The Secret Ingredient: Hondashi
What is umami and can language ever really capture taste?
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Welcome to the first edition of The Secret Ingredient! I wanted to open up my newsletter to a wider variety of perspectives, so I’m talking to cooks about an ingredient they love to use and how it encapsulates their approach to cooking. I’ll be interspersing these interviews with my regular Sunday essays.
I got to know Annie through the community around Archestratus and then through her wonderful, thoughtful newsletter. Annie got COVID right at the beginning of the pandemic and lost her sense of smell. We talked about the way that experience awakened her fascination with food and precipitated her project of posting almost every meal she’s made since then. She’s also a professional flutist and thinks a lot about the relationships between music, cooking, and writing as forms of expression.
Kate: So do you want to tell me about your ingredient?
Annie: I feel like hondashi appeared in my head quite immediately. But I still wanted to give it some thought because even though I know that the ingredient has a lot of history in my own cooking and my family, it does feel like something that — I’m not trespassing — but just don’t know a lot about in general, about its origins or what exactly it is. It’s just something that I use because my parents use it in cooking. And so it did feel a little bit like, Do I have authority to talk about it?
Kate: That’s interesting that we feel like to own an ingredient we have to know everything about it. I don’t think that’s how cooks have interacted with ingredients in the past, but maybe it’s because now there’s so much information available. We feel pressure to be a knowledge expert rather than just an experience expert.
Annie: Totally, yeah. I think that’s such a helpful way of looking at it. I was talking to someone over coffee today, about the process of writing and how sharing all of this food stuff on blogs has been so cathartic and meaningful to me, but also that I’m so new to cooking and food so there was this deep self-consciousness about it. But that self-consciousness largely went away through the writing process, because as you’re saying, it’s not really about saying, I know so much about this, this is what I hold authority over, but more like, This is what I’m looking through. These are all the threads of thought in my brain and things that I gravitate towards. Maybe you will too. So that’s a nice, helpful framework when thinking about how I cook too.
Kate: You told me you talked to your dad about how he came to hondashi. What did you learn from him?
Annie: Yeah, well, the running joke in my family is that anytime anyone’s making anything, he’s hovering in the background. And he’ll whisper, “Did you put dashi in?” When he came to the States, he would cook in restaurants for extra cash, and a lot of these Chinese restaurants used a bunch of MSG. But I asked him why he started using hondashi, because it’s a Japanese product, and he said that he tried to make miso soup once when he was younger and was like, Why does it not taste good? There was an auntie friend of ours, who lived in Japan for a really long time, and she said, you have to use hondashi. So he tried it and it became a staple. It’s funny that at least in his history of cooking, it was sort of a replacement for MSG, but hondashi is like MSG, it has MSG in it.
In the context of my own cooking journey, the reason I was gravitating toward that as my ingredient is that when I lost my sense of smell like 21 months ago, things weren’t tasting yummy. So my quest that started me on cooking was to find things that tasted yummy. And without even realizing it, a lot of those were things that had umami in them. Miso, tomatoes, things like that.
Kate: Those were the things that you weren’t tasting as much? Or was that one of the tastes that was breaking through?
Annie: It was one of the tastes that was breaking through, because I would eat peanut butter and it wouldn’t really taste that much, but miso would do something, so I guess it had to do with the fermentiness or whatever we quantify as umami. Certain tomatoes didn’t taste like anything but then I would have really nice tomatoes and those would be great. It was interesting to think about what flavors I started eating more of because they would break through this smell barrier.
I wish I could live the last two years eating what I had enjoyed as a person who had never lost their smell, but that wouldn’t be possible because the whole reason I got to this was because of that experience. I’m curious to know if I gravitated toward these tastes because they’re the only things that came through or just because they happen to be better flavors to me in general. Hondashi was used in every Chinese home cooking thing that my dad made, whether it was just a random stir fry or fried rice or anything with a fried egg. So that’s the flavor I liked growing up. But all the things I started liking — like shiitake mushrooms or seaweed or fish or fermented things especially — these were flavors that I had started using prior to even know what the makeup of hondashi was.
