When I was a kid I was told that our tongues could only taste 4 different kinds of flavors: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. The theory was that everything else to do with taste was in the nose. But as I learned to cook I knew that wasn’t the whole story. There was something else. Another taste that some foods had and others didn’t. Melted cheese has it, as do pork ribs. It’s in fried onions and fried mushrooms. It’s also the dominant flavor of MSG.

And of course, garlic has it in spades, if you know how to use it. More on this later…

I’d seek this flavor out in my food. When telling people about it, I’d usually call it “yummy” or “yumminess.” When pressed, I’d describe it as a savory kind of satisfaction – a warm-your-belly goodness that’s somewhere between a caramelized sweetness and the richness of saturated fats like butter. It gives foods an “I want to eat lots of this” quality that most people can’t put their finger on.

And then , scientists confirmed this capability of the tongue – a fifth kind of flavor receptor. Since English didn’t have a good word for it, we generally use the Japanese word, umami, coined by Professor Kikunae Ikeda, who “invented” MSG almost 100 years ago. Sometimes the English word “savory” is used to describe the umami taste, but I shy away from it as too vague.

“So how can I get that mad umami flavor in my food?” I hear you ask. Well, stay tuned, because we’re going to be talking a lot more about this in the future. But I’ll give you a hint about my favorite way: check your address bar.

It used to be that whenever I was ready to start cooking dinner, the first thing I’d do would be to grab a head of garlic and start pulling off cloves. Chop off the hard base, crush, pull off the skin, wash, rinse, repeat about a dozen times. Now I’m a little more sophisticated – I sometimes cook things that don’t require massive amounts of garlic. Occasionally. But that first clove always holds good omens of yumminess ahead.

So as I digest a fine improvised dinner of grilled teriyaki chicken, basily scallop kabobs, fresh mango relish, sautéed chard, steamed artichokes, and fried bananas, I reflect on why I’ve wanted to write this blog. Some of it is selfish – not just the typical narcissistic selfishness that all online extroverts get from blogging. But truly selfish in that I will find this a useful resource for myself – I had to dig through a bunch of files to find the right proportion of black vinegar to sesame oil for my teriyaki marinade, and if it had been online that would have been much easier. But that’s a small part. The bigger part is this cliché abstract yearning to make the world a better place. One way I can do that is by helping people to cook better.

Sure, this blog will have recipes for things like basily scallop kabobs, and instructions on how to quickly peel a couple dozen cloves of garlic. But there are dozens, nay thousands of great places for that information. I’d like to share some of my philosophy about cooking. For I haven’t seen much of that. I have read a book or two that touch on it, but not many. Perhaps that’s because the basic idea is so simple that it’s hard to devote a book to. I picked it up when I was in High School from my good friend Dr. Eric Canuteson while driving back to work after another failed attempt to beat the horse races. He was describing how a girlfriend of his taught him to think about his food. That was enough to planted the seed in my mind too. From then on, I didn’t just follow recipes anymore. I started to think about food.

Once you start thinking about your food, cooking will never again simply be a matter of following instructions. As you prepare a dish, you’ll want to understand it. You’ll want to taste it before it’s ready – not just because you’re hungry and it’s yummy – but because you want to appreciate what is happening to it in its transformation from raw ingredients to finished product. The idea that you could prepare great food without making corrections along the way becomes almost absurd. (Baking is another story. More later.) Understanding what happens to your food as you prepare it is the first giant step.

Then comes an intuition about how things would taste together. You’ll be able to answer that perennial question, “what does this need?” with a more sophisticated answer than “salt.” Your mind will spin as dozens of theoretical variations are virtually prepared, tasted, and tossed aside, and you’ll come up with the answer – cumin and a touch of ginger – and voila! The final push from pretty good to wonderful. You’ll find yourself imagining entire new recipes from start to finish while heading home from work. When you get home, you’ll make your new dish for the first time, and it will be just as you imagined it — fantastic. Then, grasshopper, you will have arrived.

I’d like to help you down this path of understanding. I’ve made this journey. It’s slow, but it’s not painful. Only once you’re here will you appreciate how little you actually know.