About Umami Guru

What Umami Guru is

Umami Guru is a cooking platform for the three great East Asian cuisines — Japanese, Korean and Chinese — built around the idea they share: umami, the savoury depth that makes food taste alive.

There are 199 recipes on the site today, and every one of them is free to read. There is no paywall on the food.

Recipes chosen and checked one by one

We do not publish everything we can find. Each dish is selected by hand from a regional tradition, researched against sources in its own language, and checked before it goes up — quantities, timings, and the small details that decide whether a dish works in a home kitchen rather than a restaurant one.

The catalogue grows slowly on purpose. A recipe that has not been verified does not get published, and when a reader tells us something is off, the recipe is corrected rather than left alone.

A recipe that adapts to you

The hardest part of East Asian cooking outside Asia is rarely technique — it is the shopping. So the site is built to close that gap rather than pretend it does not exist.

• Ingredient substitutions. If doubanjiang or gochujang is not sold where you live, the assistant proposes a replacement that keeps the dish recognisable, and explains what changes in the result.
• A shopping basket with real prices. The ingredients you need, grouped by store, with prices for your city — so you know the cost before you commit to the dish.
• Portions that recalculate. Change the number of servings and every quantity, in every step, follows.

Help while you are actually cooking

Most cooking sites stop being useful the moment your hands are busy. Ours is designed for exactly that moment.

• Step-by-step cooking mode. One instruction at a time, with its own timer, so you never lose your place in a long recipe.
• Voice. Steps and answers are read aloud, so you can keep cooking without touching a screen with wet hands.
• An AI sous-chef you can ask. «Can I use butter instead?», «How do I know it is done?», «What do I do while this simmers?» — answered in the context of the dish you are cooking right now, not in general.
• Cooking challenges. A reason to cook something new this week, if you want one.

Who runs it

Umami Guru is an independent, self-funded project operated from the Netherlands. It is not a content farm and not a syndication site: nothing here is scraped, bought in, or republished from elsewhere.

Recipes are published under the Umami Guru Kitchen byline, which is the small team behind the site and the tools we have built around it. Our use of AI is disclosed in the Privacy Policy.

Contact

Corrections, questions, and «this step is wrong» emails are all welcome — they are how the recipes get better. Write to umami.guru@outlook.com.