Early Look: Celebrating 7 Years of Using MSG

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 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).