Beginner’s Guide to Fermentation: KOKUMI

Unlike other flavours, you don’t taste kokumi as a single, distinct note. Instead, it appears as an enhancer, providing depth, roundness, and richness to our food. A long, savoury, almost mouth-filling quality that makes certain foods feel complete.

Scientifically, kokumi is linked to compounds such as glutathione and other γ-glutamyl peptides, that don’t necessarily have much flavour on their own, but seem to enhance the way we perceive other flavours, especially savoury, salty, and umami ones. They make food taste more full, richer, longer-lasting, and more satisfying. It was first described scientifically by Yoichi Ueda and colleagues at Ajinomoto in Japan, who noticed that compounds in garlic didn’t taste of much on their own, but somehow made broths taste fuller and more complete. 

This is why kokumi often appears in foods that have been aged, fermented, slowly cooked, or otherwise transformed by time, because fermentation breaks large food molecules into smaller, flavour-active fragments. 

To clarify, this is different from umami, which makes food taste savoury. Kokumi makes food feel satisfying. 

You’ve probably experienced it in a properly reduced chicken stock or aged Parmesan. In miso, soy sauce, slow-cooked onions, and roasted garlic. In fermented fish sauce, sourdough crust, the rounded savouriness of a mature cheese, or the deep, lingering richness of a stew that tastes better the next day.

This is one of the reasons fermentation is so powerful, and does much more than preserve food. It breaks ingredients down and rebuilds them into something more complex and tasty. Proteins become amino acids and peptides, starches become sugars, and fats develop into new aromas. Kokumi is present in most fermented foods, though it is most dominant in ferments like kimchi, miso, soy sauce, and fish sauce.

In this instance, fermentation teaches us that flavour is not always something we can add.

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