Vegan Umami Sauce

Easy Vegan Umami Sauce Recipe for Flavorful Dishes

The search for umami is something that has kept the food world on its toes for the past decades if not centuries. Much like a lot of people in the culinary world, umami remained a mystery to my head and my palette until it wasn’t. Every good chef or passionate cook has danced with umami at least once in their life, with some ending up being hungover with the flavor for years to come. I remember the first time I tasted umami — it was subtle yet powerful.

It was my first time in Japan and I was a teenager just starting off with my culinary journey not knowing that I would be introduced to a whole new taste. Umami was everywhere in Japan, it was in their meat, their vegetables, and even their soup. Tasting umami felt like entering a new world of possibilities of savory goodness and even though you couldn’t fully explain the taste, you wanted more of it.

So, that’s why, for the past decade, I’ve been trying to create a simple yet robust vegan umami sauce to constantly remind me of the taste of culinary wonder.

Umami is nature’s flavor so to make it, I had to turn to the world’s most potent boosters. Creating umami meant understanding flavors, their complexity, and how they mingled with each other. And after testing out different combinations, I finally came up with a vegan umami sauce that is earthy, flavorful, and versatile.

The real genius of the sauce lies in the vastness of its ingredients — how seemingly far flavors combine to create something so unfamiliar yet so good. You got the kombu from the sea, shiitake from the ground, coconut from high up in the trees, and healthy salt from the mountains. Somehow, they all worked!

The applications for this sauce are endless! Stir-fry? Tofu? Roasted vegetables? You can count on this sauce to turn anything into an umami flavor bomb!

Discovering the Secret

Finding the secret to umami was, by all accounts, not easy. The process of trying to mimic a natural but robust and complex flavor by blending multiple ingredients together could easily go wrong, in fact, it did go wrong for me a couple of times. Complexity seems like something that can only be achieved through a high level of difficulty — but that could not be farther from the truth. After trying to blend different ingredients a dozen times, I found out that the secret wasn’t in how ingredients you put, but in what you put instead.

The world is full of umami and all we needed to do was to logically combine nature’s ingredients. This vegan umami sauce is a rich but simple base that you can tweak to your liking depending on what type of umami you want. If you want the sauce to be more pungent, you can experiment on adding different types of dashi. If you want a tangier umami taste, perhaps adding fermented products could fit your taste better. By all means, take your favorite flavor booster and add it to the sauce!

If I were to be honest, the secret to good umami is to find yourself in the ingredients that you blend. So let’s head to the kitchen and get cooking.