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Going down Reddit rabbit holes often results in one of two things: anxiety or amusement. But a recent scrolling spree through the site led me toward curiosity, specifically about using MSG indesserts. In a 2022post in r/AskCulinary, one user posed the question, “Why is MSG never used in making sweet things?” Responses were plenty, with most agreeing that MSG doesn’t work the same way or as effectively in desserts as it does in savory dishes because it can only enhance savory flavors. One commenter even said that it made their peanut butter ice cream taste “beefy.”
Despite Reddit’s contention, I wondered why so many MSG-packed ingredients have ended up in many of the internet’s dessert obsessions. For example, a few years ago, vanilla ice cream with a dollop ofLao Gan Ma, the famed chili crispfrom the Guizhou province in China, was all the rage. Similarly, Milk Bar’sCompost Cookieushered in an era of folks putting potato chips and other processed foods that could contain MSG in their cookies. Surely, these trends weren’t born purely out of social media’s affinity for dramatic effect. Taste must have something to do with it, so I had to investigate.
Some MSG history to start
MSG has been around for over a century.Since its inception in 1908, this umami-rich ingredient has experienced a character arc of cinematic proportions. In discourse riddled with racist undertones, it was once blamed for a fictitious disease called “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” (despite the ingredient being equally abundant in American processed foods like Doritos, Pringles, and KFC).
Today, however, MSG is in a Martha Stewart-esque redemption era due in large part tomedical studies debunking the ingredient’s presumed health risks. This comeback isn’t just a wider acceptance of the ingredient but an exploration of what it can do beyond conventional use. The food world’s emphatic embrace of this flavor-enhancer has landed it in everything from martinis tomayo. But for desserts, it seems to be just the start.
What is MSG and how does it make food taste better?
MSG, or monosodium glutamate, “is the most efficient way to bring umami to a dish,” explains Christopher Koetke, corporate executive chef at Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition North America, Inc., “because it delivers pure umami without other added flavor compounds.” This flaky seasoning contains sodium and glutamic acid (or glutamate), one of the most abundant amino acids in nature, which naturally occurs in savory foods like cheese and tomatoes.
“On its own, glutamate does not carry that much taste,” Koetke says, “but when combined with certain foods, it contributes the umami and enhances other flavors.” This phenomenon is especially powerful when ingredients high in glutamate come together with foods that contain nucleotides, which are the building blocks of nucleic acid, or DNA and RNA. According to Koetke, “when you combine tomatoes and Parmesan, which contain glutamate, plus meat, which contains inosinate (a nucleotide), and dried mushrooms, which contain guanylate (another nucleotide), the result is a synergistic increase in flavor.”
Humans figured out this synergy way before science gave these compounds their names. That’s why umami-rich centuries-old dishes like ramen and long-cooked ragùs made with meat and tomatoes, are inherently so delicious. And the search for this indefinable deliciousness, what we know today as umami, led Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, to develop MSG. A dash of this glutamate-rich seasoning enhances the umami, especially in dishes high in glutamates and nucleotides.
MSG and desserts: it’s complicated
When I told Koetke about the people of Reddit and their skepticism regarding MSG’s effectiveness in desserts, he staunchly disagreed. “We are just beginning to understand how MSG contributes to overall flavor complexity in sweet applications,” he said. In his experience, adding MSG tochocolate cakeandbrowniesat fairly low levels adds “a characteristic savory note that makes the desserts taste richer with an increase in overall depth of flavor.”
Based on Koetke’s explanation of the mechanisms behind umami, I also wondered if MSG could perform best in desserts made with ingredients that contain naturally occurring glutamate and/or nucleotides. While most high-glutamate ingredients fall into the savory category rather than dessert, there are a few exceptions. Two of these are walnuts and green tea, which Koetke explains can contain “more than twice the amount of glutamate found in tomatoes.” So logic would indicate that adding a dash of MSG tomatcha ice creamor walnut-filledcaramel nut tartcould unlock the gate to the fifth taste of umami in these desserts.
Eggs are another big exception: theycontain a good amount of glutamic acidand are high in protein. Because of this, Koetke states that MSG does indeed work well in egg-rich desserts like custards,curds, sauces, andice creams. A dash or two in Tahitian vanilla ice cream, he explains, makes the “vanilla pop at the beginning of the palate while the MSG is felt at the end. In the middle of the palate, a new flavor sensation is created that is reminiscent of lightly toasted marshmallows or cotton candy.”
But the days of marshmallows and cotton candy have been somewhat eclipsed by desserts that lean towards bolder inclusions like chili crisp and everything bagel seasoning. Chefs and cookbook authors are increasingly broadening the overlap of sweet and savory ingredients in the Venn diagram of the dessert world. And ingredients that are high in glutamate, likemiso,soy sauce, and various cheeses, have already crossed over to this intersection because umami plays an integral role in maintaining that balance between contrasting flavors.
So the addition of MSG in desserts isn’t as tenuous as some may claim. At Bonnie’s in Brooklyn (the home of the MSG martini), chef and owner Calvin Eng offers a fried milk sundae with the option to addpork flossas a topping. Eng explained to me that the pork floss, when paired with MSG-seasoned buttered fried peanuts, creates a dessert in which sweet, salty, and savory play harmoniously.
Abi Balingit’s recipe forTurrones de Casoy MSG Browniesis, quite literally, the thesis of this story in exercise. Balingit told me over email that this recipe was inspired by a batch of pork floss and white miso caramel brownies she made in 2020. For her first book,Mayumu, she wanted to feature a similar recipe with the same sweet and savory dance but make it meat-free. And MSG happened to be the perfect replacement.
她fudgy点缀着five-spice-scen布朗尼ted nougat and seasoned with half a teaspoon of MSG which perks up the warm notes of star anise, cloves, Chinese cinnamon, Sichuan peppercorns, and fennel seeds. Balingit explains that “the MSG creates a literally mouthwatering sensation with each bite that is subtle but makes you want to eat more.”
To ensure I wasn’t blinded by my own research bias (or my personal love of MSG), I orchestrated a blind taste test of Balingit’s recipe. I presented two batches of brownies, one with and one without MSG, to six eager research subjects to see whether they could identify any major differences between the two. Redditors be damned! Pretty much everyone reported tasting the five-spice more prominently in the batch with MSG. And as Balingit promised, that pan of brownies vanished within a matter of hours.
I do think that you'll get the most umami bang for your buck when you include MSG in desserts that have a savory side, and contain glutamate and nucleotide-rich ingredients like walnuts, eggs, or miso. But taste is subjective and preferences are varied. So I suggest thinking of umami as a tuner of flavors already present in a dessert and using it to find the right chords that together make your palate sing.
To kickstart your R&D, follow Koetke’s rule of thumb: start with 0.2%-0.4% MSG by weight. This means that if the weight of all the ingredients in your recipe adds up to, say, a thousand grams, you’ll want to use 0.2%-0.4% of that weight, which equals two to four grams (or ½ to 1 teaspoon) of MSG. Then taste it, adjust it, play around with flavors familiar and new, but don’t let Reddit keep you from exploring the sweet side of MSG.
