The most memorable thing I had at Umami Burger wasn't the burger, it was the ketchup, Here's what I wrote about it at the time:
The concoction, which looks and smells like regular ketchup, seems bionically enhanced, a sensation your tongue quickly senses with its heightened flavor, an engineered savoriness not normally associated with the condiment. Yet you know it has nothing to do with its sweetness, its saltiness or its sourness: It's all the essence of umami.
Now, they've bottled the stuff and made it available for a limited time through their website. At a price of $7.50 per bottle, it's somewhat costly for a not-so-secret recipe. But then if you'd rather make it on your own, shouldn't you have been making your own ketchup all along?
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If you decide to just buy a bottle,you better act fast. Supplies seem to be limited, Umami's Umami Dust, a non-MSG Umami Dust that does the job of MSG, is already all sold out ever since the online market went live earlier this week.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.