Making a recent dinner, my wife Elisabeth put together Sohla El-Waylly’s “hot and tingly” smashed cucumber salad, a wisp of a recipe that combines favorite ingredients like cukes, chili crisp, salt, sugar, and rice vinegar, along with something less commonly used in our household, MSG. Tucking in, it wasn’t a surprise that the salad was good, but the monosodium glutamate gave it an extra savory deliciousness that made me wonder if Elisabeth intentionally set the salad bowl out of my reach.
In my decades living in North America and Europe, MSG was an unfortunately infrequently used ingredient, yet here it was making our tongues happy. Being drawn to it now was inspired by a trend I picked up on while reading some of the best new and recent cookbooks.
Easiest to pick out is the just-released Salt Sugar MSG, by Calvin Eng and Phoebe Melnick, that’s a Cantonese-American extravaganza of deliciousness. Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho made regular use of MSG in 2024’s The Memory of Taste, and Meathead Goldwyn makes a plea for its use with a special section way up on page five of his brand-new cookbook, The Meathead Method.
Plugging MSG into Eat Your Books, a subscription service that allows you to search recipes from within your own cookbook collection, I could see that among my cookbooks, El-Waylly makes great use of it in her 2023 James Beard Award book, Start Here. Helen Graves has a recipe for an MSG martini in her BBQ Days, BBQ Nights, along with a warning that—I’ll paraphrase—you’ll likely get hammered if you have more than one of them.
If I searched Eat Your Books for MSG but took out the results from these books, the list dried up to almost nothing. That’s a shame considering what great work the ingredient does in the kitchen. El-Waylly uses it in that cucumber salad, a cauliflower and coconut soup, and a cool pistachio ranch fun dip made fun because she loves ranch. Meathead likes it on chicken, mac and cheese, and meat in general. Tu David Fu uses it with stir-fried clams, sticky rice dumplings, and tomato-braised salmon belly. Calvin Eng uses it on just about everything.
“I keep salt, sugar, MSG on my counter all the time,” says Eng who’s such a fan that he has a little MSG heart tattoo on the back of his left arm.
A self-professed “lover and user of MSG on a massive scale,” he still has aha moments with it that help him appreciate its power. His favorite example is Cantonese chicken broth with scallions, garlic, ginger, and Shaoxing wine, finished with salt and MSG. Once for a private dinner, he featured a head-to-head tasting of the broth with salt next to broth with salt and MSG and was deeply impressed at the difference.
“It adds so much umami,” he says, referring to the savory “fifth taste” that accompanies salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. “It adds a layer. It makes you want more.” Indeed, I tried little head-to-heads with mugs of my own broth and enjoyed getting a hang of its effects and how to use it. Salt adds depth, but salt and MSG can make broth bigger, deeper, rounder, and more delicious.
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