Being a home cook can be both terrifically liberating and horrendously frustrating. You can make all sorts of delicious dishes in the comfort of your own kitchen, you can nourish your family night after night, you can earn the admiration of your friends, and the thinly-veiled jealousy of your enemies. However, you can never quite make your food taste the way it does at your favorite restaurants.
Unless you have access to their pricey equipment, or you managed to pry their recipes out of their cold, dead hands, your food, no matter how tasty, will taste just a little bit different. But if you're rending your shirt in despair at the futility of making takeout-style sesame chicken (for example), don't worry so much about it. There's an ingredient, one that's commonly available but rarely found in home kitchens, that will get you almost all the way there.
, . No, MSG isn't dangerous Wait a minute, hold the phone! Isn't MSG that terribly unhealthy additive everyone warns you about, responsible for everything from obesity to general malaise? Don't you see a bunch of products for sale at the supermarket which specifically sell themselves as MSG-free? Why on earth would an upstanding food resource like ourselves tell our audience to ingest such a horrible thing? What kind of sickos are we? . In fact, it contains just a third of the sodium as table salt.
A letter written to the New England Journal of Medicine by one coined the term "Chinese restaurant syndrome" to describe getting sic.
