My umami suggestion would be to use a vegetarian dashi (a Japanese broth), one made from kombu (the Japanese name for a certain kind of seaweed) and dried shiitake mushrooms in place of generic vegetable stock.

I've collected seaweed for kombu from the local beaches, just rinse in the ocean, let dry, and brush off any sand later (or don't bother with the sand and strain the dashi). Of course, kombu can be found in Asian markets.

Kombu was the original source of MSG (an easy source of the umami flavor); the Japanese extracted the pure crystalline powder by processing seaweed as abundant MSG naturally occurs in this plant. Today, commercial MSG is synthesized.

These days, I make my own dried shiitake mushrooms. I buy the discounted "ugly shiitakes" at the farmer's market; they taste the same as the full priced "pretty" shiitakes. They dry out in a couple days on the kitchen table.

Here's a recipe for vegetarian dashi if you want one

Web Link

although I just improvise.

For the purpose of this vegetarian chili, I would probably chomp into a shiitake after I was done making the dashi. If it still had any flavor, I'd chop it up and toss into the chili itself. Dried shiitakes have a pleasant slightly smoky flavor that the regular ones do not have.

Ideally, dashi should be made fresh (just like traditional stocks, fish fumet, etc.), but you can make a bigger batch. It'll keep in the fridge for a few days, or you can freeze it.

Chili is the absolutely perfect suggestion for this time of year. (By coincidence I'd just sorted dried beans and put them to soak for a related "bean pot" dish. The range of such dishes is legion.)

Now some quibbling about background info you touched on (from a lifelong student of tastes and food science):

First, natural umami agents aren't limited to glutamates -- in different food groups, the main families are glutamates, guanylates, and inosinates. (These products are sometimes isolated or semi-synthesized as food additives -- as anyone knows who reads labels -- but they're the natural components that add the flavor-enhancing quality to the condiments, broths, cheeses, mushrooms, seaweeds, etc. that various cultures use as umami aids.)

Second -- and this may be a subtle point, so bear with me. After the discovery of umami receptor cells on the tongue, it became fashionable to "explain" umami (a compact Japanese term for what in the US was long called "flavor enhancement") as a "fifth taste." That's tidy, but has problems both as a teaching concept and when its literal implications are explored.

The usual four taste sensations manifest readily in subjective evaluation, such as blind taste tests (the, pardon the phrase, meat and potatoes of "sensory evaluation" of tastes for various practical purposes, and a basic tool in related specialties like winemaking). Even evaluating the four is a bit complex because they interact, but basically, if one of the four is added vs. not added to an existing flavor, people can pick out the separate component consistently, blind. Not so with umami, which acts to _enhance_ other tastes rather than to add something new. Also (per Davidson, "Oxford Companion to Food," 1999), additional taste classes, identifiable in taster evaluations and understood as "basic" in some cultures' cooking, include "metallic," "astringent," and "pungent" (as in hot peppers). Umami (as well as "metallic") interact strongly with the classic four sensations to modify their perceived effect, while "astringent" and "pungent" are also physically sensed, but by different mechanisms distributed throughout the mouth. So some people argue you should speak of eight basic tastes if you're going beyond four.

The upshot of this is that "fifth taste" sounds good to anatomists who don't deal with taste trials; non-food-savvy journalists love the phrase; but it has real issues if you embrace the full scope of what the food world means by "taste." So I still describe umami as flavor enhancement, a feature of so many things we cook with, from Parmesan cheese to SE-Asian fish sauce.

Postscript, more on bean pots: If you haven't ever read Charles Simic's piquant little 1992 essay "On food and happiness," a centerpiece is special-occasion bean-pot dish in his native Serbia, recalling an event when he ate everyone else "under the table," and still seemingly didn't get his fill.

The essay appeared in the food-writing anthology that was the Spring 1992 number of the literary semiannual "Antaeus." I have extra copies of you need one (or Simic might have posted the essay online by now). I'll send a copy of the Antaeus volume (it has lots of other good stuff too) if you contact me. (If you don't have my current email address handy, reach me via Gene Cordero.)

Another possibility -- while I've never tried it myself -- would be to add some parmesan rinds to the chili, perhaps in cheesecloth for the cooking period, to extract umami.

Some markets actually sell parmesan rinds.

My guess is that you can also buy a hunk of parmesan, use it up, then freeze the remaining rind until you need it.

I'm almost done with a hunk of Grana Padano, I might try this myself.

Food Party! readers are smart. Good show you guys. Max Hauser = Gene Cordero somehow? The plot thickens. And parm rinds - yes yes yes! Max I know that thing about 5th taste and I usually add pungent to the list. Metallic & astringent take it too far for the average taster to relate too, in my humble writers opinion. But I love when you go into the depth of discussion. Thank you!

And speaking of piquant, I didn't write anything about chili types either - so anyone please add your favorites. Lately, I have been purchasing from The Chili Shop, and enjoy their Hatch Chili blend. Grown near Hatch, New Mexico, it is prized for it's special contribution to a pot o'chili.

Agreed, Single Guy -- I haven't used them myself, but Parmesan rinds are a particular (and thrifty) umami source in Italian folk cooking, they're tossed into soups and so on.

This reference website, with a Japanese perspective, Web Link lists Parmesans at 1.2 to 1.6% free (soluble) glutamate by weight. (The rind zone being the part of the cheese that's lost the most water, you'd expect even higher concentration there.)

An interesting bit of trivia is that, besides being present, even prominent, in many foods (because it's a protein component common in animal and vegetable cells, including throughout our bodies), glutamate (glutamic acid) in foods such as cheese occurs together with sodium. That means, in the presence of moisture, those components together are identical to MSG. They are "natural MSG." Indeed MSG as a food additive isn't even truly synthetic, it's commonly made via a grain fermentation that concentrates the same natural sources. Some folks who've convinced themselves they're "sensitive to" (or even "allergic to") MSG -- as a result of its pop-culture stigma as a food additive -- are blissfully unconscious that they've always consumed it, in significant amounts and without ill effects, from natural foods without knowing it, and so have all of our ancestors. It's part of our natural diet. That's why (as Nathan Myhrvold summed it up in his massive modernist cookbook), clinical testing has consistently and relentlessly disproven the self-diagnoses of people claiming to be MSG-sensitive, though sometimes they're sensitive to something else in foods that they misinterpreted as MSG sensitivity, it being such a popular buzz phrase. (Not that I consider commercial MSG any substitute for good cheese, seaweeds, tamari, or any of its many other better-flavored strong natural sources.)

I do use the parm rinds and they are great for soups and sauces with a Mediterranean flare. Chili... why not, but maybe pushing that southwest expectation? Same with dashi in chili. To each his own though. I keep them in a little glass tupperware in the cheese drawer. Don't throw yours out! If you don't want them - send over to me.

Re MSG - I agree with you Max about sensitivities and I will write something similar about gluten soon. (I expect people to give me a hard time about it). However - it's good to add the macrobiotic perspective here: anything taken out of the whole food is not optimal. MSG, cornstarch, white flour, white sugar, etc are problematic because they don't have the rest of the food to balance out their overwhelming affects.