Recycling your wine corks and capturing that elusive fifth taste are the subjects of a pair of recent USA Character Approved Blog posts.
We recycle as much as possible. We dutifully save aluminum and tin cans, plastic milk jugs, all manner of paper and more wine bottles than I’m comfortable admitting to and haul them all off to a recycling center. But one thing we’d been routinely tossing until Marion figured out they would compost was wine corks. Now it turns out they’re also recyclable. And if that sounds a little trivial, consider this—every year, around 13 billion of them are produced.
Besides being recyclable, natural cork is a renewable, sustainable way to seal wine bottles, unlike synthetic corks and screw caps. To find out just how green cork is—and where to recycle your wine corks—read my post on the USA Character Approved Blog.
That elusive fifth taste, now in a tube. Remember those slightly gross diagrams in your grade school science book pointing out the four taste bud zones on your tongue? Sweet (the universal favorite), sour, salty and bitter? Somehow, those four taste sensations never satisfactorily explained the taste of a hamburger to me. Or mushrooms. Or even Kentucky Fried Chicken. There was something more than salty going on, and it certainly wasn’t sweet, sour or bitter.
What it was has been identified (more than 100 years ago, in fact, by a Japanese chemist) as umami. Umami is a “subtle, pleasantly savory flavor” that occurs naturally in meat, fish, vegetables, cheeses and a number of other foods. While it was first named by the Japanese, it’s somehow fitting that the British, the creators of Marmite, figured out how to put umami in a tube. To be more precise, Taste #5 Umami Paste is the invention of an enterprising British food blogger, Laura Santtini.
Taste #5 Umami Paste has only recently become available in the US, sort of. We’ve gotten our hands on a tube and will cook with it and report back as soon as we’ve dealt with the sudden influx of Meyer lemons. Meanwhile, to find out how Santtini concocted umami in a tube and how to get your own, check out my latest post on the USA Character Approved Blog.
Awesome post! I don’t know why it never occurred to me to compost wine corks, but I’m going to start immediately. And I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about the umami paste, so I’ll look forward to your report.
Chowgirl, great! I just lob the corks into the pile as I’m walking through the yard. Some may bounce the wrong way, but they get added in eventually. And keep in mind that it can take a while for corks to break down, relative to other stuff in there – last spring when I was harvesting from the pile I had some very nice black compost studded with these gruesome nuggets of cork.
Isn’t umami the same as MSG?
Not exactly, Susan. Umami is the flavor of the combination of the amino acid L-glutamate and ribonucleotides, both of which occur naturally in umami-rich foods. MSG is a sodium salt of glutamic acid. In and of itself, MSG doesn’t taste like umami, but it is capable of coaxing those flavors from foods to which it’s added. Taste #5 Umami Paste gets its flavor from actual umami-rich foods—like tomato purée, garlic, olives, Parmesan cheese, mushrooms, olive oil and anchovy paste. And while some studies are now suggesting MSG doesn’t have harmful side effects, the jury still seems to be out on that question.