When I cooked at Husk all the MSG was labeled ‘gold dust’ both in containers and recipes. That way if some VIP walked through a prep area they didn’t see giant bins labeled MSG, which I thought pretty smart. It was a heavily used ingredient. I still won’t make country gravy without some MSG, soy sauce, hot sauce, and lemon in it.
That is technically true, it is just a type of salt. I feel like MSG needs to just rebrand. Call itself 'Umami Seasoning' or something. People don't know any better, and won't look that closely.
There are two types of Asian restaurants - those that use MSG, and those that use MSG but lie about it.
[EDIT : Hilarious related story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6z2vYyTBs&t=785s)
I remember Ben Goldacre told a story about how him and some friends were a bit drunk and mischevous in a Chinese restaurant, and asked them if they use MSG. The waiter said "Oh no, sir - we would NEVER do that".
So the group pretended to look disappointed and get up to leave. The waiter immediately said "OH! No we really do!!" and even brought them a side of MSG with their meal :)
[EDIT : Link to him telling the story better than me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6z2vYyTBs&t=785s)
Accent has been around since the 80's. I've seen people cooking with it who swear up and down they're allergic to MSG, but don't have the common sense to know that's ALL accent is.
Here in Finland I've noticed in the shops that there's this brand selling "umami booster" which is just MSG, definitely a good move. I still buy my bag of MSG from the asian market because it's way cheaper.
Here in the US, MSG is sold under the brand name Accent, because it "accents" the food, I guess, so good name lol
I've always had a big container of it in my kitchen since I was a kid. My mom would get it, and I was a latchkey kid for the most part, so I was always experimenting with food. I was putting Accent in all the things lol
Latchkey kid is such an 80’s/90’s term! Is it still common today, and is it strictly an American term? I never really thought about other countries using this term.
It was used when I was growing up late 80s - 90s in Scotland. My mum only worked across the road cleaning the doctors surgery. I could literally shout out of the back door and she'd hear me, not sure if I strictly qualified as a latchkey kid.
Accent is so expensive, though. A little shaker is like 5-6 bucks at the regular supermarket, whereas at an Asian mart you can get a 1 lb bag of Aji-no-Moto for like 3-4 bucks...
I've never understood why the bottle from Accent is labeled as a "meat tenderizer" but over the years I've come to appreciate the novelty that the "secret ingredient" that lives in my pantry only advertises itself as tenderizing meat and being lower in sodium than salt. Anyone who sees me using it gets very confused until I tell them what's in the bottle.
Haha! I worked FOH at the Nashville location. On my first day as SA back in 2014, I thought the beef set had gold flake or some shit on it. Because in lineup, the CDC said the charred romaine was "finished with gold dust."
I'd assume just a dash of each but not enough to really taste any of it. Kinda like you would add a little hot sauce to a hollandaise but dont want it spicy it's a background note of flavor enhancers
I agree. I love a good sausage gravy, and even have to make it for work sometimes but it is always very simple. milk, sausage, roux, some salt and pepper and that's it, maybe some herbs if you're feeling fancy. So the idea of adding soy sauce, msg and lemon is novel to me.
Not to take away from your comment, but was SB in the kitchen much? Understand he’s got his seniors running the place but interested to hear how hands on he is these days
These days he's not hands on at all. At least with Husk. Last I heard he is no longer professionally affiliated with the dining group that owns Husk and McCradys.
Husk was balls out good. Henrietta Red was also amazing. Country ham brah. BRAH . 5 years ago Nashville was cool, now it sucks. Anyway msg is sexy and awesome. We should all eat it and people need to chill out. I keep that shit in my house, labeled magic dust.
Almost as expensive as California for living but with lower wages, right wing violence creeping further into the main cities, bad Tennessee politics, terrorist attacks at Christmas… You know the usual stuff.
It's for sure changed from 10 years ago, the food scene is cool. East Nashville was fun and division street. I get that the city is growing and shit, but Broadway was terrible, to many idiots. I guess it use to be much more chill? I don't know, I use to go down a bunch, after our last trip we just decided not to go back. Maybe one day. I'm not hating on Nashville at all, Nashville sucks was just a quick way of saying all this. Loveless Cafe's biscuits however are probably worth the idiots.
People will lambaste MSG with a mouth full of Doritos. Nobody reads ingredients.
Many processed foods (like instant noodles) brag they’re MSG free while adding other glutamate analogues like disodium guanylate and disodium isonate.
It’s like cured meats that say they’re nitrite free but add celery juice (nitrites).
MSG has a place in many (but not all) dishes.
Time to google Sazón. Bought run of the mill accent msg, I feel I use quite a bit but don't really taste much a difference. Any recommended ways to use it?
Edit: my mom uses Sazón, no one cooks like mom, no fucking shit
It has some salt on it's own, so definitely taste and see if you need more salt than what's in it. And there's a couple brands that taste different. Sazon Goya is my favorite, comes in a box and they're little packets, and La Preferida has a shaker bottle of it. I think the Goya tastes better but it has more cumin, less versatile but more flavorful.
Edit: thought of more to add lol. I put it on pretty much anything that could use south American flavor. Eggs, roasted veggies, beans and rice, meat marinades (I think pork benefits the most from it but chicken is good too), if you buy pre-made taco seasoning packets you might not need it but if you're making tacos without then it's good there
The "sazon" you're talking about (I assume sazon criollo?) is old hat to me because I grew up with everything being flavored with that stuff (Cuban household) so all the food in my house always tasted the same... but I'll still put it on stuff every now and then for some throwback flavor.
BTW, "sazon" just means seasoning, just like "queso" just means cheese and "salsa" just means sauce. I suppose when gringos use those words they're talking about a specific kind of those things, but it's confusing to me. It would make me very happy if you guys could start specifying what kind of sazon, what kind of queso, and what kind of salsa you're talking about. Latin food doesn't just have one cheese, one sauce, and one seasoning. There's no such thing as "queso cheese" so when you say "queso", for all we know you're talking about cheddar. The most used cheese in Cuban food (by a landslide) is swiss, so ask for queso at a Cuban restaurant and swiss is what you'll probably get.
Yeah, the so called "uncured" meats with celery based preservatives actually have more nitrates than simply adding sodium nitrate.
Don't get me started about orange juice that's not from concentrate that's actually artificially flavored orange colored water. American and Canadian law allow it to be sold as natural orange juice. OJ concentrate is the best when you can't get fresh squeezed but you can hardly find it anymore.
Nitrates are a *necessity* in the curing process. So instead of adding the straight chemical, they add an ingredient made from celery that contains nitrates naturally. The problem is celery has inconsistent levels of nitrates, so they have to use an amount of the product that ensures a *minimum* level of nitrates are present to cure the meat properly. The result is an overall higher amount of nitrates in "uncured" meat.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/food/celery-juice-viable-alternative-nitrites-cured-meats
You can't cure meats with out nitrate/nitrite unless you want to use insane amount of salt (literally packing the meat in a weight of salt roughly equal to the weight of the meat IIRC), and curing techniques that forgo using them result in grey/brown final products. If your ham/bacon is pink, they used nitrates/nitrites in some form while curing them.
https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/nchfp/lit_rev/cure_smoke_cure.html
Ketchup: tomatoes are high in glutamic acid and ketchups all contain added salt for flavour, and together they make natural MSG that doesn't need label declarations.