Kate: I feel like you’re saying that there’s so many things that go into whether something tastes good to you. There’s this element of how you grew up and what your associations with it are. There’s maybe things that are just objectively good and objectively tasty. And then you’re also trying to figure out if, because your physical sense of smell is different, how does that affect what you’re tasting?
Annie: Halfway through the pandemic I reached out to a company that was working on giving resources to those who had experienced cancer and had lost their taste buds — essentially they’re burned off — how to find joy in eating and cooking again. They were trying to come up with another version of it for people who had lost their sense of smell due to COVID. I was really shocked that so many of the rules they’d codified were things that I’d ultimately found myself because of doing so many iterations. Like, cook with a lot of textures and layer your food, try to make food that has different processes within it, whether that’s something that’s been marinated overnight or something that’s been braised or burned, different chemical processes. And then add things that are acidic and that, to me, are essentially just hondashi elements.
But I wonder what other things have this umami and how other people find that taste if they don’t use hondashi as a shortcut. I’m interested to know if the word “umami” makes you twitch because sometimes people don’t like using that. I feel like overall it’s overused.
Kate: I haven’t. I actually want to fight those people. I wonder what that’s in reference to? It became trendy maybe like ten years ago, but I had stopped eating meat, I think 18 years ago, and I knew there was something missing. I found myself eating a lot more mushrooms, and cheese, and tomatoes and things that turned out to be natural sources of umami. And then once I learned about the concept, it helped me. It helped me think about it a little more and make sure I was always building it into a savory meal.
Annie: That’s really cool. Actually it sort of crystallizes what I’ve been thinking about lately, which is sometimes you have a feeling about what works for you and you follow those intuitions, and then having a word to describe it can either help you grasp it, or it can sort of contain it in a way that’s not helpful. And I feel like umami is an interesting word because I’d also learned it and was trying to piece it together based on what I was reading, but to some extent, I know. I know what tastes yummy and it’s like trying to encapsulate a feeling I already know.
I’m teaching this class right now, at Juilliard pre-college, and I’ve been talking about language and capturing things with words and how specificity is really amazing to develop a personal voice. But there are certain mediums that can also help us broaden and get away from specificity. Like music as being something that’s not contained by words.
Umami is an interesting one to think about in those terms, because it’s so loosely defined in so many ways but also received so specifically for a lot of people. In Japanese, it just means like “super yummy,” like “great taste.” And there’s a word in Chinese, xian 鲜. That’s what my parents always say, That’s so xian, whatever we’re eating. And I guess if we were to equate one-to-one that would be like “umami” for the Chinese language. And yet, trying to describe foods that have it is really difficult as well. I was thinking about a related word, xiang 香, which is like fragrant, as opposed to like xian. The fragrance was the first thing that was breaking through and that I could taste, which is really interesting, because when you think of fragrance in English, it’s smell-based. One of the very first things that happened to me that made me excited about eating, after not really tasting anything, is I was eating these roasted nuts. And I could definitely taste the fragrance in them without smelling. And the first that popped into my head was, Oh my gosh, that is so xiang.
It’s so hard to encapsulate these flavors in words. What’s interesting about umami is how people try to define it. Because yumminess feels so subjective. People tend to define it as “deliciousness” and then we’ll list a bunch of things that fall into the category of delicious for you, to retroactively define what that means.
Kate: How do you think of cooking as a kind of expressive medium outside of words? Is it like music to you?
Annie: There is something really amazing about cooking to find out what is yummy to you and what resonates and then seeing how other people receive it too. So there’s that specificity of like, This is my voice as someone who cooks and this is what works for me. This is how I’m going to express myself culinarily, do you like tasting that? Or maybe that taste is different than what you have known and reminds you of something else, but it feels like a web that captures a lot of things. So there is that specificity and difference of reception that’s really cool, something that I’ve been trying to explore more of.
What I’m cooking
Chocolate cherry rye twists (v)
I couldn’t believe how rich and luxurious these bread twists were. When I’m developing vegan recipes, I don’t like to make vegan versions of baked goods that normally depend heavily on dairy, since I don’t like most dairy substitutes, but try to make new things that fill the same desires. This dough is based on focaccia, so it has a lot of olive oil to make the bread soft, and then the chocolate-hazelnut spread makes it truly decadent. Sign up for a paid subscription to get Friday’s recipe!