MSG Deep Dive pt 4: Make MSG Salt to craft umami on your own terms + lower sodium
Have you made last week’s tofu with basil and garlic? Dori Fern dove right in. She posted this photo on Instagram of her salad-y rendition, which smartly included blanched amaranth and cucumber with the tofu.
I shared Hanna Che’s recipe to motivate you to practice using MSG. It’s simple, low commitment and revelatory. However, getting a handle on MSG means more than following recipe instructions. There’s the added problem that there just aren’t many recipes calling for MSG. (Someone should connect me with Ina Garten to further the flavor enhancing campaign!) What if you want to free-style and use MSG and MSG-less Asian Mushroom Seasoning Granules (AMSG)?
The MSG Deep Dive part 2 offers MSG dosage tips but that can be hard to calculate on the fly. Give all that, for this last installment of the MSG mini series, I’m suggesting a simple workaround — making an MSG salt to use like regular salt. MSG is strangely mysterious so sliding it into what you already do in your kitchen may foster greater understanding and seamless, easier dosage. If you adopt MSG salt for the long haul, it may lower overall sodium intake, too.
Let’s get into it.
I didn’t invent MSG salt. About ten years ago, my friend, Yun Ho, FedEx’d a care package of Korean pantry items from Seoul. Among the ingredients was a package of mat-soh-geum (맛소금), a mixture of salt and MSG. Yun Ho said that the “seasoned salt” was a staple in many Korean households. “Use it just like regular salt,” Yun Ho wrote. It wasn’t impactful in my dishes so I didn’t use it much. (One estimate of mat-soh-geum places it at 9 parts salt to 1 part MSG.)
This past May, restaurateur and chef Dennis Ngo introduced me to a “compound salt” mixture that includes MSG. I stayed with him and his wife when I was book touring in New York. They let me have free reign of their kitchen. I used his special salt a few times when we cooked at home, but admittedly, didn’t quite understand it. My food tasted a little meh.
After I returned home, I emailed Dennis about his special salt formula. Then, I came up with my own formulas and test drove them for my everyday cooking.