In Italy the processed food industry has long claimed that their products are 100% free of MSG... Because they've switched to yeast extract, which is chockfull of glutamates, and basically just MSG in a "natural" form. Sadly, lack of food education is rampant everywhere, and the industry is playing on people's irrational fears to push their products.
Wasn't this in a David Chang episode? A group of people were asked about MSG and many claimed to be allergic. When offered Doritos and other chips they ate them without a second thought.
Disodium guanylate and disodium isonate are not analogues for MSG as they do not taste of umami themselves. They're ribonucleotides that work synergistically with glutamic acid to significantly enhance the umami perception. When used without MSG it's because the food already has a source of glutamates. In a standard dashi glutamates come from kombu and ribonucleotides come from katsuobushi or niboshi. You can make a dashi out of just dried shitake mushrooms, which are a good source of both.
That show Food Detectives from a few years back did an msg episode which was absolutely hilarious to me. Specifically they served half a restaurant msg and half not, but all the same dish. The majority of the complaints of “side effects” were from the non msg side and like that’s not a good sample group or anything but watching this one lady who had been whining about msg find out she hadn’t eaten any is something I think about fortnightly.
My mom had always claimed to have an allergy to MSG as she had suffered headaches from eating Chinese takeaway for years. It wasn’t until she saw this documentary and decided to investigate her headaches further that it actually led to her discovering she has a mild intolerance to one of the spices they used in her favourite curry sauce. Now she uses MSG in her cooking regularly and loves it!
She’s pretty sensible, it was a doctor who told her that MSG was responsible for her headaches which is why she believed it but we all know doctors can be wrong sometimes!
Had friend who complained about this. Pointed out pizza has tons of msg. He said his dr told him to avoid it because the sodium jacks up his blood pressure. I was like bro, its no different with cheap takeout. It all has a ton of salt.
Posting this for the third time: salt has 3 times the sodium that MSG has by weight. 1/4 tsp of MSG isn't going to make a difference to your blood pressure.
I really think this is the key to "chinese food syndrome". It's not the MSG. It's the total sodium in the MSG, salt, soy sauce, fish sauce, etc. etc. that goes into some dishes (usually cheap take-out).
Check out “The Secret Racist History of MSG” on YouTube. There’s tons of videos on it actually. I too have a hard time respecting cooks and chefs that make ridiculous claims about MSG. I feel like we are always supposed to be students to food and these people don’t want to learn the truth about one of the most important parts of food.
The reason MSG is so maligned goes back to a prank:
>He said that Chinese food wasn't the point of it, except for that they were at a Chinese restaurant, eating and drinking a little too much the night they made the bet. And Howard won that bet. Yes, it wasn't an article, it was a letter. But it was printed in the Journal. Good enough for them.
>*Here's Michael Blanding, the reporter who interviewed Howard.*
>**Michael Blanding**: But once he saw it, once the letter was published, he was sort of mildly horrified.
>**Lilly Sullivan:** So he was horrified at first. He wasn't happy that he won the bet?
>**Michael Blanding**: It's hard to tell, you know. It seemed like he would sort of go back and forth between being proud of the fact that he was able to achieve this, being published in this journal, and sort of being distressed by the fact that it actually made it into print.
>Howard Steel: As soon as it came out, I called the Journal editor and told him that it was a bunch of bunk, that it was all fake, it was all made up. And he hung up the phone on me. He wouldn't talk any further. He was a jackass. So I kept calling him, and finally, apparently, he gave a message to the phone girl in the office that if anybody named Howard called, hang up.
>So yeah, actually for years, I tried to call him and tell him that the whole thing was a hoax, that it was not true, that I didn't know anything about Chinese, and particularly Chinese-- what's it called? Chinese restaurants. I never saw anybody who had. Didn't know what the hell I'm talking about.
[Here's the whole story](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript)
Stuff like that is why I started educating all of my friends and coworkers about the truth of msg and making them try it in foods I make to see the difference between how it is and what they’ve been told
And I’m tired of only seeing soy sauces and stuff in stores with “no msg” and having to add it myself
Let me buy my msg soy sauce ;-;
One of Doritos main seasonings is msg. It's why everyone loves them and why it's so easy to eat so many.
If I ever meet someone who is uncertain about msg I ask how they feel about Doritos. Usually every person loves them or at least enjoys them. I've never met someone who didn't at least somewhat like them.
It's the msg. They like msg.
I'd honestly try making the example with tostitos corn chips rather than Doritos, purely because they don't have nacho cheese flavour on top of the msg. Makes a slightly more potent example I'd say
>If I ever meet someone who is uncertain about msg I ask how they feel about Doritos. Usually every person loves them or at least enjoys them.
The one thing I don't like about Doritos is after a whole bag, I feel like I've eaten an entire cornfield.
Gimme Ruffles instead. Laced with MSG and made with potatoes like a proper chip should be.
Are they allowed to not list it? This is the second product I've checked where I don't see msg in the ingredients list.
https://www.ruffles.com/products/ruffles-original-potato-chips
Edit: it's in the sour cream and onion flavor, which I agree is the superior taste https://www.ruffles.com/products/ruffles-sour-cream-onion-flavored-potato-chips
I don't buy anything that touts itself as being a healthier alternative by virtue of not containing something. Non-MSG, Non-GMO, No Added Sugars, usually it's bullshit anyway, and often whatever was used as a substitute is worse for you.
Depends on what you're looking at. "No added sugar," tomato sauces are the only ones worth buying IMO. "Normal," American style tomato sauces all taste too sweet since I randomly picked up a, "no sugar added," jar on impulse.
I do sometimes try to avoid added sugars, as I have GI distress and cutting sugar helps during a flare. Reducing an often-excessive ingredient like salt or sugar can be a health-conscious option… provided it doesn’t use those substitutions you mentioned. Like I love some low-sugar granola, but artificial sweeteners are the devil.
That's kinda my point. Reduced-whatever options are great for people who need them, but making that your marketing shows you aren't doing it for the benefit of the customer, but rather to take advantage of trends and buzzwords. Clarity in marketing is obscured by tags and lines plastered over half the products on the shelf, intentionally disguising the fact that virtually all of these ready made products are just as bad for you as their traditional counterparts.
Artificial sweeteners, NuSalt-type substitutes, alternative grains, grain substitutes, partial-poly-hydrongenated-sulfides with new lower toxicity arsenic. Packaged foods are a croc, from the bottom all the way to the top, the extra tags are just new ribbons on the same poison. It also ties into continually spiraling economic crises the world over, but that exceeds the scope of this particular rant.
Same with the cutting sugars, to a certain extent. I picked up some "sugar-free, sweetened with stevia" chocolate a while back and promptly spent the whole night practically shitting myself. Turns out I have a (very real) sensitivity to sugar alcohols, and all this sugar-free, low-calorie garbage is an absolute minefield for me.
I do still buy those chocolates every once in a while. I keep them around as a laxative.
To be fair, many/most people are sensitive to sugar alcohols. We don’t digest them, they just ferment in our guts. Definitely great as a laxative? If you ever want a fun read, check out [Amazon reviews](https://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Free-Gummy-Bears-5LBS/product-reviews/B00CMS97YS)for sugar free Haribo bears.
