Lent V: Umami

Some fragmented thoughts on brisket, that unparalleled savory flavor, preparation, daffodils, and book tour

Apr 10, 2025

April 10, 2025
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Tristan and I just got home late last night from the Texas swing of the book tour. Of course we brought a few pounds of brisket home with us. We got it at Helberg Barbecue in Waco, one of my absolute favorites.

Proprietors Phil and Yvette Helberg have been on a long journey. Shortly after I first visited in the autumn of 2023, a fire ravaged their four-year-old restaurant. Their new place just opened a month ago, so it was a particular delight to see what they have built and re-built.

Phil and Yvette are people of deep faith; Helberg’s tagline is “salt, pepper, and a whole lotta prayer.” Maybe it’s just my bias, but having heard some of their story, I also think there’s a profound connection between that faith and the flavors they create.

Some of that has to do with Phil’s openhearted, culinary embrace of Yvette’s Filipino heritage; he told me once about a “very umami” marinade that he was making—Sprite, soy, garlic, oyster sauce, cane vinegar—for his adobo. While that wasn’t on the menu yesterday, his classic smoked brisket is no less satisfying—and no less of a beautiful umami bomb. And his chopped brisket banh mi shows how versatile brisket can be; the pickled carrots and onions are the perfect bright counterpoint to the rich meat, and the garlic aioli adds savory richness.

That's Helberg's chopped-brisket banh mi on the left and the sliced brisket sandwich on the right

I’m already thinking of the fried rice that will eventually put that Helberg brisket to good, umami-boosting use. I love that the dish is layered with collaboration—that someone else tended the meat for hours, seasoning it and then infusing it with smoke. In my wok, the fat will melt into the rice. I’ll chop up some green peppers, onions, and scallions to offset the richness. And I will think, as I always do when I make this dish, of the happy marriage of Texas and Hong Kong, Tristan’s traditions and mine. If there were a dish that perfectly encapsulates us, this is it.

There are multiple ways to make fried rice. When my mom makes it, she often scrambles the egg first and then chops it up. When my grandmother made it, she’d crack the egg right over the rice, so that each grain was coated. As the egg cooked, the rice would fluff up. I love my mom, and she has always been the best cook in the family, but I preferred my grandmother’s version of fried rice.

Grandma’s fried rice developed a crispy crust on the bottom of the wok. Once these near- burnt bits— called 飯焦 (“fan jiu”)— were mixed in, the best bites had just a little crunch. 飯 (“fan”) is the Cantonese word for cooked rice. 焦 (“jiu”) can mean “scorched” or “burnt,” but it can also mean “focus.” The heat concentrates all the rice’s goodness into that crispy layer. 飯焦 is the Chinese cousin of Persian tahdig as well as the socarrat you find at the bottom of the best paella. Deeply savory and rich with umami, it tasted to me like comfort and love.

I cook fried rice the way I learned from my grandmother, but I’ve never quite been able to replicate her 飯焦. Maybe I don’t give it enough time. “Shhhh,” my grandmother would probably say. “You need to wait. Just wait.”

...

To me, the heat of the wok expresses culinary love, softening what’s hard and imbuing it with flavor. Whether you’re deep-frying or steaming, stir- frying or poaching, 鑊氣 (“wok hei”), the breath of the wok that the Cantonese venerate as near-spiritual, is present, eliciting the inherent goodness of the ingredients.

Umami is perhaps the least familiar of the five flavors, and the most challenging to explain. It wasn’t even clearly identified until Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda set about trying to figure out exactly what made dashi, the seaweed and seafood-based stock that is fundamental in the Japanese kitchen, so satisfying. In 1908, he isolated a compound that we now call monosodium glutamate (MSG), which naturally occurs in seaweed, and he decided to call the flavor itself “umami.”

Though Ikeda was the first to understand scientifically how umami occurs, and though he was working with dashi, its presence is global. You’ll find it in Parmesan cheese, and anchovies, and Marmite, and mushrooms and tomatoes—particularly in varieties that are dried, which concentrates the flavor. In Chinese cooking, it’s most common in soy sauce. The Chinese equivalent of umami, 鮮味, literally means “fresh taste,” which doesn’t really capture the full scope of umaminess. That first character, pronounced “seen” in Cantonese, can mean “rare,” “tasty,” “special,” and “vivid.” It combines the ideograms for “fish” and “sheep”—as if someone once imagined that such a meal would embody that full range of satisfying flavor.

“Mushrooms and Twig,” Shibata Zeshin, mid-19th century, ink and color on paper. From the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art

In the cookbook Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, chef Klavs Styrbaek and researcher Ole Mouritsen explore both the savory experience and its scientific background. They also note one other odd aspect to umami. “What is very unusual about umami is that the intensity of the taste it imparts is not solely dependent on how much glutamate is present,” they write. “To a much greater extent, it is affected by synergistic interactions with other substances that increase its gustatory intensity.”

In other words, umami depends on relationship. It rarely overwhelms, because it tends to be relatively subtle. Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that in Scripture, though it is never explicitly named, umami might be most present in the quails offered to the Israelites along with their manna. And of course there’s the lamb on the Passover table, its natural umami enhanced by slow roasting.

