Transform Your Dish with a Dash of MSG

American food journalist MFK Fisher wrote in 1949, “There is no culinary challenge quite as demanding as salt-free food in the modern diet.” While this challenge still persists today, chefs across the globe have long touted one of our five basic tastes, umami, as a tool to build flavor while reducing sodium.

The science of umami begins in 1908 when a chemist named Dr. Kikunae Ikeda discovered that glutamate was the source for a taste he could not...