Older, Not Old: Flavor Bombs with Umami and EVOO

When I was a kid, and lat­er dur­ing my dietet­ics edu­ca­tion at UCLA, I learned about the four basic tastes in foods – sweet, sour, bit­ter, and salty. Rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly a fifth taste, uma­mi, joined the clas­sic four. Uma­mi trans­lates as “savory,” and it’s hard to describe in words. To bor­row from Unit­ed States Supreme Court Jus­tice Pot­ter Stew­art ‘s “I know it when I see it” (refer­ring to obscen­i­ty), you’ll know uma­mi when you taste it. Think about how ingre­di­ents like aged Parme­san cheese or soy sauce bring out the fla­vor in a dish, a bit like the dif­fer­ence between musi­cal notes played one at a time or in a chord. That’s uma­mi. Ingre­di­ents and foods that con­tribute uma­mi include meat, fish, aged cheeses, mush­rooms, toma­toes, cer­tain oth­er veg­eta­bles, and monosodi­um glu­ta­mate.
Speak­ing of fla­vor and taste, if vision and hear­ing decline as we get old­er, what hap­pens to our sense of taste? Sure seems like it gets duller — foods just don’t taste the same as they did when I was younger. Sci­en­tists are not yet sure why this hap­pens, but a research group at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Gronin­gen in the Nether­lands recent­ly found that the brain of an old­er adult is less effi­cient than that of a younger adult at reg­is­ter­ing and inte­grat­ing sig­nals from the taste buds. The taste buds are talk­ing but the brain isn’t lis­ten­ing. So you might find your­self look­ing for ways to bring out fla­vor in foods. But­ter and salt are the best friends of many a chef, but most of us could do with­out the extra fat, calo­ries, and sodi­um.

Ear­li­er this week, I invit­ed my neigh­bors over to see whether we could coax more fla­vor out of unsea­soned chick­en, plain baked pota­toes, and an undressed avo­ca­do – with­out using salt or but­ter. The ingre­di­ents at hand were lemon juice, onion pow­der, gar­lic pow­der, a lighter-fla­vored Arbequina/Picual EVOO blend from Mar­ques de Griñon and a zesty Picual EVOO from Castil­lo de Cane­na. (The oils were gifts from a spon­sored din­ner.) Here’s what we dis­cov­ered:

• Carameliz­ing the exte­ri­or of the chick­en brought out its uma­mi. The Picual com­bined with a squeeze of lemon juice paired beau­ti­ful­ly with the chick­en. No salt need­ed here.
• The pota­to pro­vid­ed a neu­tral can­vas for each oil, but each pota­to-EVOO com­bo tast­ed even bet­ter with a sprin­kle of onion pow­der.
• The spici­ness of the Picual was a per­fect match for the avo­ca­do.
• The pota­to and avo­ca­do com­bos were just fine with­out salt, but the tini­est fin­ish of a few grains of sea salt – bare­ly enough to make a sodi­um dif­fer­ence – made them even bet­ter.

Since I was play­ing with olive oils, I decid­ed to toss togeth­er a quick sal­ad. My good friend Jacques is a mas­ter at dress­ing sal­ads and he inspired me to cre­ate my own rather than buy­ing store-bought dress­ing. Here’s what I do:

Put greens in a bowl. I’m using a baby kale mix.

Add 1 table­spoon extra vir­gin olive oil. I chose the Picual because its strong fla­vors will stand up to the kale. Toss well until the greens are well-coat­ed. This helps pro­tect the leaves from a con­cen­trat­ed burst of the oth­er ingre­di­ents.

Squeeze the juice of 1/2 lemon over the sal­ad. Toss well again.

Sprin­kle the sal­ad with 1/8 tea­spoon of salt, max, and sev­er­al grinds of fresh black pep­per. Toss, serve and enjoy!