Cooking Essentials: On MSG
Cooking Essentials covers fundamental ideas that explain the why and how in food preparation methods that are often overlooked.
No, this isn’t another post that regurgitates the crusade against MSG (monosodium glutamate) or supports the claim that the construct of Chinese restaurant syndrome is racism. Demonization and ideological beliefs do us no good. This post is about the lesser-known (but more important) properties of it and how I look at it as a tool in the cooking arsenal.
Chinese Restaurant Syndrome
For context, the Chinese restaurant syndrome has been used as a collective term to describe certain adverse reactions experienced after eating restaurant-prepared food. For whatever reasons, these seemingly allergic reactions were attributed to the food addictive named MSG.
In reality, since its discovery from seaweed in 1909 by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda and its mass production that follows, MSG has been heavily used in restaurants worldwide, and not just restaurants in the West. The link between MSG and these allergic reactions has never been scientifically established. Even if you never use MSG in your cooking, and eat at home all the time, you still ingest free glutamate in your diet. It’s naturally occurring in many food ingredients, from tomatoes to onions and carrots.
Now, I’m not claiming that the Chinese restaurant syndrome isn’t real. It’s worth considering though that such reactions could stem from any number of things:
Carelessly prepared food using inferior ingredients in these establishments. People may be allergic to anything other than MSG: preservatives, chemicals, cleaning agent residues, pesticides, etc. Let’s face it: most restaurants, especially ones that heavily rely on MSG, are simply not great, and some of us can easily feel sick from eating at those restaurants. That alone does not imply that MSG is the culprit.
Overly salty and sugary restaurant food. Due to fierce competition, restaurants try to one-up one another by adding excessive amounts of salt, sugar, and of course, MSG. Chemically, MSG is a sodium salt. Consuming large amounts could result in sodium-potassium imbalance, just as if one consumes large amounts of table salt. One could very easily have too much of a good thing. (Paradoxically, MSG has an amplifying effect in that it increases perceived savoriness. Sometimes food manufacturers may feel compelled to use even more salt in the absence of MSG, and that could be an even worse thing given the already excessive intake of sodium in our modern diet.)
Even though many natural food ingredients are rich in glutamate, commercially available MSG is mostly isolated from biological synthesis, and it could be that the extraction process leaves behind certain offending impurities.
The Umami sensation
When I was a kid, I used to go through my mom’s pantry and taste every single condiment on its own. I remember pausing for quite a while when I first tasted MSG. It didn’t taste salty, yet it reminded me of savory food. It definitely wasn’t sweet. The pure umami sensation was so foreign to me that it felt novel and somewhat empty, without substance, at the same time.
It wasn’t until 2002—long after I first tasted MSG—that biologists at UC San Diego eventually demonstrated that humans have a specific taste receptor for certain amino acids (including glutamic acid), in addition to those for sweetness, sourness, saltiness, and bitterness. Savoriness was formally recognized as the fifth taste.
The Japanese characterize umami as having three properties:1
Spreading across the tongue and coating it (due to the distribution of the specific taste receptor)
A lingering aftertaste lasting for several minutes.
Promoting salivation.
Glutamate and friends
MSG is a chemical salt based on glutamic acid (an amino acid derived from proteins). Table salt is a chemical salt too. Technically speaking, the free glutamate (in ions) in MSG is what activates our umami taste receptors. The other part of MSG, as we taste it, is just sodium ions, which we already get from table salt—there’s nothing foreign in MSG that we are not ingesting already. While free glutamate may naturally occur in foods, it may exist as part of other compounds. But the free glutamate in them is all the same.
Here are some common food items having notably high amounts of glutamate:
Kombu (seaweed): 1-3%
Tomatoes (esp. the jelly part): 0.2%
Parmigiano Reggiano: 1.2-1.6%
Dried shiitake mushrooms: 1%
Green tea: 1% (also contains theanine, the amino acid that’s the main source of umami in tea.)
Anchovies, salted squid: 0.6%
Soy sauce: 0.4-1.7%
Miso: 0.2-0.7%
Marmite: 2%
Fish sauce: 1%
Dry-cured ham: 0.3%
Foods having relatively low amounts of glutamate:
Most common vegetables: 0.02-0.05%
Fresh meats and fish: 0.01-0.05%
You may have noticed that most meats and seafood don’t contain high amounts of glutamate, yet they are commonly associated with savoriness. Why is that?
It turns out that there is another compound that also contributes to umami. It’s known as inosinic acid, or inosine monophosphate (IMP). What’s more interesting is that IMP and glutamate have a synergetic effect combined—the presence of IMP greatly enhances the effect of glutamate! Inosinate is produced when ATP (the energy source in animal muscles) is broken down by enzymes after they die.
Here are some food items rich in IMP:
Katsuobushi (dried bonito): 0.4-0.7%
Dried sardines: 0.3-0.8%
Fresh meats and fish: 0.2%
Curiously, the IMP content in cured animal proteins decreases as they age and gradually turns into glutamic acid. For example, dry-cured ham contains almost no inosinic acid but is rich in glutamic acid.
Japanese food scientists have found that a 1:1 ratio between glutamate and IMP yields the most synergistic effect—as much as 8 times the umami intensity! This is why bonito broth is commonly added to pure seaweed broth in Japanese cuisine. The IMP in bonito broth supercharges the glutamate-rich seaweed broth.
