For years, you’ve had a taste for something but didn’t know its name. It’s umami. Some call it “the fifth taste” after the well-known quartet of the tastes bitter, sweet, salt and sour. Umami is that very pleasant, savory, juicy, salivary taste set off by certain foods such as a nugget of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a sip of miso soup. Umami was isolated as a taste and the word coined back in the early 1900s by Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese chemist.