ChineseCookingDemystified
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Early Look: Celebrating 7 Years of Using MSG
🕑 Added 2024-10-04 07:21:11 +0000 UTCA 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 we're somehow intrinsically... better. For much of my pre-YouTube adult life, I’d uncritically accepted the Culinary Conventional Wisdom of the ingredient – i.e. that MSG (while harmless) is a cheap shortcut used by bad cooks and low quality restaurants.
It was a few months into the project making a Yunnan ‘Dai flavor cucumber’ dish that made us confront those priors. We were aiming for a very specific dish in Kunming, and it turns out the MSG was the ingredient that really made the recipe 'click'.
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.
Now, that original Yunnan Dai flavor cucumber dish isn't our very best work or anything - tasty enough, but it was only a few months into the project. So with this video, we wanted to circle back to the dish - plus, chit chat about MSG a bit (the health thing, plus the true origins of anti-MSG sentiments).
Comments
Maya
PS: it was generally agreed that MSG did improve "Da Bomb" though I didn't try it because "Da Bomb" is horrid.
Maya
I've been thinking about this a good deal since watching. In general, I really appreciate this channel for the depth that you go to. I love the cultural and linguistic background you share, the stories of the people, politics, agriculture, broader social fashion behind the dishes and ingredients. This is going to be an even longer comment, that was just the preamble 😆🫠🍻 probably grab a beer. There are 2 things that have been kicking around in the brain-pan since: a) My Grandmother's MSG allergy, and my soy allergy (seriously get a beer) and b) Lard. So. Part a, the allergies. At my younger brother's birthday this summer, we had a lineup of hot sauces, inspired by Hot Ones, and featuring the season 21 lineup with other local favorites. We got to the "Da Bomb" subject about how it tases like poison and the folks that had it tried it and it was awful, because objectively it's bad. And then the question was floated: what if we add MSG? Which got a little hot because you can't just add MSG, there has to be some kind of discussion of the politics of MSG. When my brother got hot about the anti-asian hate around MSG, and repeated the Doritos line about "no-one getting sick from Doritos", I reminded him that our Grandmother was hospitalized 3 times in 2 years from her MSG allergy, he got really upset. He reminded me that our grandma was racist, and I agee'd - but the allergy was real. He was to young to remember taking her shopping, and needing to read all of the food labels. She never ate Doritos, because it would send her to the hospital. Things you can't fake, like a swollen tongue blocking your airway. He doesn't remember it as clearly because he was around 12 when she died. So, the conversation then turned to things people "shouldn't" be allergic to but sometimes are. I've known people with garlic, beef, and chicken allergies. Others had known strawberries and bananas. I'm allergic to soy. I've somewhat given up on all Asian food because of it. I live in a Vietnamese part of town and it's really hard to not go to my favorite spots. I flip the bird to my own body probably quarterly and go to my favorite soup shop or the Sichuan place down the road, and end up the next day hating my own guts (literally) and making very long Patreon posts while riding it out. So, I very much appreciate the nuance that you bring to a discussion because these things aren't binary. Also: I'm wondering if you know of any difference in the soy grown in the Americas vs the soy grown in the EU? I ate pizza in London that was made with half soy flour not knowing until after and I was fine. I'm wondering if the soy is different or if there's another more complicated thing happening in my body when I have soy reactions (that also can make my hair fall out, give nerve pain, and a rash). Not that you would know or could give advice about an allergy - but are the beans different or processed differently in different parts of the world? Which brings me to b) Lard. I buy hogs directly from the farmer, which means I also have a lot of lard to render. I'm wondering if you could do a video or a series of videos on uses for Lard, and maybe give some political/historical context for why non- religious objections to lard could probably be overblown or oversimplified and maybe lard should be given a fair shake?
Alan
Thank you for doing this.
Wayne
Excellent episode with loads of MSG humor 😂😂😂