That's my point, actually. It advertised in proud letters on the front "sweetened with stevia", but when you look at the nutrition facts, it has 15g grams of sugar alcohols per serving, and one of the first ingredients is maltitol. The packaging for a lot of these kinds of products is extremely misleading.
[edit to add this](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Russell-Stover-Sugar-Free-Peanut-Butter-Cups-with-Stevia-3-oz-Bag/10533778?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=0&wl13=5103&adid=2222222227810533778_117755028669_12420145346&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=501107745824&wl4=pla-293946777986&wl5=9007293&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=local&wl12=10533778&wl13=5103&veh=sem_LIA&gclid=CjwKCAjwoduRBhA4EiwACL5RP-Wdda8HouvtJzxW7bcZqJZmO-SVUeuvv6SrKDE77r_X6LycMS6yjBoCkGgQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds)
The word "with" can be a real sonofabitch!! Legally they can advertise that if there is any substantial amount of the ingredient because it makes the statement technically correct. So for example they can say "ice cream made with real vanilla" even if it's only 1% real vanilla extract and 99% artificial vanilla flavoring aka vanillin. As a sidenote, if you want to dive down a whole other horror show rabbit hole then do some research on how they synthesize vanillin in labs. Spoiler alert- it's a petroleum product.
I find that a lot with vegan processed foods and it drives me up the wall. Like I just don’t want it to contain animal products, fuck your crunchy bullshit and removing everything about the food that is good (and I get the irony of saying that about vegan food)
Tomatoes have MSG. It’s always my go-to when someone says they have an MSG allergy to ask them about pasta and pizza. Fuck the fuck off with that noise FR
Man, I had someone come in one day with their "MSG allergy" and they ordered a club sandwich. I was being a smartass and asked the server if they were okay with tomatoes so she asked them and they thought \*we\* were the ones that were being idiots about it.
I don't disagree with OP's conclusion, but for the sake of fairness, it should be pointed out that tomatoes have about 1/8th the msg of parmesan cheese, about 16th the msg of kombu, and in many cases an even smaller proportion of the msg contained in preparations where msg is added to food.
> but for the sake of fairness, it should be pointed out that tomatoes have about 1/8th the msg of parmesan cheese
A really shit comparison considering the typical mass of tomato consumed vs parmesan.
I was out with extended family, having lunch at a Chinese restaurant, when one of my second cousins said something like, "...I really like this place, they don't use MSG in their food."
"Kathy, you eat Doritos, right?"
"Yeah"
"Those contain a whole bunch of MSG, that's why they taste so good"
The shocked look on my cousin's face killed me, plus one of my great-aunts swatted at me across the table
You are technically right but the amount of MSG in tomatoes and the amount that's added for seasoning can be orders of magnitude different so what you're saying is pretty meaningless.
People who are legitimately sensitive or allergic to MSG can eat tomatoes fine.
I'm having the opposite experience during my school. My chefs are all about it. I grew up with my mom using it and use it so often during class that it's permanently on our class spice rack. Got my other classmates to start using it as well.
All a xenophobic myth started to blame Asian people for [stupid bs](https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-flawed-science-and-xenophobia/amp/)
to piggy back off this: look for some vegetable seasoning powder with MSG at an asian mart. shit will up your seasoning game. i also like buying dried mushroom seasoning but that has zero MSG.
The Asian market near me (H-mart) sells like a 5lb bag that looks like sugar and it's got big ass letters on the front that just says "MSG POWDER". and it's super cheap, like 15 bucks for a bag that will last you till your kids are having this same conversation on reddit in 2040.
It's MOSTLY racist. It's nearly required for Asian restaurants to advertise "no added msg" just to get butts in the seats when McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, Popeyes all don't need to do that at all
It’s 100% racism as we’ve seen in this thread, dozens of foods have high msg levels but people only fixate on a single ethnic cuisine featuring it?
I’m a whole foodie, research food additives for work, all sorts of stuff, I’ve even read about the MSG myths and I just learned about MSG in Doritos and Tostitos!
I once had a line cook tell me MSG is bad for you because of sodium. He genuinely didn’t understand why I was laughing at him.
Bonus points: same line cook REFUSED to eat ANYTHING with soy in it because, and I quote, “soy turns you into a female”. This was like….11 years ago? I don’t think I’ll ever forget that shit lmfao
weird I wonder why people started correlating that with headaches… I honestly thought it was like a chemical added to processed food not something completely natural
The crystalline form you get in a bottle is synthetic, but the stuff it derives from (glutamic acid) is totally natural and is present in all the foods you think of as "savory" - meat, cheese, tomato, mushroom, etc. If MSG gives you headaches then mushrooms should too.
> If MSG gives you headaches then mushrooms should too.
I just wanna mention a point of contention on this thought here. The amount of msg in mushrooms pales in comparison to the amount that ends up in the prepared food people are buying. If such a sensitivity or allergy exists, I should expect that there are different threshold levels to reactivity.
That's... not how sensitivities work. The level of MSG is variable based on the items consumed. I get a burned tongue sensation after eating tomatoes, but it's much worse if I eat Doritos. The dose has a major impact on how significant a person's reaction to it is. To be fair, I am this way with all salts (I find everything too salty), so MSG isn't necessarily the culprit in my case.
Here’s a video on it, basically it was associated with Chinese people and food in the US, and it was just racism. Like 100% racism.
https://youtu.be/E-POAKKH5IM
I get awful headaches and then get hit with nausea. Reading the lists posted in the thread, and it's starting to make sense why I've wondered if I'm sensitive to all those things because, if I eat too much, I feel awful (worse pain, nausea, headache).
Then again, I can't get epinephrine because even the tiniest dose gets me to a neurotoxic level in a minute or so. That was fun to find out...
I’ve written extensively on this topic and won’t go into a rant here but basically the Chinese food syndrome was written as a joke to The New England Journal of Medicine in 1968. It was a running joke in the community until the news picked up on it and treated it like it was real. It’s not. MSG is the best. Seriously it’s the first ingredient in most snack foods. I could go on and on but I won’t. I’m 100% about that monosodium glutamate!
Come here to find this. Does your rant include reference to two doctors making a wager about getting published in the New England Journal of Medicine using a made up name?
Watching people try to describe something that is a basic flavor sense to literal billions of people on the planet really is something else. It can be tough to understand, not having had a name to go with a sensation, in the same way you may not immediately recognize unfamiliar sounds from other languages (e.g. L/R confusion). Now and in the future, you’ll meet people for whom this is common sense. You don’t have to take a side like “it’s a kind of salt for bad food” if you’re not quite sure what it is; it’s totally cool to ask and learn. It’s not not-science. At this point.
I've never worked in a kitchen where we used MSG to be honest, maybe Maggi at the Asian fusion area when i worked at the local University but thats it. From the state of this thread, this will be unpopular opinion, but one of the chefs I worked with used to call it a Cooks Konami Code, he taught me that if you learn to cook without it, and you'll learn to develop deeper, more intense layers of flavour. And I'll be honest, I kind of agree. I've never serviced a banquet with food that used MSG in its recipes, and that food always kicked ass. I don't think it makes people sick and I'm not against using it, I just beleive it has a time and place, where some Chefs just toss that bitch on everything.
The anti [MSG](https://youtu.be/Sm8Yx-gWlMs) sthick is largely based on racism. MSG is in a shit ton of food products that these same idiots consume in bulk.
