Just had some stir fried vegetable and adding MSG was magic.
MSG = free glutamate. Glutamate can be excitotoxic. Anything excitotoxic basically triggers your cells to release energy, at a rate greater than your mitochondria is making it. Eventually this means the cell runs out of energy and goes into a crisis.
Free glutamates are found in basically any meaty tasting food that isn't meat. Mushrooms, soy sauce, tomato sauce, fish sauce, parmesan, etc. Actual meat has it too but it's bound to other stuff, which is why mushrooms can taste more meaty and addicting than actual meat.
Many people cannot tolerate high levels of free glutamate. The worst offender for me is torula yeast, in potato chips, and also oyster mushrooms. Reliably causes headache, lethargy, and twitching for me. Especially the "Kettle" brand of chips, jalapeno flavor, they just absolutely incapacitate me
Also, while Chinese restaurants use MSG, tons of Italian ones also do, among others. If you're getting a clear white sauce, there's an almost guaranteed chance that it's flavored with MSG. If you want a restaurant that's guaranteed to be low-MSG, start eating Indian food.
I agree that like 90% of the hype about MSG is just racism (because it's so fucking common in western food) but the root problem is actually real
Seems unlikely that you're gonna get excitotoxicity just from some MSG in your home cooking TBH. Just did a cursory search and found this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30508818/
It all depends on the individual's sensitivity and the dose. I get it worse from potato chips than I do from restaurant meals usually.
Some of the foods with the highest levels of glutamates are parmesan cheese, tomatoes, and mushrooms. if someone in your life bitches about "getting headaches from MSG Chinese food" but they eat a small countries GDP worth of unlimited pasta and breadaticks at Olive Garden, they lyin'.
sure, but headaches can be kinda ephermeral. i only recently found out that my massive-ice-pick-through-the-head-like-trotsky-migraines were from a lack of salt
In Australia we have “chicken salt”, it’s basically just MSG, lots of places use it on chips/fries, it’s good man
Ironically I once made an Italian (like authentic northern Italian recipe, may have been CIA, not gabagool Yankee Italian) mushroom soup for my family in Wuhan and they thought it was too oily.
Wuhanese people have deep fried dough (油条） for breakfast
How much of that is traditional Chinese food though, vs. food that Chinese people have started eating in the last century?
Or in other words, were Chinese people using tons of soybean oil back in the 1800s? Not saying they weren't, but it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't
Anecdotally, I’ve eaten dinners cooked by poor rural grandmothers and it’s still pretty oily.
Yeah, I know, but oil is pretty dirt cheap and has been for a while. What poor peasants eat today, or even 50 years ago, could be different from what they were eating in 1850.
I think they may have put on some fancier dishes for guests. My grandmother used to have mantou and a hard-boiled egg for breakfast. And some pickled mustard tubers for flavour.
Yeah, she's from the north. Another food item I didn't really get was just plain Coogee/rice porridge with a few slices of pickled radishes. No sauce or oils of any kind. Just wet rice to start the day.
Also watch Li Ziqi, she makes traditional Sichuan food in very pretty videos. Well known in China.
As a Chinese from China, that channel has been very accurate but I've noticed with a slight southern bias. E.g. with se stir frys he cooks each ingredient to about 90% of the way done, takes it out, repeat until the end and then combines them for like 45 seconds to finish
Which does end up with a less greasy end product but I generally see 小炒 where I'm from which is throwing ingredients into the same wok at different times, from things that require the longest time to cook to those that require the least.
Chinese restaurant food is completely different from home cooked Chinese meal. They use a lot of oil and seasoning, they deep fry almost everything, including vegetables before stir frying. It's all based on getting repeat customers, but this applies for all restaurants especially fast food. You're not supposed to be eating restaurant food on a daily basis, maybe once or twice a month.
Chinese food in US is so bastardized that people associate saltiness with authenticity ("It's not REAL Chinese food if it isn't salty!"). It's a shame.
maybe i'm just a heavily salinated individual who likes good food regardless of some manufactured notion of "authenticity" q-q
I wouldn't necessarily call it bastardized. I know a lot of Chinese Americans people that would get defensive if you said that. Early Chinese immigrants adopted to the ingredients they had available and also to the pallets of whatever country they were in That's why there's "American Chinese food" in America and "Indian Chinese food" in India, etc. If you call Orange Chicken "authentic Chinese" that's a different story.
My dyslexic ass thought you were talking about nuclear capable bipedal robots
MSG is safe for human consumption. I am too lazy to get the link but I remember several years ago that hospitals were pondering using MSG to add flavor to hospital food because it is such an effective* flavor booster that adds less sodium than regular salt, making it safer for people with high blood pressure etc. *edit for grammar because I can't post
Teflon got a bad rap due to bad safety testing and media hype.
I just use stainless tbh - it’s cheap and tough, and the results of a good polish with Barkeeper’s Friend still impress my baby brain.
Shoutout to Barkeepers Friend, absolutely critical if you want to maintain your stainless cookware and it also makes every tough cleanup simple and easy. Also great for cleaning the metal ring around your sink drain or polishing the metal fixtures of your sink/shower. DIY approved.
yeah just stick to the basics, a seasoned cast iron and carbon steel will last you a life time.
I've been moving to stainless since all our teflon pans are nearly 20 years old that we got as wedding presents and the aluminum bottoms are eaten through and the teflon is chipping in places.
bunch of scare-pieces out there about how MSG gives you "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" and cooking with teflon can poison you. Haven't researched the Teflon thing myself but MSG has been proven safe
I mean cooking aside teflon is not ideal for a lot of reasons. shit kills birds and causes cancer to produce. Society has progressed beyond the need for teflon and DuPont.
Adam Ragusea on youtube did a video on Teflon. Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FNNKhVoUu8
I mean, my dad actually does get migraines when he eats food with high levels of added MSG. That's not anti-China racism. But unless you specifically have an adverse reaction to it, bring on the MSG.
Does hard/dry cheese also give him migraines (like parmesan)? There's been some tentative studies into how glutamate may be a aggravating factor in migraine sufferers (chocolate and caffeine as well but not due to glutamate).
chocolate and caffeine as well but not due to glutamate
I'd imagine it's the same principle. Glutamate, coffee compounds, are both excitotoxic, and I wouldn't be surprised if chocolate was too
My money is that if research continues then common migraine sufferers likely have some form of hyper-sensitized or easily excitable series of neuron receptors due to a genetic factor that are connected with migraine formation.
Depends entirely on the context of migraine. I get headaches with glutamates, never have a problem if I avoid those foods.
It would likely be just for glutamates since they are a core excitotoxin we as a species consume the most and which can propagate cell responses that might not be good for certain people, still though there's not enough research to really nail stuff down besides glutamates being a factor in cell death when overabundant.
My dad flipped out about MSG back in the day and didnt let me eat anything fun or remotely flavorful for my whole childhood
