Continuing my one-man monitoring of Fuchsia Dunlop's writings, here she
is endorsing, gasp!!, the use of MSG.

China's true dash of flavor
Fuchsia Dunlop
Thursday, February 22, 2007

The Chinese Year of the Pig began on Sunday, filling local Chinatowns
with people in search of a festive meal. Yet despite the enduring
popularity of Chinese food, many still see it as strictly a down-market
cuisine, more the stuff of cheap takeout than one of the world's great
culinary cultures.

In the old days of chop suey and egg foo yung, this reputation may have
been justified. But now that fine and authentic Chinese dining is
available in much of the world (if you know where to look for it), why
do so many people still think of it as junky?

Looming large as an explanation is the use of monosodium glutamate, or
MSG, in Chinese kitchens. For restaurant chefs and Chinese home cooks,
MSG is a ubiquitous seasoning, considered as "normal" as salt, soy sauce
and vinegar.

Yet for many people, the fine white powder is a sinister food additive,
tainted by association with industrialized food production and the
garish, over-the- top flavors of packaged snacks.

And ever since 1968, when The New England Journal of Medicine used the
headline "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" over a letter from a doctor
complaining that Chinese restaurant food gave him numbness in his neck
and palpitations, it has also been fingered with medical suspicion.

While around a third of Americans say they believe that MSG makes them
ill, reputable medical studies have shown that only a tiny proportion of
people truly react to it, and then only when it is administered in large
oral doses on an empty stomach.

In the absence of medical evidence of any harmful physiological effects
of MSG, the fact that the Chinese use it while people not of Chinese
descent generally don't creates a serious cultural barrier to the
mainstream appreciation of Chinese food. Isn't it time, perhaps, to cast
off our prejudices and take a cool, steady look at MSG?

MSG is not, of course, a traditional Chinese seasoning. It was
discovered in 1908 by a Japanese scientist, Kikunae Ikeda, who was
trying to pinpoint the source of the intense deliciousness of broth made
from kombu seaweed.

In his laboratory, he isolated the natural glutamates in the seaweed,
and to their marvelous taste he gave the name "umami," derived from the
Japanese word for "delicious." His work led directly to the industrial
manufacture in Japan and then worldwide of monosodium glutamate.

Still, MSG was long considered simply to be a flavor enhancer, with
little or no taste of its own. In recent years, however, there has been
growing acceptance of the existence of a so-called fifth taste — an
addition to the traditional quartet of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter —
known through an emerging consensus by Ikeda's term, umami.

Our tongues, biologists have shown, have distinct receptors that pick up
on the taste of MSG and a wider family of umami compounds, and some of
our brain cells respond specifically to umami.

The umami taste comes from the building blocks of proteins, amino acids
and nucleotides, which include not only glutamates but also inosinates
and guanylates.

These delicious molecules appear when animal and vegetable proteins
break down, for example in the ripening of Parmigiano cheese or
prosciutto di Parma.

Industrially made MSG is a chemically "neat" form of one of the umami
compounds that delight our taste buds when they occur naturally in
cheese, ham and seaweed, just as salt is a "neat" form of the saltiness
of seawater and white sugar of the sweetness of sugar cane. Is it any
worse for us than refined salt and sugar?

Western chefs, food writers and consumers are only now cottoning onto
the existence of umami and its power as a culinary concept. In China,
however, it has long been part of the daily vocabulary of the kitchen.
Chinese chefs talk often of "xian wei" — their term for umami.

They use many ingredients that are naturally rich in it — Yunnan ham,
dried scallops, and shiitake mushrooms — to enhance the flavors of their
stocks and sauces (just as an Italian cook might use grated Parmigiano
or truffles to enhance the umami taste of a dish of pasta).

They talk of "ti xian wei" ("bringing out the umami") in their cooking
through the judicious application of salt, sugar, chicken fat and,
nowadays, MSG.

Bad Chinese chefs, of course, just use MSG as a substitute for good
ingredients and properly made stocks, just as bad American food
companies cook up snack foods made from fat and carbohydrates laced with
salt and sugar.

But top Chinese chefs also use it, to refine and elevate flavors. There
may be no need to add MSG to a delicate soup made from chicken, ham and
dried scallops. But in some culinary contexts, it works wonders: A
little MSG mixed with salt and sesame oil can lift the flavor of a
simple bamboo shoot salad, or add a dash of ecstasy to a stir-fry of pea
shoots and garlic. If you didn't know it was MSG, you would simply find
it delicious.

In the past, I was as closed- minded on the subject of MSG as the
purists and hypochondriacs.

When I started cooking and writing about Chinese food more than a decade
ago, I decided not to use MSG. I wanted to stick up for proper
ingredients and traditional cooking methods, and help to rehabilitate
the reputation of Chinese cuisine by showing that it didn't require this
reviled additive.

But these days I'm not so sure. The scientific evidence for umami is
persuasive, and as a concept it makes sense of a great deal of
traditional culinary theory.

I see brilliant chefs in China making subtle and skillful use of MSG.
And if some outstanding Western chefs — like Heston Blumenthal, whose
Fat Duck restaurant in England has three Michelin stars — are willing to
risk ridicule and experiment with its culinary potential, perhaps it's
time I should as well.

Intellectual curiosity is, tradition has it, a hallmark of the Year of
the Pig.

Fuchsia Dunlop is the author of "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook."


From http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...n/eddunlop.php