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You’ve seen it at the end of hundreds of recipes: “Add salt to taste.” Whether it’s beef stew or a chocolate chip cookie, salt is a seasoning we often lean on as an inoffensive way to wake up the palate. But, like it or not, sometimes salt needs help. (Coming from a long-time salt worshiper, this is saying a lot.) For a surefire way to kickstart your tastebuds, crack open the MSG. I do it on a regular basis.
What is MSG?
Though the misinformation about MSG is waning, there are still plenty of folks who’ve heard (and believe) that it’s poisonous, leads to health problems, or is bad for you just because. This is incorrect. Our Senior Health Editor, Beth Skwarecki, breaks down how the MSG scare started and the racism that kept it alive long after it was disproven.
MSG is exactly what its longer chemical name, monosodium glutamate, indicates: a harmless combination of sodium and the glutamate amino acid. Amino acids combine to form proteins, and they are naturally in our bodies, plants, and other animals. In fact, glutamates and monosodium glutamate are also naturally occurring in plenty of our food already, like parmesan cheese, kombu seaweed, tomatoes, mushrooms, and grapes—to name a few. You might already be enjoying MSG more than you know.
What does MSG taste like?
Monosodium glutamate is a teeny, clear, crystalline substance. It looks a lot like salt at first glance, but when you look closely you’ll see that the granules are longer and more regular in shape. It dissolves quickly so it doesn’t have a texture when you eat it.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
We identify the flavor of MSG as umami, or savory. It’s one of the five elemental flavors we can detect: umami, salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Like sweet or salty, or any building block, it’s not exactly like anything else. Umami is a word we can use to describe other things, though, and that can help you identify when you taste it.
I often can taste umami in deeply savory foods—dishes with mushrooms, meats, olives, aged cheeses or yeast extracts. When you eat pizza, especially pepperoni pizza, umami is there. Umami adds complexity of flavor, almost like a bass line beneath the music of the entire dish. If you take a bite of risotto and you can feel your mouth water, MSG is actually what is making that happen. When you eat MSG, the glutamate receptors in your taste buds (yep, your body was made to detect glutamates) fire up and actually trigger salivation.
Use MSG in your cooking and baking
I want all of my cooking to make people salivate and take another bite. Since MSG doesn’t taste like anything, it can go in sweet and savory dishes without throwing off the flavor profile. Adding a pinch here or there is going to give your casserole, spaghetti sauce, chocolate cake, or blondies recipe an irresistible je ne sais quoi. I highly recommend adding MSG to brownies—here’s my recipe for dark chocolate soy sauce brownies, but you can use boxed mix and just stir in a quarter-teaspoon of MSG to get the same effect without using soy sauce.
The same goes for savory dishes. I like to stir a pinch into soups and stews toward the end, taste, and take it from there. Basically, you use MSG as you would any seasoning in your cupboard—add, taste, adjust. Even though sodium is part of the MSG equation, it’s not exactly salty, so you will likely use it in conjunction with a pinch of regular cooking salt.
If I’m making homemade stocks or broths, I’ll add about a quarter-teaspoon of MSG per four cups of liquid before I add salt simply because I might not need as much as I think. Taste the food if you can, and then add salt to taste. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes we add more salt when what we’re actually looking for is more umami. Using a smidge of MSG can actually help you reduce your salt intake. As Beth mentions in her article linked above, “sodium only makes up 12% of the weight of MSG (as opposed to 40% of table salt).”
Get an MSG cellar
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
One of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten was my MSG cellar. But you don’t need one made especially for MSG—you can use any salt cellar. You can also buy these cute panda Ajinomoto MSG shakers instead of a cellar to easily sprinkle it onto your food just like you would salt or pepper.
In the store, MSG might be packaged in medium-sized clear bags, or small seasoning bottles. Check the seasoning aisle of your grocery store. In the Uzbek market near me they carry clear bags of Ajinomoto and I decant it at home into my MSG cellar and smaller back-up jars for easier storage. In my Shoprite, I’ll find MSG in seasoning shakers like these from Ac’cent and Spice Supreme. A little goes a long way, so a shaker this size can last you eight months or longer.
Here are some things I’ll always season with MSG:
All my egg dishes. MSG brings out the best in your breakfast. All it takes is a pinch per two eggs. Add it to your scrambles, omelettes, quiches, and casseroles.
Soups and broths. MSG brings complexity, a more “round” flavor, to broths. It’s subtle, but once you have a broth with MSG it’s impossible to go without. A quarter-teaspoon per quart of broth will add a richness that pairs well with every soup, from sweet, earthy borscht to savory beef stew.
Fresh sliced tomatoes. Enjoy the best tomato sandwich or BLT of your life. There is no better way to quickly improve crappy tomatoes than to add a mixture of MSG, salt, and sugar. And even if they’re not crappy, I still add it—sans sugar.
Burgers and meatballs. Any mixed ground meat situation is better with MSG. Beef and veal meatballs, pork dumplings, turkey burgers—especially turkey burgers—will have a richer, more meaty flavor from a dose of MSG (about a half-teaspoon per pound of meat). This is actually a prime example of when more salt just wasn’t giving me the flavor I wanted. MSG and less salt fixed my burgers and meatballs.
Salad dressings. Whether you’ve been looking for a way to avoid those anchovies in your homemade caesar, or your Dijon dressing needs a softened edge, MSG is a great way to improve your whole salad.
Gravies and sauces. MSG brings a welcome depth of flavor to tomato sauces, meatiness to brown gravies, and while the French might never admit this, all of the mother sauces are better with MSG.
Roasted vegetables. Part of the reason that roasted veggies are so good is because the flavors are concentrated and the natural sugars caramelize. Adding MSG will elevate them to a whole new level of flavor. Simply sprinkle it in when you toss them with oil and salt before roasting. If you’re new to roasting, here’s the easy way to do it.