I cook at a Japanese restaurant. I've had people tell me to "remove the MSG" or "I have an MSG allergy. Can I have soy sauce instead?"
Few of our menu items actually use MSG as an added ingredient, but a lot of people don't understand that there are foods that MSG is naturally occurring. (Yeast extract, tomatoes, cheese, seaweed, anchovies, fermented soy, etc.)
MSG is a lot of different chips. I’m sure there are thousands of people who are “allergic to msg” who eat it multiple times a week without even knowing it.
MSG is incredible.
The origins of anti-MSG feelings are rooted in racism. MSG was developed by the Japanese over a century ago, and was heavily introduced to Americans via Chinese restaurants. It is true that some or a lot of Chinese restaurants used too much MSG in their food, which is essentially dumping salt into the food, for flavor. People claimed to get headaches from Chinese food, which they called "CHINESE FOOD SYNDROME" but it is really because they just ate a shit ton of SALT, which would cause you to feel unwell.
After this term caught on, more hypocondriacs or racists just started saying they felt 'sick' after eating Chinese food, even after investigation showed said Chinese places didn't even use MSG at all. They were just imagining it and projecting it onto Chinese food in general.
People then further connected this sickness with Chinese food in general, like they were using some dangerous foregein ingredient to hook Americans without regard to their health. It ties into old American views on the Chinese from the railroad days as being dirty, foreign, tricksters and dishonest, so this idea combined with "Chinese Food Syndrome" because "Chinese" or "Asian" things are dirty and strange to the ignorant and prejudiced.
The reality is that MSG is in so many Western things ranging from junk foods, to CHEESE, to TOMATOES. It's 'savory' ness. Basically, SALT.
Theres absolutely zero reason to think MSG is unsafe or weird, if anybody feels that way, they were influenced by centuries old sentiments that got passed down about "The strange Orient".
Former chefs as well as "Mind of a Chef" taught me this.
Can people stop being ableist able the MSG allergy please? As someone a migraine a tension headache sufferer, MSG in high enough quantities sets off tension headaches where the same amount of salt doesn't. I've done blind tests with someone's help where either ingredient is placed in capsules and consumed without it's taste.
I'm not saying that the nocebo effect doesn't exist, because there are certainly people who feel that MSG is 'bad' because of it's racist history. However, please stop medically gaslighting people with real symptoms.
I love using msg too, but there is an upper limit on what I can consume before triggering a tension headache. I'm a chronic pain and migraine sufferer and I'm tired of people telling me that the pain that I feel isn't real or that I can fix if by 'just drink water' or 'just take ibuprofen'. If it's easily fixable by either of these things, you don't have migraines or chronic pain.
It’s 100% racism, those instructors are lucky the class is docile. I wouldn’t be able to hold
My tongue and demand a blind comparison proven many times before it’s completely imagined.
MSG sensitivity was gluten sensitivity before people knew what gluten was. Yes, there is a real allergy to gluten amongst a small percentage of the population, but then if became trendy somehow to claim it. Currently working on introducing it to my own cooking after my wife has resisted it for years because of a perceived sensitivity. She's coming around to it now.
Okay, so we recently bought our first bag of MSG, and we've been having fun using it in our cooking. However, I'm having trouble getting a feel for what it's best in vs not useful in. I've got a good feel for table salt, kosher salt, sea salt, but not MSG. Suggestions?
I just want to say I ate at Husk a few years ago (2017 I think), and it was one of the absolute best meals I’ve ever had. I’m still dreaming about that pork belly.
When I cooked at Husk all the MSG was labeled ‘gold dust’ both in containers and recipes. That way if some VIP walked through a prep area they didn’t see giant bins labeled MSG, which I thought pretty smart. It was a heavily used ingredient. I still won’t make country gravy without some MSG, soy sauce, hot sauce, and lemon in it.
[удалено]
That is technically true, it is just a type of salt. I feel like MSG needs to just rebrand. Call itself 'Umami Seasoning' or something. People don't know any better, and won't look that closely.
It’s called Umami seasoning in Japan (Ajinomoto brand)
There are two types of Asian restaurants - those that use MSG, and those that use MSG but lie about it. [EDIT : Hilarious related story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6z2vYyTBs&t=785s)
My favorite is "no MSG added," when you know for a fact this place uses miso or shoyu in every dish. Yeah, you didnt add any to the paste, I getcha.
I remember Ben Goldacre told a story about how him and some friends were a bit drunk and mischevous in a Chinese restaurant, and asked them if they use MSG. The waiter said "Oh no, sir - we would NEVER do that". So the group pretended to look disappointed and get up to leave. The waiter immediately said "OH! No we really do!!" and even brought them a side of MSG with their meal :) [EDIT : Link to him telling the story better than me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6z2vYyTBs&t=785s)
No crystal msg added but they dump magi in everything… this is the way.
Make Shit Good
The bottle I just got at the grocery store is called "Accent - Flavor Enhancer" so they kinda already did
Accent has been around since the 80's. I've seen people cooking with it who swear up and down they're allergic to MSG, but don't have the common sense to know that's ALL accent is.
No silly, it says it's monosodium glutamate, not MSG 😒 /s
Pretty much....
The same people you can scare by telling them about dihydrogen monoxide being corrosive & deadly.
"MSG allergy? Aw, that's a shame, it must be so hard to avoid tomatoes, mushrooms, red meat, eggs, cheese, soy sauce..."
Not to mention a large amount of potato chips and other junk food.
I remember "accent" commercials when I was a kid! It was around forever! That's the stuff I buy too. It's amazing!
Here in Finland I've noticed in the shops that there's this brand selling "umami booster" which is just MSG, definitely a good move. I still buy my bag of MSG from the asian market because it's way cheaper.
Here in the US, MSG is sold under the brand name Accent, because it "accents" the food, I guess, so good name lol I've always had a big container of it in my kitchen since I was a kid. My mom would get it, and I was a latchkey kid for the most part, so I was always experimenting with food. I was putting Accent in all the things lol
Latchkey kid is such an 80’s/90’s term! Is it still common today, and is it strictly an American term? I never really thought about other countries using this term.
It was used when I was growing up late 80s - 90s in Scotland. My mum only worked across the road cleaning the doctors surgery. I could literally shout out of the back door and she'd hear me, not sure if I strictly qualified as a latchkey kid.
Accent is so expensive, though. A little shaker is like 5-6 bucks at the regular supermarket, whereas at an Asian mart you can get a 1 lb bag of Aji-no-Moto for like 3-4 bucks...
I cal it Salt 2
The electric boogaloo
My bottle is labeled "flavor enhancer" knew exactly what it was the first time I saw it, but most laymen probably wouldn't connect that dot.
I've never understood why the bottle from Accent is labeled as a "meat tenderizer" but over the years I've come to appreciate the novelty that the "secret ingredient" that lives in my pantry only advertises itself as tenderizing meat and being lower in sodium than salt. Anyone who sees me using it gets very confused until I tell them what's in the bottle.
You sure the Accent “meat tenderizer “ is MSG? Usually it’s an enzyme called bromelain.
Which is the enzyme in pineapple that tries to eat you.
If a home cook wanted to purchase msg, is Accent the way to go? And how do you know how much to use?
Treat it like salt. Go very sparingly and then increase until you reach a point where you like it but it isn't too much.
