Peter Bromhead: Intangible taste

Illustration / Peter Bromhead

I'm still celebrating my birthday, months after the event. This week, I've been frogmarched off into the city to attend a Japanese cooking class.

This was an educational gift from my loved ones, who clearly believed it was time I learned how to master the secrets of umami and received some edification on matters such as preparing correctly teriyaki dishes.

Umami apparently refers to something mysteriously oriental called the fifth element, describing an intangible taste.

For some inexplicable reason, when this was first described to me I could visualise only melted cheese on toast, sprinkled with Worcestershire sauce.

I was slightly miffed when I unwrapped my birthday voucher, simply because I thought I had already mastered the art of oriental cooking.

After all, I have a wok and a bottle of soy sauce in the kitchen cupboard.

Armed with these two essentials, I sometimes grandly announce to the family, "I'm cooking Japanese tonight".

That my efforts tend to merge into something where the difference between "Japanese" and a rather dodgy Chinese takeaway is marginal, is not a point I wish to dwell on. However, that's probably the reason the caregiver packed me off to Sachie's Kitchen to learn a few fundamentals.

At the kitchen, I was surprised to discover there wasn't a wok in sight, dispelling my illusion that this type of skillet was an essential tool for all forms of oriental cooking.

I was also swiftly taught that I needed more than a bottle of soy sauce to unlock the secrets of umami.

As part of this quest, I was introduced to other ingredients, including flakes shaved off something that looked like a ghastly old cattle horn, which turned out to be some sort of rock-hard preserved tuna.

As well as preparing teriyaki dishes, I was also shown how to delicately segment pieces of orange with a razor sharp knife that was eager to remove my fingers if I as much as blinked.

One of the night's secrets was how to triple the size of a rather tiny, limp prawn - apparently a practice familiar to the restaurant trade. It involves a process of tiny cuts and nicks then flattening before battering.

If only I could triple the size of one of my more intimate anatomical appendages in the same way, I wistfully thought.

However, that razor-sharp Japanese knife might be slightly off-putting.