It’s apt, too, that as Styrbaek and Mouritsen note, umami is abundant in one of the very first foods that most humans consume: Mother’s milk.

The kitchen, like the garden, is never static. You learn new skills. You acquire new tools. You experiment with new ingredients. You incorporate new ideas. You might try to replicate a dish from a past season, but it will never be exactly the same. Your taste buds change. So do your moods, and even the produce. A chili pepper harvested in early autumn will likely be spicier than one picked in midsummer. Even two peppers grown on the same plant and harvested on the same day might not carry the same heat.

I’d always told myself I’d be a success in the kitchen if I could cook like my mother. As I stood at the stove that night, though, I realized that wasn’t really true. I’d learned so much hovering over my mom’s shoulder as she cooked, absorbing her counsel about how to contrast texture, how to play with color, how to amplify flavor. But I’d also tasted things she’d never tasted and been places she’d never been.

The real win, I realized, was that I had learned to cook like me.

Throughout this Lenten series, I’ve returned again and again to the theme of balance and harmony. Bitter, sour, salty, sweet—all have their place.

Lent can be caricatured as a season of deprivation, but properly considered, it’s more a time of recalibration and reorientation. We remove distractions and set intentions. We reflect on who we have been so that we can remember who we want to be. This is the work each of us must do for ourselves—in community and in conversation, with God and our neighbors, of course, but for ourselves nonetheless.

In Luke 22, Jesus dispatches Peter and John to make preparations for dinner—and not just any dinner but the Passover feast. Note that the text does not say, “What do we cook?” They knew. Rather, the question was, “Where do you want us to prepare?”

“St. Peter and St. John at the Passover,” from *Vaux Passional, 1503-1504, illumination on parchment. From the Peniarth Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales*

I wonder what the scene would have been like in the kitchen as Peter and John prepared the meal. Did they bicker over the seasoning? It would delight me to no end if we discovered that Peter liked to stick rigidly to the recipe that he’d learned from his wife. But maybe when his back was turned, John, who certainly seems like the kind of guy who enjoys that extra flourish, would throw in some extra salt or a couple more turns of the pepper grinder. Or did they fall into the comfortable rhythm of old friends who simply knew each other’s ways? Perhaps John was not quite as confident in the kitchen as he was, say, in a footrace. He made sure to record in his own gospel that he ran faster than Peter, but he says nothing about being a defter cook.

Or perhaps they went and ordered the kosher, holiday-ready equivalent of a KFC family dinner, though I like to imagine that they actually did all the sourcing and the cooking—the lamb and the unleavened bread, bitter herbs and fine wine. Perhaps there would have been charoset on the table too; some culinary archaeologists believe that this richly spiced blend of chopped apples and nuts was not uncommon in ancient times—and certainly it would have paired nicely with the fatty lamb.

It strikes me too that, at least according to the stories we have, Jesus issues no specific instructions. He just tells them to go prepare. In the midst of uncertainty, the call to feed others remains. They’ve been with him for a while. They already know what they’re supposed to do.

As we look within us and around us at this aching world, as we survey the longings and hungers in our own hearts and in the lives of others, I suspect we do as well.

[The italicized portions of the above essay are taken from Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand, which is now available wherever you like to buy books. If you’d like to read the earlier installments of this Lenten series, they’re here: Part I: Bitter. Part II: Sour. Part III: Salty. Part IV: Sweet.]

What I’m Growing: It was 85 degrees and sunny, with not a cloud in the big Texas sky, yesterday. When we landed in Grand Rapids, just before midnight, it was snowing. Rude! But this afternoon, I walked around the yard, and I saw that our first daffodils had bloomed, so I cut some for our kitchen. It’s gray here, and chilly, but the flowers do brighten things up.

Programming notes: Book tour has gone relatively well. It has been meaningful and exhausting and gratifying and hard and lovely—all at once. Thanks to all who have showed up along the way.

ICYMI, I was on Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens podcast last week. Kate is a dear friend and a delight, and I always love talking with her. If you want to watch me squirm or if you’re interested in seeing what went wrong with my hair that day, Kate is also now posting videos of the podcast on YouTube. Eek.

Last week in Memphis, I preached at Calvary Episcopal Church as part of their 102nd annual Lenten Preaching Series. Barbara Brown Taylor and I preached on consecutive days, and in a moment of great foolishness—it really did seem like a good idea at the time!—we agreed to preach on the same text: Matthew 5:43-48 (“Love your enemies” and all that). If you like, you can watch my sermon on YouTube.

Signed copies of Good Soil are now available in several bookstores around the country, including Schuler Books in Grand Rapids; Parnassus Books in Nashville; The Book and Cover in Chattanooga; Novel in Memphis; and Book People in Austin. (Probably best to call the stores directly if you want to be assured of getting a signed copy.)

If you’ve already read the book, please review it on Goodreads and/or Amazon, especially if you liked it. And I always like to receive reader feedback. Thoughts? Questions? Irritations? Favorite parts? Things that left you wondering? Leave a comment here or email me, if you’re shy, at makebelievefarmer@gmail.com.

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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