Yes, MSG, the Secret Behind the Savor
Published: March 5, 2008
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Even after “No MSG” signs began appearing across the United States, “most Chinese restaurants, honestly, kept right on using it,” Ms. Hsu said. “And at home most Chinese cooks will sprinkle in a little bit at the end, especially if the ingredients they had to cook with were not that great.”
Meat and MSG work beautifully together. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the fallback rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. Accent, which is mostly MSG, was introduced in 1947 and quickly became a staple for American home cooks.
But it is in Japan that MSG has been most thoroughly integrated into popular food, through two main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise, now popular on pizza, omelets and sushi. (Mayonnaise Kitchen, a food stall in Tokyo, serves only mayonnaise-friendly foods and lets patrons store their own bottles of Kewpie, the most popular brand.)
Japanese mayonnaise is flavored with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it an addictive roundness and tang. It is the main ingredient in dynamite sauce, a mix of mayonnaise and chili sauce that has become a staple of sushi bars here and in Japan. At Ginza in Boston, a dish called hotate hokkaiyaki — baked shellfish with dynamite sauce — has had a passionate following for more than 10 years.
If you have ever wondered what makes spicy tuna rolls so much tastier than plain tekka maki, dynamite sauce, or perhaps the MSG in it, is the answer.
In upscale restaurants, whether by tradition or by inclination, chefs are unlikely to use monosodium glutamate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto because we can get the ingredients that have natural umami: shiitake mushrooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,” said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in New York.
Although umami is only a bit player in Japanese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been produced here on this elusive fifth taste, which is supposedly linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of kelp and dried tuna.
Umami “is delicious,” Katsuhiro Utada told The New York Times in 1983, and a food-lovers’ swoon began. Mr. Utada, not coincidentally, was the president of the Ajinomoto Company — then, and now, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate.
Whether umami is the fifth taste or the 50th — there is little agreement among neuroscientists — it has been positively identified as the flavor of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata. Food writers lost no time adding umami to their mental glossaries. But this same crowd rarely mentions MSG, a cheap, synthetic route to the flavor of glutamate.
I keep kecap and (umami-rich) ketchup on hand, but MSG is not normally present in my kitchen. The spice drawer has never seen Accent, the canned chicken broth has a big “No MSG” stamp on the label and the hoisin, soy and fish sauces on hand are the food-writer-approved brands. Again, no MSG.
So the food I produced at home using Maggi sauce, MSG-laden bouillon cubes and Japanese mayonnaise tasted ... different.
I made two versions of pad kee mao, with and without Maggi, and while both were good, the one with MSG had the kind of round flavor I’d normally associate with homemade chicken stock or some form of professional expertise.
Tasted straight, though, the sauces had the chemical, tangy aftertaste common to many processed foods.
“Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid taste,” said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it just right and that dish will sing.”
The role of MSG in food, and its effects on health, remain controversial. Linda Bartoshuk, a director of the
University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste, who has studied the sensory effects of MSG for years, believes not only that MSG is harmful to health, but also that it has virtually no effect on the taste of food. “All this umami stuff is just marketing,” she said.
In 1995 the
Food and Drug Administration issued a large-scale review by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, clearing glutamates as a health risk for the vast majority of consumers.
An international research review in 1987 by the
World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations had come to the same conclusion.
“There was simply no clinical evidence for any of it,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of
nutrition at
New York University.
She did not even mention MSG in her recent book “What to Eat,” much of which is devoted to health concerns over
food additives. “I thought the issue was settled, though I know a lot of people will never believe that,” she said.
MSG is blamed by some groups for a range of serious neurological and physiological disorders. Some studies have identified both MSG and aspartame (another Ajinomoto product) as excitotoxins, substances that overstimulate the neurotransmitters to the point of cell damage. But no large-scale clinical research has been done since the F.D.A.’s 1995 review.
Since the 1970s, MSG has sidled back onto American supermarket shelves, under assumed names: hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, protein concentrates and other additives that are not labeled as MSG but, according to nutritionists and the
United States Department of Agriculture, are essentially the same thing: synthetically produced glutamates.
The whey protein concentrate and liquid aminos that many Americans buy at health food stores are also, essentially, pure glutamate, Dr. Chaudhari said.
According to U.S.D.A. guidelines, “labeling is required when MSG is added as a direct ingredient.” But other glutamates — the hydrolyzed proteins, the autolyzed yeasts and the protein concentrates, which the U.S.D.A. acknowledges are related to MSG — must be identified under their own names.
Alternatively, they may also be included under certain terms, like vegetable broth or chicken broth. Thus, these ingredients are now routinely found in products like canned tuna (vegetable broth is listed as an ingredient; it contains hydrolyzed soy protein), canned soup, low-fat yogurts and ice creams, chips and virtually everything ranch-flavored or cheese-flavored.
Thus, the richest source of umami remains your local convenience store. Grab a tube of Pringles or a bologna sandwich, and glutamic acid is most likely lurking there somewhere.
Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan.
No wonder they taste so good.
Whey protein and MSG
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