Make Shit Good

Many cuisines have an entire area of cooking that's about concentrating free glutamate in a finished dish, providing an umami sense that probably evolved to help tell us when we're eating foods that are good sources of protein and minerals. That's the story of pretty much every meat or mushroom stock, demi-glace, tomato sauce, fermented foods like fish sauce, miso, gochujang, Marmite and aged cheese, and vegan standbys like nutritional yeast, broccoli and black beans.

MSG is a pure form of free glutamate--glutamic acid bound to a sodium ion that dissociates from it in solution--and allows for adding that sense at will without drastically changing the flavor profile of a dish. The 5'-ribonucleotides, commonly available as disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate, amplify the effect of MSG significantly when added to it at a 3% ratio. Though they're expensive in absolute terms, a small jar of "I+G", a 50/50 mix of the two, can be had for the cost of a single fast food meal and will last practically forever. The mixture of glutamic acid and inosinic acid is exploited to great effect in Japanese dashi, combining glutamic acid from kelp and inosinic acid from dried and fermented skipjack (鰹節, katsuobushi).

Glutamic acid is an amino acid that occurs in great quantity in nature, and though glutamate can act as a neurotoxin in the brain, there's no obvious relationship to dietary glutamate, nor is there any compelling evidence that glutamate sensitivity is a common problem. The hysteria over MSG is the result of a dubious letter published in a scientific journal in 1968 that may itself have been a racist hoax, and even studies of people identified as sensitive to MSG have consistently failed to reproduce symptoms. Many of the purported symptoms of MSG sensitivity can just as easily be caused by eating a meal high in sodium. The levels of free glutamate in foods cooked with MSG are also comparable to those in many common foods--in other words, if MSG really made people sick, so would pasta with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese.

Note the plural "people" there. I'm in no way excluding the possibility that there exist individuals who are genuinely harmed by a high-glutamate diet, and in my life I've met one person who actually had to avoid free glutamate from common foods. He could not eat mushrooms, tomatoes, black beans, hard cheeses, etc., etc. He also suffered from a dangerous hypertensive syndrome when he took over-the-counter cough syrup. My point is, rare conditions still exist. Don't deliberately feed glutamate-rich foods to people who claim a glutamate sensitivity, no matter how spurious you think it might be. That's shitty behavior and not what we're here to do. That being said:

My pet conspiracy theory is that adding MSG to foods where it's appropriate may actually be good for us: though free glutamate increases the palatability of foods and generally leads us to eat more, we are bombarded on all sides in the modern world by ultra-processed foods that contain free glutamate (as monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed proteins, or autolyzed yeast extract) and/or the ribonucleotides. These foods often contain these additives to provide the gustatory qualities of meat, beans and high-protein vegetables while consisting almost entirely of low-quality carbohydrates and fats (see, for example, Cool Ranch Doritos), and I think our ongoing exposure to these foods has helped to decouple the immediate reward of an umami-rich meal from the longer-lasting sensation of satiety from having eaten nourishing food.

So: use MSG for good. Use it to make your chicken taste more delightfully chicken-y, to make your black beans irresistible, to punch up your stir-fry. Every fast food outlet and snack peddler out there is already using it against you.

Ingredients

• 97g monosodium glutamate (MSG)
• 1.5g disodium inosinate plus 1.5g disodium guanylate, commonly available as 3g of powdered "I+G" mixture

Directions

Mix ingredients and store in an airtight container or salt cellar.

Notes

Wherever an intensely savory/umami flavor is desired, add about 1/2 tsp. to each pound of meat, or 1/2 tsp. to every 4-6 servings of beans, soups, stews, curries or casseroles.