MSG is no longer a guilty kitchen secret – here’s how to cook with it
Earlier this year Ryan Riley, the chef behind Life Kitchen, which designs recipes for those living with cancer, teamed up with Holland & Barrett to create a range of flavour-enhancing foods for anyone experiencing taste loss.
One is Sensation Salt, a blend of salt, white pepper and Monosodium glutamate (MSG), “which work together to create a full sensory experience,” said Riley.
Now Ocado is stocking Ajinomoto umami seasoning, arguably the world’s most famous MSG brand. Cookery writer MiMi Aye reacted with delight. “OUR TIME HAS FINALLY COME,” she wrote on Instagram, with chefs and food writers, including Nigella Lawson, filling her responses in appreciation.
“This is middle-class acceptability, hallelujah,” Aye, author of Mandalay: Recipes and Tales from a Burmese Kitchen, told The Telegraph. Meanwhile, Canadian Tiktok sensation Logan Moffitt, better known as the “cucumber guy”, has added to MSG’s popularity, sprinkling it in his now-famous salad recipe.
“I love that it’s being normalised,” added Ana Da Costa, a recipe developer and cook. “But it’s also a bit sad that it needs to take white people to use it to be an ‘ok’ ingredient. It’s been around for ages. It’s obviously a big step for it now not to be a monster.”
What is MSG?
Monosodium glutamate is an odourless crystalline additive used widely around the world. It can be found in soups, stock cubes, canned vegetables, crisps and more. It is essentially a synthetic production of glutamates which occur naturally in umami-rich foods including tomatoes, mushrooms and parmesan.
First extracted by the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda from seaweed broth in 1908, it is now made by fermenting starch, sugar beets and sugar cane or molasses and crystallising the solution into a powder.
On its own it has little flavour, but is a powerful flavour enhancer, boosting the umami – or savouriness – of almost anything. “It’s basically a type of salt, the clue’s in the name,” says Aye.
Why the controversy?
Initially more popular in the USA than Asia, mistrust of MSG largely stems from a 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine describing sickness after eating a Chinese meal.
It led to an anti-MSG movement, and became associated with symptoms such as numbness, weakness and headaches, based largely on poorly conducted research. By the 1990s, studies had failed to find evidence MSG is unhealthy – but the stereotype has endured.
How to use MSG
MSG has long been popular in Asian cookery. “In most southeast Asian communities it’s completely normal [to use it],” says Aye. “It’s just another little shaker, alongside the tray of cooking ingredients at the side of the stove.”
Aye’s most recent book had an essay dedicated to MSG and in 2021 she guest edited an issue of Pit Magazine which focused on MSG. It’s the most successful issue of the food publication to date.
MiMi Aye’s guest edited issue of Pit Magazine, which was dedicated to MSG
Aye uses it similarly to salt, as an ingredient while cooking, primarily in savoury dishes. “If I put a tablespoon of salt in, I’d put in a quarter tablespoon of MSG. It makes stuff more savoury, the same way salt makes things saltier and sugar makes things sweeter.”
And it’s not only for Asian dishes. Aye adds it to tomato sauce for a “more rounded, richer flavour,” or to salad dressings for depth. “People are surprised, but it can work in everything.”
For Judy Joo, founder of Seoul Bird, a group of Korean restaurants in Britain and the US, MSG is “a great shortcut” when there’s a limited time to pack as much flavour as possible into food.
MSG can be used as a seasoning after cooking for the likes of popcorn or chips. Da Costa, who grew up in Macau to Chinese and Portuguese parents, says “MSG has always been normalised in our household, I’ve never really thought it wasn’t something people use.” She adds it to almost anything, including desserts. “I’ve done a recipe for a flan with MSG in the caramel, it went down a treat.”
A little goes a long way – if cooking for two, half a teaspoon will suffice. Da Costa’s mother would use it in Chinese recipes but not Portuguese ones, though Da Costa uses it in bacalhau à brás, a cod and potato dish, or feijoada, a bean stew. “MSG is an awesome ingredient to have at home,” says James Chant, founder of Matsudai Ramen in Cardiff. “A shaker filled with two-thirds salt and one-third MSG adds a new layer of flavour to anything you cook.”
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What are the alternatives?
For Joo, alternative ways to add umami to dishes include seaweed, tomatoes, mushrooms, anchovies, Parmesan, black garlic, and “anything fermented, like kimchi, soy sauce, fish sauce, gochujang or doenjang, which is why Korean food is packed full of flavour.”
Da Costa argues that umami-rich products like mushroom powder or Parmesan “don’t give the same umami taste. They are umami, but it’s not pure umami. You could put them in desserts or popcorn, but it would taste cheesy, or mushroomy.” Umami simply boosts the flavours already there.
Is MSG bad for you?
MSG is “a form of something called glutamic acid” explains nutritionist Caroline Farrell. That amino acid is found in everything from mushrooms to cheese and tomatoes.
While MSG is made by fermenting and then crystallising glucose (a sugar-like molecule) extracted from plants, “it breaks down in the same way as a natural glutamate,” says Farrell.
MSG vs salt
Contrary to popular belief, MSG may actually be less dangerous for your health than normal salt. It’s the sodium content of salt that increases our blood pressure and our risk of heart disease when it’s consumed in high amounts.
Gram for gram, MSG contains a third of the sodium found in table salt, meaning that it may be safer to use as a seasoning. And, because MSG is more potent than salt, you don’t need to use so much of it in your cooking.
MSG and headaches
Headaches are a major component of so-called “Chinese restaurant syndrome”, which was said to occur within hours of eating MSG-laden food and whose symptoms also include profuse sweating, stomach cramps and nausea.
Though it has long been blamed on MSG, Farrell says, “I haven’t seen any studies which show that the amount you might consume in a typical takeaway or restaurant meal would result in these symptoms,” Farrell adds.
Instead, the condition may result from other ingredients traditionally used in Chinese cooking. Natural compounds such as histamine, tyramine, phenylethylamine and glutamine figure heavily in black beans, prawns and soy sauce and all four have been linked to headaches.
MSG sensitivity
Around one per cent of people are thought to have a sensitivity to MSG. However, this occurs only when it is eaten in very large amounts of around three grams. Typically a food or dish enhanced with MSG contains just half a gram.