Why You Should Give MSG a Chance
By Carla Lalli Music. Photo by: Alex Lau.
I first became aware of monosodium glutamate in the early 80s. I was eating Chinese food with my parents and younger sister at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (close your eyes and picture an episode of Seinfeld). After relaying our order to the waiter, my mother and father jinxed each other by simultaneously and emphatically exclaiming “No MSG!”
Whatever MSG was, it was a bad, bad thing.
Life went on. I became an awkward teenager with braces and curly hair that I had no idea what to do with. I had a pair of Jordache jeans and a Heaven sweatshirt, which—obviously—I enjoyed wearing together. Then, in 1986, Cool Ranch Doritos were born. “Omigod how do they make these taste so good,” I would say to myself while eating an entire bag in my room an hour before dinner. And the answer, of course, was MSG.
That’s around the time I started thinking that maybe this MSG stuff wasn’t the monster everyone had made it out to be. I mean, I never got a headache after eating Doritos. Perhaps all the MSG fear-mongering was the result of bad press and prejudice, like when people say they’re “allergic” to green peppers when they actually just hate green peppers. Maybe MSG just needed some good PR.
A bunch of years went by. Eventually, while working in a restaurant, I learned what umami was—a.k.a., the “fifth taste,” a.k.a. the reason why we say “mmmmmm.” When we eat umami-rich foods, we experience it as a savory/rich/delicious taste sensation, and it’s human nature to want more. Fact is, monosodium glutamate is a naturally-occurring substance in lots of foods, including mushrooms, tomatoes, dry-aged meat, soy sauce, and Parmesan. Store-bought MSG is a synthetic version of a naturally occurring thing, and it has the same effect on our taste buds. Which is why those Doritos were so incredibly satisfying and addictive!
The next time I got up close and personal with MSG was in 2014, when I was working on a recipe story with chef Quealy Watson at his restaurant Hot Joy, in San Antonio, TX. That crazy bastard put MSG not only in his cold cucumber salad, but sprinkled it all over his fried rice! And yeah, it tasted good. When we ran his recipes in the magazine, we were faithful to his seasoning, and that’s probably when I bought my first bottle of those white sparkly granules for personal consumption. Just having it in the house sort of made me feel like a rebel. (See: teenage years, above.)
According to Harold McGee, who wrote the legendary book On Food and Cooking and is never wrong about anything, MSG is harmless in small and large quantities. It’s not even on the list of the top 8 allergens that food manufacturers are required to disclose on ingredient labels. On its own, it tastes sort of like salt mixed with dehydrated meat juices. I don’t use it every day, but it is mighty fine sprinkled over a sliced skirt steak along with some flaky salt, and that time I put it into a dry spice for wings, my husband and I ate them all. It’s a match made in heaven for cold noodle salads, fried rice, and soups that could use a little more oomph. Our own senior food editor Andy Baraghani says he never makes a cucumber salad without it, and he’s a helluva smart guy. I bet if you cut up some cantaloupe and seasoned it with lime juice and MSG, it wouldn’t suck. If you doubt me, go lick a sheet of konbu—that white powder on the surface is MSG, too. But the little shaker jar that MSG comes in is a lot simpler to use.
This story originally appeared on Bon Appetit.
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