The cooking YouTube channel/blog Chinese Cooking Demystified has a great post on celebrating 7 years since they called for MSG in a recipe they released online. They talk about how, despite once believing that MSG was a “cheap shortcut used by bad cooks and low quality restaurants,” they eventually encountered a dish that was impossible to properly recreate without it, no matter how hard they tried. MSG eventually became part of the standard way that they season dishes alongside salt and black or white pepper.
I started using MSG not too long ago, and I recently promoted it from the spice cabinet to a permanent home alongside my salt and pepper mills. I can’t really articulate what MSG does to my food any better than I can articulate what salt tastes like – you kind of just have to experience it. I highly recommend it to everyone, though, and I think there is a reason why it’s a staple in many parts of the world. It’s available at most western grocery stores under the name “Ac’cent Flavor Enhancer” or at Asian grocery stores under the name “Ajinomoto.”
From what I can tell, and despite the warnings I’ve seen in some cookbooks, there seems to be a consensus among experts that MSG is safe at normal dietary levels. See, for instance, the FDA’s Q&A on MSG, or simply read the Wikipedia page on it: “A popular belief is that MSG can cause headaches and other feelings of discomfort, but blinded tests have not provided strong evidence of this. International bodies governing food additives currently consider MSG safe for human consumption as a flavor enhancer.”
