishes.

Vinegar

Vinegars are great little spurts of umami, and balsamic vinegar is the most powerful of them all. Sherry wine vinegar is another excellent option.

Nutritional Yeast

Nutritional yeast is loaded with healthy nutrients, and is a complete protein, and considered one of those super foods we should all be eating.  And it has lots of uses.

I add it to soups, pasta dishes and vegetables. It’s great sprinkled on zucchini and then sautéed. I also shower it over delicata squash slices and then roast them in the oven.

But my favorite way of using this fabulous ingredient is making nutritional yeast popcorn. It’s completely addictive. 

Roasted Nuts and Seeds

Roasted almonds and walnuts provide great umami and crunch to dishes, and I particularly like adding pan roasted pepitas to salads and vegetable dishes like this Stuffed Delicata Squash.

Onions and Garlic

Onions and garlic both offer some umami flavor to dishes, but caramelized onions and roasted garlic really hit the mark! Check out this Balsamic Roasted Brussels Sprouts dinner for a great example of this. It uses both caramelized onions and balsamic vinegar to amp up the umami flavor!

Parmesan Cheese and Eggs 

These are my only non-vegan suggestions, so I'm grouping them together. All cheese adds umami to a dish, but freshly grated Parmesan cheese has a unique salty, nutty, almost brown buttery flavor.

This complex combination puts it above other cheese for adding umami flavor to a dish. Authentic Parmesan cheese is not vegetarian as it uses an animal rennet for coagulating the cheese. Trader Joes has a great Parmesan - like cheese sold under their name Trader Giotto that's vegetarian. I also like Whole Food's 365 vegetarian Parmesan. Here's a list of vegetarian cheeses that use a vegetable rennet!

It barely needs mentioning, but adding an over-easy egg with its runny yolk is pure umami, and elevates almost anything from a warm salad to roasted vegetables or a veggie-burger, and turns it into a meal.

3 Umami Foods You Might Not Have on Hand

These 3 umami foods are a fantastic way to add umami to a dish, but they might not be staples in your pantry. If not, add them to your grocery list for the next time you head to the market.

Kombu Seaweed

Kombu, an edible seaweed, is often referred to as the king of seaweeds for both its flavor and nutritional value.

If you're looking for ways to use it, Vegetarian dashi, a Japanese soup stock full of umami flavor, is always made with kombu. Or add it to stews, salads, or your next pot of dried beans to make them more digestable.

For an easy way to try kombu, try it on dishes using these freeze-dried flakes. 

Marmite

Marmite is a sticky, dark brown spread made from a yeast extract. It's intensely flavored and very salty - think of it as a yeasty-salty-soy saucey flavor. If you're familiar with Vegemite, Marmite is a little milder and slightly sweeter.

A popular way to use Marmite is in a pasta dish, like this one.

Better Than Bouillon 

I confess, I'm a huge fan of the Better Than Bouillon products. They even have a line of 6 products that are vegan / vegetarian. My favorites, that I always have in my pantry, are their Vegetable Base and No-Chicken Base. I also like their Roasted Garlic Base.

I add it to many soups, stews, vegetable casseroles and curries with great success when I need an extra push of umami.

Using Multiple Umami Foods in One Dish

There are limits of course, but more is sometimes better. If it makes sense in the recipe, use more than one umami ingredient. A perfect example of this is in this Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry recipe. It uses sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic roasted tomatoes, and Better Than Bouillon. That's 4 umami boosts (the balsamic tomatoes get 2 points) for a curry with layers of savory flavor, that's ready in about 30 minutes!

Try adding of couple of these umami flavor boosts to your next vegetarian and vegan dishes, and you'll be shocked at the fullness of flavor they give.