Celebrating Seven Years of MSG
Celebrating Seven Years of MSG
Proudly applying flavor for seven years - a retrospective (and a recipe re-do)
A little over seven years ago, we called for MSG for the very first time in a recipe – Yunnan Dai flavor cucumber.
At that time, there was already starting to be a chorus of people pushing back on the idea that MSG is bad. I remember Fuschia Dunlop had blurbs in her books saying that there was nothing wrong with the stuff, and David Chang practically devoted an entire episode of Ugly Delicious on the topic. And yet… if you looked the actual recipes these sort of media personalities put out, nobody out there seemed to have the guts to actually call for the ingredient – in spite of it being extremely Western supermarket available.
Now, I don’t want to claim that I’m somehow… better. For much of my pre-YouTube adult life, I’d uncritically accepted the Culinary Conventional Wisdom re MSG – i.e. that (while harmless) the ingredient is a cheap shortcut used by bad cooks and low quality restaurants. It’s one of those opinions that easy for a culinary pseudo-intellectual to hold. And living in Shenzhen, it was easy to confirm that prior – after all, meals at cheap restaurants would usually come with a complementary soup that I’d disparagingly label “MSG water”. It’s free, so whatever… but even today I do always appreciate the restaurants that take their time to serve you a proper stock.
It was a few months into the project - making a Yunnan ‘Dai flavor cucumber’ dish - that made me confront those priors.
Now, that recipe’s not exactly the best one we’ve ever put out. There’s things we would definitely change today – which is why we’re following this post up with an updated recipe. But it was the first time on the channel when we actually based a recipe off of going back into the kitchen of a professional restaurant.
We were traveling in Kunming, which food-wise is very much a Han and Hui town. Neither really tickles the brains of a culinary pseudo-intellectual as “Yunnanese”, and so we found ourselves frequenting and refrequenting a small eatery run by a Dai woman from Honghe. Their smashed cucumber was particularly memorable. And after a number of times ordering it, she offered to take us back into the kitchen and show us how to make it – notes were taken.
Returning to Shenzhen, we set out to recreate what we saw. After a couple tests, the dish was close to our memory of the thing, but not quite there. On a whim, we said to ourselves, “eh, fuck it, let’s try not cutting the MSG, pick up a bag, see where that gets us”.
Turned out? …it was the missing ingredient. It had to go into the recipe.
And so, for the very first time, it graced our ingredient list:
MSG (味精), ¼ tsp. Optional, for seasoning. We like a little MSG in this dish, but if you hate MSG it’s not a critical ingredient or anything.
From that point on, perhaps, Baader-Meinhof kicked in. Again and again, whenever we found a legit looking source for a dish, odds tended to be quite high that they seasoned with MSG. We started slow and judicious – an optional tag here, a small sprinkle there – but over the years MSG has become part of our standard seasoning protocol.
And while I don’t think the rest of the English-language food world has quite caught up, I think you’re starting to see an increasing number of recipe writers using the stuff. It’s a little more common with Asian dishes, I think – perhaps partly because creators fear the wrath of the Nigel Ng – but the situation does seem to be slowly improving, at least on YouTube.
Of course, food creators on YouTube get the benefit of being niche. In defense of the Dunlops and the Changs, they do need to appeal to the general population. And in the general population, there’s still a lot of people that turn their nose up at MSG.
And no, they’re not all racists. Or I guess, at least most of them.
MSG and Health
So… we finally wanted to engage with this question head on. Because frankly, it feels like a lot of people online are just talking past each other.
I also feel the need to word this section incredibly carefully. Because I think we can all agree that the internet is absolutely chock full of dubiously sourced food-related health claims. Like, just google “why [insert thing] is good for you” and compare the results against “why [insert thing] is bad for you”. I guarantee you’ll be able to find something out there that’ll confirm your priors:
There’s plenty of evidence that MSG is harmless, but I think a lot of people in the anti-MSG crowd will then claim that those studies are cherry-picked (who then follow up with their own cherry-picked studies). Most MDs will tell you MSG is fine, but I’m sure you can also dig up MDs that say otherwise.
So let’s call the thing off – no cherry picking studies, no cherry picking doctors – just me, you, and our mental models of the outside world.
A point that I see a lot of pro-MSG people online make is the “Doritos Argument” that David Chang made in Ugly Delicious:
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That is, we have a group of people that claim they have MSG sensitivity, and avoid Chinese food for that expressed purpose. And yet, they don’t seem to have any symptoms when they eat Doritos. And junk food tends to have a good bit of MSG (or other umami additives) in it! Curious…
This would certainly be a good point to contradict those sort of narrow anti-MSG claims that you might’ve found in the 80s and 90s. But I think many of the anti-MSG folks have moved on. Here in 2024, the Dorito argument sort of misses the bigger picture.
