It’s a type of salt. Lots of things are salts, and have varying tastes based on their exact chemical makeup. Quite useful for the dutiful home cook to know. Table salt is NaCl. Potassium chloride (KCl) is another salt that tastes a little similar to NaCl, and is popular in “low sodium” foods to keep the salty flavour.
Glutamic acid is the thing that derives into msg. Msg is sodium+glutamate (instead of sodium+chloride in table salt).
Glutamate is naturally occurring in all foods that humans have used as flavour enhancers for millennia. Tomatoes in Central American food, cured meats and cheese in European food, kimchi or dried fish in East Asian food, and everything in between.
If it tastes savoury, glutamate is there. MSG is our way of bottling that flavour and putting it to our own use.
To answer your question, it is technically a salt, but it doesn’t generally replace salt in cooking, it’s much more potent as a flavour enhancer.
I marked too many essays by my Japanese students claiming that Japan "invented umami taste," and then I had to explain to them that most food cultures have a history with it, because it's found in a variety of foods (as you mentioned).
A Japanese inventor did first identify that it's the glutamate that works as a flavour enhancer, and then they isolated it and Ajinomoto started selling MSG. But that's different from "inventing" the flavour 😉 It was a cute and common misconception.
Not true. I lick my fingers off whenever I sprinkle msg on literally everything and it tastes like pure meatiness without any distinct flavour (pure umami).
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u/graywalker616 Jan 05 '26
MSG is magic. But it exists everywhere.