There is yet another compound, guanosine monophosphate (GMP), that’s also synergetic with glutamate. It’s present in dried shiitake mushrooms (but must be rehydrated) and dried tomatoes. That’s why dried shiitake mushrooms have a much more intense flavor compared to fresh ones.
Other compounds are still being discovered. Adenylate, for example, has 1/8 of the strength of inosinate and can be found in octopuses.
Takeaway
Here are my rules of thumb about using MSG incorporating all this information.
If you are already cooking with ingredients that are naturally rich in glutamate, there’s little point in adding extra MSG. Unless you like to say phrases like PIN number or ATM machine. I mean, not that you can’t…
Use the synergetic effects to your advantage. If you are working with ingredients rich in IMP (fresh meats and fish), they can usually benefit from an umami boost by cooking with anything rich in glutamate. MSG can be useful if you want that boost without introducing extra flavors as a side effect. Use it as a creative tool and not something to reach out for by default.
Use dried shiitake or dried tomatoes as boosters for food rich in glutamate, too. This is useful, say, if you want a super tomato sauce bomb that combines tomato sauce with dried tomato powder. Or you want to half the amount of soy sauce you use by adding dried shiitake mushrooms to your dish. Then you won’t have to add that extra 1/4 teaspoon of MSG!
Let the raw ingredients sing and bring the best out of them. Salt, sugar, vinegar, and MSG are modifiers used to correct discrepancies in expected performance. Understand what your end goal is and use what is available to achieve it.
Not everything needs to be an umami bomb. Give your flavor receptors a break by having some variety and contrast between dishes. Your taste buds will thank you for that and you will experience the next dish with renewed excitement.
Chicken powder
Sometimes we hear people who eschew MSG swear by “chicken powder” instead. What exactly is in chicken powder, you ask? Well, it doesn’t take any investigative journalism to find out. We can easily tell from reading the list of ingredients:
Salt, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, dehydrated chicken meat, natural and artificial flavors, sugar, chicken fat, yeast extract, disodium inosinate & disodium guanylate, spice.
Maltodextrin is mostly a neutral filler. The next prominent ingredient after salt is—surprise!—MSG. Yeast extract also provides free glutamate. Also, as we have seen, both inosinate and guanylate are glutamate boosters.
Chicken powder is essentially a glorified MSG product. Imagine how many chickens it would’ve taken to produce the amount of dried stuff that’s as rich in glutamate? Would they still sell it at $4 for a can? Many “chicken flavored” powders don’t even contain meaningful amounts of real chicken!
What about the MSG-free version?
Salt, maltodextrin, sugar, dehydrated chicken meat, natural and artificial flavors, yeast extract, contains less than 2% of chicken fat, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, acacia gum, l-cysteine, thiamine hydrochloride, succinic acid.
Even without MSG, it’s almost the same, except they probably boosted the amount of yeast extract. L-cysteine yields meat flavors with sugars during cooking2. Succinic acid is also a umami flavor modifier.
I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with using chicken powder. I don’t even have too much problem with a home cook being lazy (aren’t we all). But claiming that it’s not MSG or it is more noble is just misinformed. And I do think professional chefs ought to do better than mindlessly sprinkling chicken powder like magic dust.
I have no experience with these products, but that’s only because I rarely rely on premixed formulas. I prefer to be able to freely adjust the salt-to-umami ratio. It’s part of my freedom of expression.
Conclusion
What’s my take on MSG? Like anything else in everything we do, it boils down to mindfulness. We should know full well why we are adding it and the exact effects it achieves. If the ingredients we are cooking with are naturally rich in glutamate, there really isn’t much point in adding it. Do you dip fresh apples in sugar when you eat them? We have a problem if it has come to that. (Unfortunately, a lot of the produce sold in supermarkets is so devoid of flavors that I had a hard time coming up with a counterexample. I still remember when cantaloupes were so sweet that they would attract ants the minute you set them on the table. But that’s for another post.)
MSG and salt are like photo filters or the process of mastering soundtracks for a recording. They alone do not decide how good the outcome will be, but judicious application will help bring out the features you want to highlight. MSG and salt will not fix any underlying issues with the ingredients or preparation. They will not create flavors that weren’t there to begin with. If you want to get better flavors from your cooking, start with quality ingredients and work on technique before considering MSG. After all, if MSG makes a dish 4% tastier, working on getting an 8 from a 5 is more critical than getting from a 5 to a 5.2. Remember, the power of MSG is synergistic—it plays a supporting role and requires other amino acids to work really well.
Privilege alert: When resources were scarce, especially post-war, the use of MSG became prevalent in giving people the illusion of fuller flavors when they did not have the means or luxury to obtain or consume once-available ingredients. To be sure, MSG contains little nutritional value, but the mere comfort it offers and the sensory moments it evokes were some of the very few things for people to cling onto when the goings were tough. We need to acknowledge the fact that most of us having a choice today is a privilege afforded to us in an era of overabundance.
What umami tastes like, Umami Information Center.
Meat Science and Applications, Flavors of Meat Products. ISBN 978-0-203-90808-2.