The real reason why your Pad Thai is so delicious

The year is 1908 in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. A professor of chemistry named Kikunae Ikeda made a delicious discovery while working at Tokyo Imperial University…

When it came to naming his discovery, the Japanese scientist got it spot on and named it ‘umami’, which translates from Japanese to ‘deliciousness’. To get slightly more technical, what Professor Ikeda had actually discovered was that a naturally occurring chemical compound called glutamic acid contained glutamate, and that glutamate tasted delicious. He named the flavour umami, and then worked out a way to produce little crystals of deliciousness called monosodium glutamate, enabling him to sprinkle umami all over his favourite foods! Professor Ikeda patented a method of mass-producing monosodium glutamate, which is now more commonly known as MSG, and used all over the world as a flavour-boosting food seasoning.

Glutamate occurs naturally in our bodies and in lots of different foods because it’s actually one of the fundamental building blocks of protein. These little building blocks are called amino-acids, and glutamic acid is just one of them. So you’ll find glutamate in abundance in meat, egg, cheese and fish. But it’s also plentiful in protein-rich vegetables including tomatoes, onions, mushrooms and broccoli. Fruits and nuts like banana, grapes and walnuts all contain glutamates too.

The level of Professor Ikeda’s deliciousness varies in all of these foods. Inside food, glutamate is either attached to (or bound with) other amino acids to form protein, or it’s boundless, alone and fee (actually, the scientific term for this is indeed ‘free’). The more free glutamates there are inside a food, the more delicious it will be. Some foods are just naturally high in free glutamates, but there are also a few variables. For instance, in fruit and vegetables, ripeness has an impact on the amount of free glutamates; the riper a fruit or vegetable is, the more free glutamate it will have, and the umami flavour stronger. With meats and cheeses, age has an impact on the amount of free glutamates. This is because, over time, the proteins break down and their individual amino acids break free. Processes like curing or fermenting therefore increase a food’s free glutamate content and produce more umami flavour. You could, of course, just add glutamate to food using Professor Ikeda’s monosodium glutamate (MSG) seasoning.

Despite the natural origins of monosodium glutamate, MSG has attracted bad press over the years. With anything we consume, you can end up introducing too much into your diet. With umami occurring naturally, why add it in powdered form? However, the same could be said of other condiments such as salt or sugar, or of artificial flavourings and sweeteners. That’s led to a theory that misrepresentation of MSG was racially motivated due to it becoming so strongly associated with Chinese cuisine.

Before Professor Ikeda’s research, the scientific community only recognised four basic tastes; salty, bitter, sweet and sour. The Japanese research introduced the idea of a ‘savoury’ taste, but the controversy over MSG prevented umami from being recognised as a basic taste. Instead, MSG and umami were thought to be the same thing. It took almost 100 years, and the discovery of umami taste receptors on the tongue in 2000, before the scientific community agreed that umami was a naturally occurring flavour, deserving of its place as the fifth basic taste, savoury.

Now that the MSG myths are busted, umami has become a buzz-word in the culinary world, with many food professionals preferring to refer to the fifth basic taste by its Japanese translation. And so it turns out that there’s a scientific reason why Pad Thai is so delicious! It is umami that underpins the complexity and depth that makes many of Thailand’s best known dishes so popular. Pad Thai hits all five basic flavours of salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami. A traditional Pad Thai sauce contains salty Thai fish sauce and sweet palm sugar, while delightfully tangy tamarind takes care of the sour sensation. A wedge of lime brings the bitterness. But it is savoury umami that runs through the entire dish, from the sauce, to the egg and choice of protein.

At BANGKOK BOX, our Pad Thai isn’t seasoned with MSG. We know that it’s already bursting with the natural umami flavour of the traditional ingredients of this famous street food dish. Furthermore, we understand how to make all the flavours dance together in the wok. And because we make REAL Pad Thai, without cutting corners or substituting key ingredients, it tastes just as it would on the streets of Bangkok. Achieving this with our popular vegan Pad Thai is a bit trickier, as there are a few of those traditional ingredients that need to be left out altogether. But because we make our own sauces by hand, we’ve been able to pay special attention to our vegan Pad Thai and ensure we maintain the umami goodness despite removing some of those traditional ingredients.

After being handed their bangin’ box of Pad Thai, all of our customers can choose to elevate their meal further by adding complementary chilli and crushed peanuts to taste. Both of these garnishes boost the bitter and umami content respectively, add texture, and engage the senses even more.

If reading this has made you hungry for a taste of real Thai street food in London, locate us here, subscribe to know where we’re heading next, and consider booking us for your own event.