Why Shiitake Mushrooms Are The Ultimate Umami Bomb for Meat Lovers and Chefs

Transcript (Auto translated can have spelling mistakes)

So, shiakei mushrooms are what I make fable out of. And here you have pictured, you know, this is a very famous mushroom in in Asia. It's very very strong glutamates, very strong umami. And uh that makes a wonderful thing to to make mushroom uh meat from because it's got a very meaty texture.

So, if you see where my mouth is over here, got really long taste also. Uh it it tastes like meat meat actually like uh well it's a very strong it's a very strong taste as it is but when you cook it and this is a bit of my background is I have a culinary background and I have a chemical engineering background. So I can manipulate the way that they taste by cooking and with the full understanding of you know you need to change the mushroom taste to a meaty taste. That means essentially there's a a a cooking reaction called the mayard reaction that changes mushroom taste to generic meaty taste. And that's what I do because they have such a a high amount of glutamic acid, glutamates. That's the umami thing. You can cook them so that they do taste like meat, but whenever they're raw, they they don't taste like meat.

They taste almost like um very sulfuric. you think of like uh sulfur like uh cooked eggs you know sulfur gas sulfuric if you you have to cook that out but once you cook that out they have a very a very earthy deep umami taste so yeah this is what shiakei look like and this is what they look like when they grow uh you know they have a a lovely silky cap but what we do is we actually use the stem M.