Add An Umami Kick To Your Tomato Sandwiches With One Ingredient

A tomato sandwich typically involves more than just tomatoes and bread — even if there's not a whole lot more to it. You can eat whatever you like, but those two ingredients alone might make for a plain lunch. Still, they're a British classic: tomato sandwiches usually use white bread, and Elton John's favorite sandwich required nothing more than tomatoes, cheese, and bread. But a really good tomato sandwich will make the juicy tomatoes the star of the show, rather than a supporting character, with a simple umami flourish: miso.

Hot sauce makes for an easy embellishment, but for something a little more complex, you can try adding miso. If you're unfamiliar, it's a Japanese fermented soybean paste, with a big savory kick. Mixing about half a teaspoon of miso into the mayonnaise for your sandwich should be all you need. It's an easy way to upgrade your tomato sandwich with just one ingredient, and it can add a savory element without adding any extra proteins. Plus, if you're pairing it with soup — as you can do with any good tomato sandwich — it's an added bonus if your soup contains miso, as well.

Building your tomato and miso sandwich may not be quite as simple as it sounds, just because you might discover that miso comes in lots of different colors. Every type of miso will be made from the soybean paste that's been fermented in koji mold, but white miso has a more mild and sweet taste, while yellow miso has a slightly stronger salty flavor. There's also red miso, which ferments for a longer period of time, and has an even bolder taste. White miso is an easy choice for a tomato sandwich, but you can still mess around with red miso if you're feeling adventurous.

Essentially, the signature miso flavor is umami: this can be challenging to describe beyond it being savory, but it's also a common flavor in meat, veggies, and some cheeses. The secret of umami is that the flavor comes from proteins and amino acids. And do you know what else just happens to be packed with umami flavor? Tomatoes, which include lots of glutamic acid, a chemical responsible for creating that savory flavor. Food science aside, what it means for your sandwich is that the tomatoes and miso will enhance each other's flavors very cleanly, and that you'll only add to that savory profile by including other additions like cheese.