Umami is not just a taste. It is a memory — of nourishment, of safety, of survival.
You have known it all your life. In aged cheese, fermented fish, slow-cooked broth.
This workshop is an invitation — not to learn a new flavour, but to recognise something you have always carried.
What will change after this experience:
- You will no longer think of umami as “Japanese” or “Asian”— but as a universal structure across cultures
- You will begin to recognise umami in places you never noticed before
- You will understand flavour not only as taste, but as process and time
- You will cook with intention — not just ingredients
- You will see how taste connects to sustainability, memory, and human survival
This workshop’s outline
Through science, tasting, culture, and cooking, this workshop explores umami not as a Japanese concept, but as a universal human experience.
Participants journey through five interconnected doors:
- Illumination — the science of taste, satisfaction, and perception
- Savour — tasting umami across Japanese and European ingredients
- Roots — fermentation, preservation, and cultural memory
- Composition — creating flavour through umami synergy
- Nourishment — sustainability, wellbeing, and the future of food
Along the way, participants taste and compare Umami ingredients, and create their own personalised miso soup.
The workshop concludes with one question: What is your own umami?
Facilitator Profile
Kumi Matsushita is an Umami Expert / Curator based in the Netherlands.
With over 20 years of experience as a creative director and marketing strategist in Japan, she began researching umami around 2018 — exploring how fermentation, aging, drying, and extraction encode not just flavour, but cultural memory and systems of survival.
Her work sits at the intersection of culture, history, and science. Since relocating to Europe in 2022, she has been dedicated to offering a new context for umami — one that connects the oldest memory of nourishment to the way we live and eat today.
Her work is not about explaining umami — but about reframing how we understand taste itself.