this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Nutritional yeast, aka flake yeast.
Intense flavor, goes with damm near anything parmesan goes with, and things it doesn't. It's fairly cheap, lasts ages when stored decently, and it packs a nutritional punch.
People like to talk about how umami's spread as a specific flavor into awareness in the west was a massive shift. But a lot of people got locked into the soy and fish sauce focus that was the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami. Even when folks are aware of other things, they still tend to think in terms of sauces and complex recipes for pastes and fermented products. But good old yeast is right there, cranking out a deep and rich flavor.
So it gets slept on pretty hard. It doesn't help that it isn't marketed well. A lot of people that have heard of it think it's more along the lines of a vitamin you take on its own, or lump it in with woowoo nutrition in places where it's called nutritional yeast.
One of my favourite things that really focus on it as a major flavor component is roasted cauliflower. You mix it with the spice blend, and toss it in a bowl, and it opens up with that rich, heady scent that yeast has. I don't measure for it, it's just dumping a bit of garlic and onion powders, salt & pepper, then some paprika. Then maybe two to three tablespoons of the yeast. It's mouth watering, just the smell. Fuck, my mouth is watering thinking of it.
You get that amazing caramelized flavor from the roasting, that delicate floral note that some cauliflower has, the slightly sulfuric tang too. Then the spices lift those, and the yeast ties it all together and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
I like it on corn. Cheese grits with cheddar & nutritional yeast; on popcorn OMG like it better than Parmesan (and I say this as a woman fascinated by cheese) and on corn on the cob.
I do not like it on tofu as sub for scrambled eggs. Nope. Mostly use it for grits and popcorn.
Oh, heck yeah! Elotes en vaso especially. It still needs the cotija or parm, but the yeast bumps it up.
Grits are the same; still needs actual cheese, but the yeast amplifies it. Popcorn, it can just go straight on!
Nutritional yeast is great for scrambled tofu. You can of course season scrambled tofu however you like, but for one block of tofu (quite forgiving in terms of quantities, I think this will work well for anywhere between 200g to 400g of firm or extra-firm tofu):
Keep in mind I don't make any attempt to make mine taste like eggs. If you want scrambled tofu as an egg substitute then you could leave out the cumin (which gives it a more curry flavour) and add stuff like garlic powder, onion powder, and black rock salt at the end (add black rock salt at the very end when it's off the heat, otherwise it will lose its eggy flavour). But personally I prefer a more curry flavour than an eggy flavour!
Nutritional yeast also works well to top avocado toast with. I do toasted sourdough, smashed avocado mixed with lemon juice, nutritional yeast sprinkled on top, then toasted sesame seeds sprinkled on top of that.
I've eaten roasted cauliflower with parmesan before and it was delicious so I'm gonna have to give that one a go!
This is absurd. Are you claiming that western peoples never ate meat? Mushrooms? Etc?
No, they clearly meant that umami wasn't recognized as the fifth taste until recently.
But never mind that; I just want to chime in that garum (fish sauce) has been a thing in the west since ancient Roman times, if not earlier.
I recommend the Tasting History videos about it, BTW:
No I think what they mean was that we did not discover (or the Japanese, rather) that we have separate receptors on our tongues for umami until fairly recently. We knew what it was, but didn't have a proper name for it.
I mean, you quoted the line and missed the last two words as umami. That's absurd, it's right there to see.
Up until the term umami spread outside of Japan, nobody called the flavor that. And it still took longer before people figured out that it was its own taste in the same wau sour, bitter, salty, and sweet are; that it has distinct receptors.
Before that, there wasn't really a specific term in use. When people referred to what is now called umami, the vocabulary was different. Savory and meaty are the two I remember being most used, and they have other usages for food. Savory is very often just used as an antonym for sweet, and meaty just means "meat like" without drawing a distinction between the saltiness and slight metallic tang of meat from the part that is umami.
I don't know how old you are, so you may or may not have been around during the spread of the term and its eventual discovery of having its own receptors. But it was "viral" in the way it initially crept in, then exploded as every cooking show started talking about it and familiarity with the term spread. There was a collective "ohhhhhh! That's what I've been experiencing", and the word got adopted. Now it's a part of the collective lexicon.