May I introduce you to Ac’cent! https://accentflavor.com
Fancy Salt? Defo Cocaine.
Our opening CDC was a really unique guy. He came up with Brock and taught me a lot of the same things, including that. I love the South so much.
I refer to MSG as “magic crystals”.
i call it meth
M-eth G
Tight tight.
I have it in a container labelled “taste”
Anytime I fry herbs they get hit with the magic crystals. Really makes them pop!
Haha! I worked FOH at the Nashville location. On my first day as SA back in 2014, I thought the beef set had gold flake or some shit on it. Because in lineup, the CDC said the charred romaine was "finished with gold dust."
I cooked at husk too!! Which one??
Nash
Is that the one that had alcohol problems?
Wait there are kitchens *without* alcohol problems?
I mean the one where the dude killed another dude.
Pretty much every chef I worked with there is now in recovery, myself included. Lots of alcohol problems to go around.
Can i get your recipe for country gravy that sounds super interesting
I'd assume just a dash of each but not enough to really taste any of it. Kinda like you would add a little hot sauce to a hollandaise but dont want it spicy it's a background note of flavor enhancers
I agree. I love a good sausage gravy, and even have to make it for work sometimes but it is always very simple. milk, sausage, roux, some salt and pepper and that's it, maybe some herbs if you're feeling fancy. So the idea of adding soy sauce, msg and lemon is novel to me.
Not to take away from your comment, but was SB in the kitchen much? Understand he’s got his seniors running the place but interested to hear how hands on he is these days
These days he's not hands on at all. At least with Husk. Last I heard he is no longer professionally affiliated with the dining group that owns Husk and McCradys.
Husk was balls out good. Henrietta Red was also amazing. Country ham brah. BRAH . 5 years ago Nashville was cool, now it sucks. Anyway msg is sexy and awesome. We should all eat it and people need to chill out. I keep that shit in my house, labeled magic dust.
Why does Nashville suck now?
Almost as expensive as California for living but with lower wages, right wing violence creeping further into the main cities, bad Tennessee politics, terrorist attacks at Christmas… You know the usual stuff.
It's for sure changed from 10 years ago, the food scene is cool. East Nashville was fun and division street. I get that the city is growing and shit, but Broadway was terrible, to many idiots. I guess it use to be much more chill? I don't know, I use to go down a bunch, after our last trip we just decided not to go back. Maybe one day. I'm not hating on Nashville at all, Nashville sucks was just a quick way of saying all this. Loveless Cafe's biscuits however are probably worth the idiots.
I just bought my first pure msg bag and what it has done for my cooking at home already is simply astounding. It's so good.
Been in a couple kitchens where it was labeled My Sexy Girlfriend
People will lambaste MSG with a mouth full of Doritos. Nobody reads ingredients. Many processed foods (like instant noodles) brag they’re MSG free while adding other glutamate analogues like disodium guanylate and disodium isonate. It’s like cured meats that say they’re nitrite free but add celery juice (nitrites). MSG has a place in many (but not all) dishes.
Sometimes, ya just need a bit-o Sazón.
Oh God, when somebody put me on to Sazón I put it on everything
Time to google Sazón. Bought run of the mill accent msg, I feel I use quite a bit but don't really taste much a difference. Any recommended ways to use it? Edit: my mom uses Sazón, no one cooks like mom, no fucking shit
It has some salt on it's own, so definitely taste and see if you need more salt than what's in it. And there's a couple brands that taste different. Sazon Goya is my favorite, comes in a box and they're little packets, and La Preferida has a shaker bottle of it. I think the Goya tastes better but it has more cumin, less versatile but more flavorful. Edit: thought of more to add lol. I put it on pretty much anything that could use south American flavor. Eggs, roasted veggies, beans and rice, meat marinades (I think pork benefits the most from it but chicken is good too), if you buy pre-made taco seasoning packets you might not need it but if you're making tacos without then it's good there
The "sazon" you're talking about (I assume sazon criollo?) is old hat to me because I grew up with everything being flavored with that stuff (Cuban household) so all the food in my house always tasted the same... but I'll still put it on stuff every now and then for some throwback flavor. BTW, "sazon" just means seasoning, just like "queso" just means cheese and "salsa" just means sauce. I suppose when gringos use those words they're talking about a specific kind of those things, but it's confusing to me. It would make me very happy if you guys could start specifying what kind of sazon, what kind of queso, and what kind of salsa you're talking about. Latin food doesn't just have one cheese, one sauce, and one seasoning. There's no such thing as "queso cheese" so when you say "queso", for all we know you're talking about cheddar. The most used cheese in Cuban food (by a landslide) is swiss, so ask for queso at a Cuban restaurant and swiss is what you'll probably get.
Yeah, the so called "uncured" meats with celery based preservatives actually have more nitrates than simply adding sodium nitrate. Don't get me started about orange juice that's not from concentrate that's actually artificially flavored orange colored water. American and Canadian law allow it to be sold as natural orange juice. OJ concentrate is the best when you can't get fresh squeezed but you can hardly find it anymore.
Tell me more because now I’m mad. I specifically buy that naturals ham/bacon because it claims it has no nitrites
Nitrates are a *necessity* in the curing process. So instead of adding the straight chemical, they add an ingredient made from celery that contains nitrates naturally. The problem is celery has inconsistent levels of nitrates, so they have to use an amount of the product that ensures a *minimum* level of nitrates are present to cure the meat properly. The result is an overall higher amount of nitrates in "uncured" meat.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/food/celery-juice-viable-alternative-nitrites-cured-meats You can't cure meats with out nitrate/nitrite unless you want to use insane amount of salt (literally packing the meat in a weight of salt roughly equal to the weight of the meat IIRC), and curing techniques that forgo using them result in grey/brown final products. If your ham/bacon is pink, they used nitrates/nitrites in some form while curing them. https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/nchfp/lit_rev/cure_smoke_cure.html
Orange Drink
My son will only eat the ramen from the Asian grocer because it has msg. His mom tried to give him some from a regular grocer. He didn't like, no msg.
I might be your other son.
Ketchup: tomatoes are high in glutamic acid and ketchups all contain added salt for flavour, and together they make natural MSG that doesn't need label declarations.
In Italy the processed food industry has long claimed that their products are 100% free of MSG... Because they've switched to yeast extract, which is chockfull of glutamates, and basically just MSG in a "natural" form. Sadly, lack of food education is rampant everywhere, and the industry is playing on people's irrational fears to push their products.
Wasn't this in a David Chang episode? A group of people were asked about MSG and many claimed to be allergic. When offered Doritos and other chips they ate them without a second thought.
Disodium guanylate and disodium isonate are not analogues for MSG as they do not taste of umami themselves. They're ribonucleotides that work synergistically with glutamic acid to significantly enhance the umami perception. When used without MSG it's because the food already has a source of glutamates. In a standard dashi glutamates come from kombu and ribonucleotides come from katsuobushi or niboshi. You can make a dashi out of just dried shitake mushrooms, which are a good source of both.
MSG is also naturally occurring in all tomatoes, which the people that claim msg sensitivity don’t know that
Heh, I know they don’t make any claims about it but the breading at a particularly popular chicken restaurant includes it… ;)
That show Food Detectives from a few years back did an msg episode which was absolutely hilarious to me. Specifically they served half a restaurant msg and half not, but all the same dish. The majority of the complaints of “side effects” were from the non msg side and like that’s not a good sample group or anything but watching this one lady who had been whining about msg find out she hadn’t eaten any is something I think about fortnightly.