Because… Doritos aren’t exactly healthy, right?
What’s in a Processed Food?
Everybody knows that processed food is bad for you. Everybody knows that you should be getting your nutrition from whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables, not Cheerios and Butterscotch Krimpets.
But… why?
Now, we could certainly play the health-question googling game – and there’s tons of reputable people out there with rather complete answers. But we wanted to avoid that today, right?
Logically, the answer must be one of the following:
Ultra Processed food has something bad in it – something unhealthy lurking there in the ingredient list.
Real Food contains something good in it – something you miss if you replace it with junk food.
Here’s what we consider to be our core philosophical difference with much of The Online Health Crowd – many of them, it seems, heavily weight possibility #1.
We heavily weight possibility #2.
It feels like much of the online health crowd goes around trying to unearth the hidden ‘poisons’ in our food – this food coloring or that pesticide, this sweetener or that flavor enhancer. And listen, there’s probably a little bit of that going on – I doubt the industry is necessarily run by saints.
To me, the fundamental question is – do you believe the modern world is governed by conspiracy, or by incentives?
Because when we look at well capitalized companies, multinational conglomerates, and government institutions… we see a world that has actually become really quite good at covering its ass. We no longer live in the world of Upton Sinclair, or even Ralph Nader.
In 2024, I have a quite a bit of faith that a bag of Doritos is not going to kill me. But I also have faith that Frito Lay – as a not-human institution whose very reason for existence is to make maximum possible quantity of money – is going to sell me most profitable, most addictively delicious product that they can make at the cheapest price. They have no financial reason to nourish us, so they’re gunna get the cheapest processed cornmeal they can, and flavor it with ‘isolates’ – salt, sugar, citric acid, and, yes, MSG.
I believe that even if you took that Dorito and removed all the salt, all the sugar, all the artificial coloring, all the MSG… the thing would still be unhealthy.
It would just no longer be delicious.
Why seasoning actual food is important
So here’s the good news about the incentive-based worldview: you don’t need to go around avoiding the modern world like some sort of monk. Asceticism provides no bonus points.
Too often, I see people get trapped in the following cycle:
Eat too much crap food, resolve to cook ‘healthy food’
Begin cooking ‘healthy food’ – being good citizens and being extremely judicious with the salt, sugar, oil, etc.
Get bored with ‘healthy food’ because it’s more work and doesn’t even taste good
Go back to eating crap food
Or at least… I’ve personally been there.
Of course, the awkward thing about being a dude discussing health on the internet is that unless you’re a ripped 25 year old with a six pack (or at least got that Dad muscle going on)… your words don’t really have much weight to them. And listen, I’m never going to be a health influencer. I’m about ten pounds overweight. High blood pressure runs in my family, and I’m certainly not bucking the trend. When it comes to working out, I’m only slightly better than your average New Years Resolutioner. I drink 3-5 beers a night. I eat too much red meat, and I eat out at restaurants too much. I, uh, live a passionate life – I could very easily die at 60.
But what I don’t struggle with is an addiction to ultra-processed food.
It didn’t always used to be that way – when I was a college student, I could easily consume a box of chewy chips ahoy in a single night. But I started cooking and actually seasoning my food, all that stuff… became a lot less interesting.
If you struggle with the crap food-healthy food treadmill, it’s certainly worth a shot. Per ~300g of food, try:
Salt, ¼ tsp
Sugar, ¼ tsp
MSG, ¼ tsp
White (or black) pepper, ⅛ tsp
And maybe try not to worry so much about the oil, whether seed or otherwise. Or do, whatever, it’s your life - unlike most of the merchants in this space, I ain’t trying to sell you anything.
Cue the ‘subscribe now’ popup…
Yunnan Dai Flavor Cucumber Salad (傣味拍黄瓜)
Alright, so… what exactly was the problem with our original recipe?
Well, it was the same issue that a lot of our early content had - it wasn’t so much that the recipe was bad (in fact, I still think it’s pretty tasty)… but that we didn’t have a good grasp of the larger context, the bigger picture.
