Getty | lacaosa Getty | lacaosa

Umami is ineffable. Technically , it's the fifth category of taste, next to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Also technically , umami-rich foods have high amounts of the amino acid glutamate, often giving them a brothy or meaty quality. But spiritually, umami defies categorization.

For those of us who aren't trained chefs or culinary scientists, it's hard to pinpoint, much less explain. And while cooking with umami-packed ingredients makes pretty much everything taste better, I've found it also requires a dose of every Type-A home cook's worst nightmare: guesswork.

I'm pretty far from Type A in other realms of my life, but in my early days of learning to cook for myself, I was a recipe-follower to a fault. Slowly over time, I noticed that most

See Full Page