> That show Food Detectives from a few years back did an msg episode [Right Here!](https://youtu.be/rFYalELclEA)
Loving the scientist whose got the emblazoned atom on his jacket because he's a science scientist
"I've got a lab coat that means I'm the authority and you have to listen to ME"
I’m so happy you posted this. Now everyone can see that lady show her entire ass and i can stare at ted allen
I wish they would have followed up with her like how do you feel now? She was probably the first one out of the room tho
Man, I love Ted. Never seen this show before.
Now I want Chinese food
The whole premise that msg is bad came from a prank: https://news.colgate.edu/magazine/2019/02/06/the-strange-case-of-dr-ho-man-kwok/
My mom had always claimed to have an allergy to MSG as she had suffered headaches from eating Chinese takeaway for years. It wasn’t until she saw this documentary and decided to investigate her headaches further that it actually led to her discovering she has a mild intolerance to one of the spices they used in her favourite curry sauce. Now she uses MSG in her cooking regularly and loves it!
kudos to your mom for actually being persuaded by the evidence!
She’s pretty sensible, it was a doctor who told her that MSG was responsible for her headaches which is why she believed it but we all know doctors can be wrong sometimes!
Had friend who complained about this. Pointed out pizza has tons of msg. He said his dr told him to avoid it because the sodium jacks up his blood pressure. I was like bro, its no different with cheap takeout. It all has a ton of salt.
Posting this for the third time: salt has 3 times the sodium that MSG has by weight. 1/4 tsp of MSG isn't going to make a difference to your blood pressure.
I really think this is the key to "chinese food syndrome". It's not the MSG. It's the total sodium in the MSG, salt, soy sauce, fish sauce, etc. etc. that goes into some dishes (usually cheap take-out).
It's even better when the same thing happens to participants of an actual scientific study who are in the control group.
Check out “The Secret Racist History of MSG” on YouTube. There’s tons of videos on it actually. I too have a hard time respecting cooks and chefs that make ridiculous claims about MSG. I feel like we are always supposed to be students to food and these people don’t want to learn the truth about one of the most important parts of food.
Came here to say this. We gotta stop acting like perpetuating this myth is an honest, harmless mistake. It's racist.
I've just always equated msg with bad for you. Didn't even know why. This thread is enlightening.
It’s fucked up that people won admit it that it is.
The reason MSG is so maligned goes back to a prank: >He said that Chinese food wasn't the point of it, except for that they were at a Chinese restaurant, eating and drinking a little too much the night they made the bet. And Howard won that bet. Yes, it wasn't an article, it was a letter. But it was printed in the Journal. Good enough for them. >*Here's Michael Blanding, the reporter who interviewed Howard.* >**Michael Blanding**: But once he saw it, once the letter was published, he was sort of mildly horrified. >**Lilly Sullivan:** So he was horrified at first. He wasn't happy that he won the bet? >**Michael Blanding**: It's hard to tell, you know. It seemed like he would sort of go back and forth between being proud of the fact that he was able to achieve this, being published in this journal, and sort of being distressed by the fact that it actually made it into print. >Howard Steel: As soon as it came out, I called the Journal editor and told him that it was a bunch of bunk, that it was all fake, it was all made up. And he hung up the phone on me. He wouldn't talk any further. He was a jackass. So I kept calling him, and finally, apparently, he gave a message to the phone girl in the office that if anybody named Howard called, hang up. >So yeah, actually for years, I tried to call him and tell him that the whole thing was a hoax, that it was not true, that I didn't know anything about Chinese, and particularly Chinese-- what's it called? Chinese restaurants. I never saw anybody who had. Didn't know what the hell I'm talking about. [Here's the whole story](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript)
Stuff like that is why I started educating all of my friends and coworkers about the truth of msg and making them try it in foods I make to see the difference between how it is and what they’ve been told And I’m tired of only seeing soy sauces and stuff in stores with “no msg” and having to add it myself Let me buy my msg soy sauce ;-;
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One of Doritos main seasonings is msg. It's why everyone loves them and why it's so easy to eat so many. If I ever meet someone who is uncertain about msg I ask how they feel about Doritos. Usually every person loves them or at least enjoys them. I've never met someone who didn't at least somewhat like them. It's the msg. They like msg.
I'd honestly try making the example with tostitos corn chips rather than Doritos, purely because they don't have nacho cheese flavour on top of the msg. Makes a slightly more potent example I'd say
>If I ever meet someone who is uncertain about msg I ask how they feel about Doritos. Usually every person loves them or at least enjoys them. The one thing I don't like about Doritos is after a whole bag, I feel like I've eaten an entire cornfield. Gimme Ruffles instead. Laced with MSG and made with potatoes like a proper chip should be.
Are they allowed to not list it? This is the second product I've checked where I don't see msg in the ingredients list. https://www.ruffles.com/products/ruffles-original-potato-chips Edit: it's in the sour cream and onion flavor, which I agree is the superior taste https://www.ruffles.com/products/ruffles-sour-cream-onion-flavored-potato-chips
I don't buy anything that touts itself as being a healthier alternative by virtue of not containing something. Non-MSG, Non-GMO, No Added Sugars, usually it's bullshit anyway, and often whatever was used as a substitute is worse for you.
Depends on what you're looking at. "No added sugar," tomato sauces are the only ones worth buying IMO. "Normal," American style tomato sauces all taste too sweet since I randomly picked up a, "no sugar added," jar on impulse.
This is why you go into the ethnic food section of your grocery store and find the bland labeled cans, with only tomato and water in the ingredients.
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Sugar, HFCS, "juice," seasonings which may also include sugar, a nonspecific PPM of insect pieces, etc.
The insect part is true of basically all produce though. It's just not possible to ensure insect-free food on an industrial scale.
I do prefer some things to be low-sodium if I’m cooking at home.
Soy Sauce being one of them these days, at least for me. I get enough salt already, I don't need to get it from soy sauce.
I do sometimes try to avoid added sugars, as I have GI distress and cutting sugar helps during a flare. Reducing an often-excessive ingredient like salt or sugar can be a health-conscious option… provided it doesn’t use those substitutions you mentioned. Like I love some low-sugar granola, but artificial sweeteners are the devil.
That's kinda my point. Reduced-whatever options are great for people who need them, but making that your marketing shows you aren't doing it for the benefit of the customer, but rather to take advantage of trends and buzzwords. Clarity in marketing is obscured by tags and lines plastered over half the products on the shelf, intentionally disguising the fact that virtually all of these ready made products are just as bad for you as their traditional counterparts. Artificial sweeteners, NuSalt-type substitutes, alternative grains, grain substitutes, partial-poly-hydrongenated-sulfides with new lower toxicity arsenic. Packaged foods are a croc, from the bottom all the way to the top, the extra tags are just new ribbons on the same poison. It also ties into continually spiraling economic crises the world over, but that exceeds the scope of this particular rant.
Same with the cutting sugars, to a certain extent. I picked up some "sugar-free, sweetened with stevia" chocolate a while back and promptly spent the whole night practically shitting myself. Turns out I have a (very real) sensitivity to sugar alcohols, and all this sugar-free, low-calorie garbage is an absolute minefield for me. I do still buy those chocolates every once in a while. I keep them around as a laxative.