It’s a common issue when it comes to people interested in food, and the source of the vast majority of (non-political) mean comments under recipe videos. It’s extremely, extremely easy to take your own eating experience as a sort of gospel and extrapolate it out: “I lived in Shunde for three years, never saw people do this, therefore it’s Wrong”. Or, perhaps, the inverse: “I talked to a chef once, they said they did XYZ, therefore XYZ is The Correct Way”. It takes quite a few reps of getting mindfucked by the sheer diversity of cuisine before you begin to internalize how little you know…
The problem with the original video was that it was a recipe for A Dai cucumber salad, but it was presented as The Dai cucumber salad. Further, it wasn’t exactly representative at that. Like, we added Sriracha Panich because that’s what the restaurant did, but that was… very much that woman’s own twist. There was also an insistence on serving the dish very very cold, but that was, again, mostly based off of my own experience. I was introduced to the dish as a side to a bibulous night at Kaoba (烤吧) - ‘barbecue bars’ - and many of these places would keep cucumber salad in the fridge almost ready-to-order.
Zooming out, we should understand ‘Dai flavor cold salads’ as their own category of food in Yunnan. In a home cooking context, you could think of many of these salads as part of the larger tradition of Tam and Yam within the Thai/Tai food world - especially with the Northern Thai styles. They tend to season a touch differently, reflecting the trading networks that borders tend to formalize - so… less fish sauce and Pla Ra, more soy sauce and oyster sauce.
However, the biggest difference, I think, with their northern Thai counterparts is that Dai cold salads were commercialized differently. In response to increasing Han tourism into Xishuanbanna, dishes that appealed to the tastes of tourists began to gain prominence - perhaps most notably of all, Dai flavor chicken feet:
One day, we’ll cover the whole space in a proper video. There’s a lot to learn - trying to figure out just how blurry the line is between the old and the new; the commercialized and the homecooked. But… at the very least, we’ve eaten around the province a good bit more, and today I think we can give you a bit more representative of a cucumber salad.
Ingredients and Sourcing
Cucumber, 1, ~200g. Asian cucumber preferably, though English cucumber may also be okay. Will be peeled, de-seeded, and smashed.
Carrot, ~1.5”, 20g. Julienned.
Onion, ⅛. Sliced.
Tomato, ¼. De-seeded and diced.
Toasted -or- Roasted Peanuts, 1 tbsp. Chopped up.
Toasted sesame seeds (熟芝麻), 1 tsp. Chopped up.
Garlic, 3 cloves. Minced.
Spicy fresh chili (小米辣), 1-2. We used one fresh Heaven Facing Chili. For whatever reason, over the last half year or so the fresh heaven facing chilis at markets in Bangkok have been absurdly spicy, so we only used one. Feel free to dial things up according to your heat tolerance (the dish should be spicy).
Toasted -or- smoked chili powder (胡辣椒), 1 tsp. In the video, we used a Thai Prik Bon (พริกป่น), which is rather similar to the Yunnan sort. You could toast some yourself, or you use chipotle powder (the smokiness is reminiscent of the deep, ash-roasted Guizhou variety). You could also probably use 1 tsp of a spicy cayenne pepper together with ½ tsp of a smoked paprika to hit a similar place.
Culantro (大芫荽), 10g. A.k.a. sawtooth coriander. Also used in Mexican cuisine, so unless your Asian grocer has a fantastic Southeast Asian selection, a Latin grocer is likely the best bet. You can also just cut this out and double up on the cilantro if you need.
Cilantro (香菜), 10g. Or, 20g if you’re not using culantro.
Lime Juice, ~1 Lime’s worth. Juice from one fresh lime.
Seasoning:
Salt, ¼ tsp
Soy sauce (生抽), ½ tsp
Oyster sauce (蚝油), ½ tsp
MSG (味精), ½ tsp
Recipe
Serving size: This dish functions as a side. If you are serving more than 2-3 people, double the recipe.
Mince together:
Three cloves garlic
1-2 spicy fresh chilis
Roughly chop together:
1 tbsp toasted -or- roasted peanuts
1 tsp of toasted sesame seeds
Roughly mince:
10g culantro
10g cilantro (20g if skipping the culantro)
De-seed and dice:
¼ of a tomato
Julienne:
20g carrot
⅛ of an onion
Peel (or ‘half peel’, as we did in the video), slice in half, de-seed:
1 cucumber
Then, lightly smash the cucumber ‘flat’. With the back of the knife, lightly chop in little ‘grooves’ to help the sauce cling. Then, chop into ~1.5” pieces and transfer to a mixing bowl.
Add all of the above ingredients to the mixing bowl together with the cucumber. Then add in:
1 tsp toasted or smoked chili powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp soy sauce
½ tsp oyster sauce
½ tsp MSG
Juice from one lime
Mix well and serve.
Note on the Origins of Anti-MSG Sentiment
In the accompanying video, Steph has a very good discussion on some of the origins of anti-MSG sentiment. I, Chris, as the decidedly not-Cantonese white dude half of this project… feel a little uncomfortable discussing it here. I would definitely suggest watching it however - timestamped here.