Cooking Influencer Keeps Banging On About Umami Like People Know What The Hell That Means

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

Some person who puts overly-complicated and tiresome recipes on the internet has spoken extensively about umami in recent weeks despite a growing number of people admitting they don’t really know what the fuck that even means.

From what he’s leading his followers to believe, popular local foodie influencer Peter Gaffney or ‘Feedy_with_Petey’ as he’s known to thousands, shared a tinned spaghetti jaffle recipie on his channels yesterday evening that included references to umami that had much of the audience, and this newsroom, feeling confused.

Gaffney explained he likes to add a few drops of Worcestershire sauce to the inside of the buttered bread to add a “meaty flavour” to the otherwise “goated” mid-afternoon weekend snack.

The description Gaffney gave of what our fragile society’s “freakazoids” and “latent perverts” refer to as “the fifth sense of taste” only added to the mass levels of confusion.

“I love Worcestershire [sauce] because it’s an instant power-up for flavour and it’s got this naughty, smokey umami flavour than can turn something as banal as a ‘sketti jaffle’ into something that’d get Iain Hewitson harder than the Cullinan Diamond,” he said.

“Sometimes, I even have a quick swig straight from the bottle.”

The tinned spaghetti jaffle video marks a clear turning point in the discourse around umami here in the Diamantina Shire, with readers of The Advocate sharing their own understanding of what umami is given the most recent explanation by this genderless fruitloop on social media.

“You know, I always thought it was umami that gave White Ox that delicious aroma. Like when you walk into the smoking section of a pub adjacent to a maximum security prison, like the Dudley in Bathurst or wherever, and to smell someone smoking White Ox and you know that you’re in the company of someone who’s just been let out of prison for a violent crime,” said one reader.

“But it turns out, it’s the flavour you get when you rawdog a stock cube? We’ve all done it. Taken a little nibble out of a stock cube like a mouse. That’s umami. Or is it the sharpness you get in your chest when you haven’t done a cone for years and do one at a kick ons and immediately begin dying right there on the couch. Is that umami? I’m unsure now.”

The Advocate reached out to Gaffney for comment but as he works on social media, he was still in bed at the time of print.

More to come.