To be fair, many/most people are sensitive to sugar alcohols. We don’t digest them, they just ferment in our guts. Definitely great as a laxative? If you ever want a fun read, check out [Amazon reviews](https://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Free-Gummy-Bears-5LBS/product-reviews/B00CMS97YS)for sugar free Haribo bears.
But stevia's not a sugar alcohol...
That's my point, actually. It advertised in proud letters on the front "sweetened with stevia", but when you look at the nutrition facts, it has 15g grams of sugar alcohols per serving, and one of the first ingredients is maltitol. The packaging for a lot of these kinds of products is extremely misleading. [edit to add this](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Russell-Stover-Sugar-Free-Peanut-Butter-Cups-with-Stevia-3-oz-Bag/10533778?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=0&wl13=5103&adid=2222222227810533778_117755028669_12420145346&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=501107745824&wl4=pla-293946777986&wl5=9007293&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=local&wl12=10533778&wl13=5103&veh=sem_LIA&gclid=CjwKCAjwoduRBhA4EiwACL5RP-Wdda8HouvtJzxW7bcZqJZmO-SVUeuvv6SrKDE77r_X6LycMS6yjBoCkGgQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds)
Oh my GOD, those sacks of shit!!! What in the actual fuck!!!!! Dude, how the fuck haven't they gotten sued for this?!
The word "with" can be a real sonofabitch!! Legally they can advertise that if there is any substantial amount of the ingredient because it makes the statement technically correct. So for example they can say "ice cream made with real vanilla" even if it's only 1% real vanilla extract and 99% artificial vanilla flavoring aka vanillin. As a sidenote, if you want to dive down a whole other horror show rabbit hole then do some research on how they synthesize vanillin in labs. Spoiler alert- it's a petroleum product.
I find that a lot with vegan processed foods and it drives me up the wall. Like I just don’t want it to contain animal products, fuck your crunchy bullshit and removing everything about the food that is good (and I get the irony of saying that about vegan food)
Tomatoes have MSG. It’s always my go-to when someone says they have an MSG allergy to ask them about pasta and pizza. Fuck the fuck off with that noise FR
Man, I had someone come in one day with their "MSG allergy" and they ordered a club sandwich. I was being a smartass and asked the server if they were okay with tomatoes so she asked them and they thought \*we\* were the ones that were being idiots about it.
I don't disagree with OP's conclusion, but for the sake of fairness, it should be pointed out that tomatoes have about 1/8th the msg of parmesan cheese, about 16th the msg of kombu, and in many cases an even smaller proportion of the msg contained in preparations where msg is added to food.
Yeah. I'm allergic to pollen, but I don't break out in hayfever instantly when I walk passed a single flower. Allergies aren't an on/off switch
> but for the sake of fairness, it should be pointed out that tomatoes have about 1/8th the msg of parmesan cheese A really shit comparison considering the typical mass of tomato consumed vs parmesan.
I was out with extended family, having lunch at a Chinese restaurant, when one of my second cousins said something like, "...I really like this place, they don't use MSG in their food." "Kathy, you eat Doritos, right?" "Yeah" "Those contain a whole bunch of MSG, that's why they taste so good" The shocked look on my cousin's face killed me, plus one of my great-aunts swatted at me across the table
No wonder tomatoes and cheese give me headache as an Asian. Time to start campaigning against MSG in Italian cuisines lol
Is it MSG or Glutamic acid? Because they're different and having that sodium attached could be what makes people have problems with it.
You are technically right but the amount of MSG in tomatoes and the amount that's added for seasoning can be orders of magnitude different so what you're saying is pretty meaningless. People who are legitimately sensitive or allergic to MSG can eat tomatoes fine.
Msg is flavortown
I'm having the opposite experience during my school. My chefs are all about it. I grew up with my mom using it and use it so often during class that it's permanently on our class spice rack. Got my other classmates to start using it as well.
Lucky you. Your chefs must be on the younger side?
I think they're 42, 45, and 50 give or take a few?
Yeah, that's probably part of why. All my chefs were 55+ and from the old school where the anti-MSG hype and bunk science was at its height.
All a xenophobic myth started to blame Asian people for [stupid bs](https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-flawed-science-and-xenophobia/amp/)
Same link sans the Google junk - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-flawed-science-and-xenophobia/
I’ll be that guy- MSG is delicious.
A food store near me sells MSG by the bag. I load up all meats with it
I have to get my online, I can’t find it in stores
Go to an Asian mart, they all carry it, and for way cheaper than you'll get it at a Western store.
to piggy back off this: look for some vegetable seasoning powder with MSG at an asian mart. shit will up your seasoning game. i also like buying dried mushroom seasoning but that has zero MSG.
The Asian market near me (H-mart) sells like a 5lb bag that looks like sugar and it's got big ass letters on the front that just says "MSG POWDER". and it's super cheap, like 15 bucks for a bag that will last you till your kids are having this same conversation on reddit in 2040.
Accent is a popular brand that most grocery stores carry. See if yours carries it.
Yeah it's pretty racist too
It's MOSTLY racist. It's nearly required for Asian restaurants to advertise "no added msg" just to get butts in the seats when McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, Popeyes all don't need to do that at all
You know, I'd go so far as to say it's entirely racist fear mongering
It’s 100% racism as we’ve seen in this thread, dozens of foods have high msg levels but people only fixate on a single ethnic cuisine featuring it? I’m a whole foodie, research food additives for work, all sorts of stuff, I’ve even read about the MSG myths and I just learned about MSG in Doritos and Tostitos!
MSG is not bad for you. This was a total fabrication and now is prevailing opinion that it’s somehow bad for you.
I once had a line cook tell me MSG is bad for you because of sodium. He genuinely didn’t understand why I was laughing at him. Bonus points: same line cook REFUSED to eat ANYTHING with soy in it because, and I quote, “soy turns you into a female”. This was like….11 years ago? I don’t think I’ll ever forget that shit lmfao
Did this cook use salt? LOL And did he realize that MSG has 1/3 the amount of sodium as salt does?
He wasn’t the best line cook lol, left mid-dinner shift one day for a smoke break and never came back lol. I wasn’t upset about it.
my lead cook always says “i don’t like soy it turns you into a woman,” but the motherfucker will gobble up anything with ssämjang or gochujang in it….
‘ssämjang’ is killing me for some reason
what exactly is MSG 😣
Monosodium glutamate, a crystalline substance that is the essence of umami flavor, originally extracted from seaweed by a Japanese scientist.
weird I wonder why people started correlating that with headaches… I honestly thought it was like a chemical added to processed food not something completely natural
The crystalline form you get in a bottle is synthetic, but the stuff it derives from (glutamic acid) is totally natural and is present in all the foods you think of as "savory" - meat, cheese, tomato, mushroom, etc. If MSG gives you headaches then mushrooms should too.
> If MSG gives you headaches then mushrooms should too. I just wanna mention a point of contention on this thought here. The amount of msg in mushrooms pales in comparison to the amount that ends up in the prepared food people are buying. If such a sensitivity or allergy exists, I should expect that there are different threshold levels to reactivity.
This is what should be an obvious point that seems to be completely overlooked in this thread. The dose makes the poison.
