The glories of bone marrow from a Singapore street stall

Along with his description of a delicious meal, Konstantin Kakaes explores just where bone marrow's flavour comes from. From Guy Crosby, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard and the science editor of America's Test Kitchen, he discovers that the many nucleotides present in bone marrow amplify the umami taste of glutamate by as much as 20 to 30 times. "Crosby reminded me that the function of bone marrow is to produce red blood cells. Because it is, in effect, a factory for the creation of cells, Crosby says, bone marrow is like an egg: 'a perfect food. It's got everything in it needed to create and sustain life'."

Not So Offal: Why Bone Soup, A 'Perfect Food,' Tastes So Meaty : The Salt : NPR:

I ate the best meat I've ever eaten through a straw.
When the Singaporean food stall proprietor who'd just served me a plate of bones first offered the straw, I refused. I didn't want to take any shortcuts as I worked the tastiest bits of marrow out from the skeletal hollows.
But a couple of minutes into my repast, my face smeared with the viscous broth the bones had come in, I couldn't face the thought of leaving some of this food unexploited. So I took the proffered straw, inserted it down into a bone cavity and inhaled.
It tasted like the first bite of an excellent steak, only more so. Unlike biting into a rib-eye, when that initial sensation gives way to something less exultant and chewier, the marrow lingered on the tongue. I felt as if I was mainlining glutamate, the substance responsible for umami.
These bones had been cooked for hours in a fluorescent red amalgam of tomato and chili.Sup tulang, as this dish is called in Singapore, is Malay for "bone soup." I ate it at Deen Tulang Specialist, one of a handful of stalls specializing in the dish in the Golden Mile Food Centre, one of many food courts, known as hawker centers, in Singapore.

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