The Smoking Korean
The five tastes are salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (meaty flavor from glutamates and other amino acids).
The Smoking Korean has identified a 6th taste. Yes, The Smoking Korean went through a couple of chubby periods as a child. It’s her inner chubby kid that makes her food so delicious. It’s the crispy nub of batter on a corn dog and Thrifty’s black cherry ice cream. Sometimes super market cake helps her make it through a rough patch. Otherwise it’s sushi, charcuterie, and funky cheeses.
The plancha on a lonchera seasoned with the flavor of taco meats cooked to death
The cooking fat at a waffle house that serves fried chicken. The chicken gets fried in oil that has rendered chicken fat in it. If the waffles are deep fried, then they get the 6th taste of rendered and slightly aged chicken fat
The breath of a well seasoned wok
Chinese restaurant brown sauce. The mother sauce that simmers away in a corner of the stove top
Kimchi aged in the sun or buried in the ground in ceramic jars
The browned crust of rice on paella or a Korean stone or metal rice pot cooked over charcoal
Nurungi
Abuelita’s comal
The hot dog ladies full sized baking sheet plancha
Whole animal wrapped in leaves and cooked on hot stones
American short order cooking on a flat top
The flavor of meat smoked in an old, rusted smoker with thick layers of carbon inside
It’s your grandmere’s aged Le Creuset casserole in Montmerle-sur-Saone
It’s your favorite or not so favorite uncle’s beat up grill that bits of char and soot that are older than him
It’s why marshmallow’s taste better cooked over a campfire than a stove top
It’s the flavor of the ocean and briney seaweed in a clambake
It’s why sooty crayfish taste better than pristine lobster
It’s the flavor of flatbread cooked in a tandoori oven, a tabouna
It’s the flavor of roadside cooking
It’s why kimchi is the taste of your mother’s finger tips