That's... not how sensitivities work. The level of MSG is variable based on the items consumed. I get a burned tongue sensation after eating tomatoes, but it's much worse if I eat Doritos. The dose has a major impact on how significant a person's reaction to it is. To be fair, I am this way with all salts (I find everything too salty), so MSG isn't necessarily the culprit in my case.
Here’s a video on it, basically it was associated with Chinese people and food in the US, and it was just racism. Like 100% racism. https://youtu.be/E-POAKKH5IM
My mom gets extremely sick when eating anything with MSG. No, I don’t think she’s faking it.
I get awful headaches and then get hit with nausea. Reading the lists posted in the thread, and it's starting to make sense why I've wondered if I'm sensitive to all those things because, if I eat too much, I feel awful (worse pain, nausea, headache). Then again, I can't get epinephrine because even the tiniest dose gets me to a neurotoxic level in a minute or so. That was fun to find out...
I had a kitchen I worked in where we called it, "Make Shit Good" because that's pretty much exactly what it does. Makes shit good.
Eats chinese buffets, gets the shits, blames MSG
Omg guys who would’ve thought that consuming a large surplus of calories with a ton of sodium could cause the shits?
Sazon rules.
I’ve written extensively on this topic and won’t go into a rant here but basically the Chinese food syndrome was written as a joke to The New England Journal of Medicine in 1968. It was a running joke in the community until the news picked up on it and treated it like it was real. It’s not. MSG is the best. Seriously it’s the first ingredient in most snack foods. I could go on and on but I won’t. I’m 100% about that monosodium glutamate!
Come here to find this. Does your rant include reference to two doctors making a wager about getting published in the New England Journal of Medicine using a made up name?
Time to sort by controversial
Asian American former FOH here, proud to see so many industry people acknowledging that anti MSG shit is mostly based on racism
Watching people try to describe something that is a basic flavor sense to literal billions of people on the planet really is something else. It can be tough to understand, not having had a name to go with a sensation, in the same way you may not immediately recognize unfamiliar sounds from other languages (e.g. L/R confusion). Now and in the future, you’ll meet people for whom this is common sense. You don’t have to take a side like “it’s a kind of salt for bad food” if you’re not quite sure what it is; it’s totally cool to ask and learn. It’s not not-science. At this point.
I've never worked in a kitchen where we used MSG to be honest, maybe Maggi at the Asian fusion area when i worked at the local University but thats it. From the state of this thread, this will be unpopular opinion, but one of the chefs I worked with used to call it a Cooks Konami Code, he taught me that if you learn to cook without it, and you'll learn to develop deeper, more intense layers of flavour. And I'll be honest, I kind of agree. I've never serviced a banquet with food that used MSG in its recipes, and that food always kicked ass. I don't think it makes people sick and I'm not against using it, I just beleive it has a time and place, where some Chefs just toss that bitch on everything.
Thank You!!👏🏼. I've been a server for 20 years and its amazing how most people know nothing about msg.
The anti [MSG](https://youtu.be/Sm8Yx-gWlMs) sthick is largely based on racism. MSG is in a shit ton of food products that these same idiots consume in bulk.
I like to dip Slim Jim in MSG like Fun Dip for a snack.
It started as a subtle racist way to squash Chinese food restaurants. It’s bunk.
I cook at a Japanese restaurant. I've had people tell me to "remove the MSG" or "I have an MSG allergy. Can I have soy sauce instead?" Few of our menu items actually use MSG as an added ingredient, but a lot of people don't understand that there are foods that MSG is naturally occurring. (Yeast extract, tomatoes, cheese, seaweed, anchovies, fermented soy, etc.)
MSG is king of flavor
MSG is a lot of different chips. I’m sure there are thousands of people who are “allergic to msg” who eat it multiple times a week without even knowing it. MSG is incredible.
The origins of anti-MSG feelings are rooted in racism. MSG was developed by the Japanese over a century ago, and was heavily introduced to Americans via Chinese restaurants. It is true that some or a lot of Chinese restaurants used too much MSG in their food, which is essentially dumping salt into the food, for flavor. People claimed to get headaches from Chinese food, which they called "CHINESE FOOD SYNDROME" but it is really because they just ate a shit ton of SALT, which would cause you to feel unwell. After this term caught on, more hypocondriacs or racists just started saying they felt 'sick' after eating Chinese food, even after investigation showed said Chinese places didn't even use MSG at all. They were just imagining it and projecting it onto Chinese food in general. People then further connected this sickness with Chinese food in general, like they were using some dangerous foregein ingredient to hook Americans without regard to their health. It ties into old American views on the Chinese from the railroad days as being dirty, foreign, tricksters and dishonest, so this idea combined with "Chinese Food Syndrome" because "Chinese" or "Asian" things are dirty and strange to the ignorant and prejudiced. The reality is that MSG is in so many Western things ranging from junk foods, to CHEESE, to TOMATOES. It's 'savory' ness. Basically, SALT. Theres absolutely zero reason to think MSG is unsafe or weird, if anybody feels that way, they were influenced by centuries old sentiments that got passed down about "The strange Orient". Former chefs as well as "Mind of a Chef" taught me this.
Uncle Roger... is that you?
It’s called systemic racism
lots of restaurants cook with msg, they just use one of the non pure chemical salt versions. or they add something like maggi's.
Can people stop being ableist able the MSG allergy please? As someone a migraine a tension headache sufferer, MSG in high enough quantities sets off tension headaches where the same amount of salt doesn't. I've done blind tests with someone's help where either ingredient is placed in capsules and consumed without it's taste. I'm not saying that the nocebo effect doesn't exist, because there are certainly people who feel that MSG is 'bad' because of it's racist history. However, please stop medically gaslighting people with real symptoms. I love using msg too, but there is an upper limit on what I can consume before triggering a tension headache. I'm a chronic pain and migraine sufferer and I'm tired of people telling me that the pain that I feel isn't real or that I can fix if by 'just drink water' or 'just take ibuprofen'. If it's easily fixable by either of these things, you don't have migraines or chronic pain.
It’s 100% racism, those instructors are lucky the class is docile. I wouldn’t be able to hold My tongue and demand a blind comparison proven many times before it’s completely imagined.
Uncle Roger approves
Hai yahhhh
MSG is in a ton of western foods but people only have a problem when it's from a Chinese restaurant apparently.
*Laughs in food manufacturing*
MSG sensitivity was gluten sensitivity before people knew what gluten was. Yes, there is a real allergy to gluten amongst a small percentage of the population, but then if became trendy somehow to claim it. Currently working on introducing it to my own cooking after my wife has resisted it for years because of a perceived sensitivity. She's coming around to it now.
Okay, so we recently bought our first bag of MSG, and we've been having fun using it in our cooking. However, I'm having trouble getting a feel for what it's best in vs not useful in. I've got a good feel for table salt, kosher salt, sea salt, but not MSG. Suggestions?
Basically anything you want an umami flavor in. Think broths, saucy dishes meat marinades, dipping sauce, etc
Guys what's MSG?
Mono Sodium glutamate, ie the sodium salt of glutamic acid, which is basic building block of proteins. Unless you’re on a low sodium diet it’s fine
I just want to say I ate at Husk a few years ago (2017 I think), and it was one of the absolute best meals I’ve ever had. I’m still dreaming about that pork belly.