Too Much MSG? How to Fix a Dish That Tastes Flat, Brothy or Too Salty

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) has one job in a dish: the savory taste called umami. Too much shows up as a heavy, one-note savoriness that lingers, and often as a dish that’s also too salty, since MSG is a sodium salt and usually goes in alongside salt. Dilute, the same way you would for salt. Nothing we found neutralizes umami. And if the pot already holds anchovies, Parmesan, mushrooms or soy sauce, an ordinary pinch of MSG may be one pinch too many.

Quick answer

What “too much” tastes like

Umami is a savory or meaty taste, produced by glutamate, guanylate and inosinate.¹ A little MSG comes across as depth. Past a point, it stops helping. Chef Daniel Holzman, who seasons with a 10-to-1 mix of Diamond Crystal kosher salt and MSG, warns that going past that ratio overwhelms the palate and leaves a distracting, lingering mouthfeel.² The cooking channel Chinese Cooking Demystified says too much gives a dish a one-note “processed food” kind of taste.³ Those are cooks’ descriptions, not measurements.

Umami can also stack up without much MSG. America’s Test Kitchen explains that when glutamate meets the nucleotides inosinate and guanylate in equal amounts, umami can be as much as 20 to 30 times greater than with glutamate alone.⁴ So in a dish that already has anchovies, Parmesan, mushrooms or soy sauce, by our reading of ATK’s explanation, an ordinary pinch of MSG may be one pinch too many.

How much sodium does MSG add?

MSG is about 12% sodium by weight, against 39% for table salt, in a peer-reviewed analysis by Wallace and colleagues.⁵ Here’s how that looks on a label. Two retail listings of Accent, whose label lists monosodium glutamate as its only ingredient, show different figures:⁶⁷

The two Accent listings disagree, and we can’t tell from the pages which one reflects the current label. The 60 mg figure matches Wallace’s 12% for a 0.5 g serving (0.5 × 0.12 = 0.06 g).⁵⁶ Either way, a teaspoon of MSG carries roughly a fifth to a quarter of the sodium in a teaspoon of table salt. For scale, the FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day.⁹ If the dish tastes salty, look first at the salt, soy sauce, bouillon or seasoning blend that went in with the MSG. Some blends contain MSG themselves; FDA requires added MSG to be listed by name on the label.¹⁰

Too savory or too heavy

Dilute. More of the main ingredients, or more unseasoned liquid in a soup, sauce or braise, lowers the glutamate in each bite. If the pot won’t hold more, cook a second unseasoned batch and combine the two. That’s the method Tasting Table gives for too much garlic.¹¹ Two equal batches halve the MSG per serving.

Add a little heat. Chinese Cooking Demystified suggests that a bit of cayenne pepper helps bring a dish with too much MSG back to life, and that spiciness balances MSG.³ That’s one cook’s tip, and we found no test of it. It suits stir-fries, noodles and soups that can take some chile.

Sweetness or acid. We found no source testing sugar, vinegar or citrus against excess umami. They may make the dish taste different, but we can’t say they make it taste less of MSG.

Too salty as well

If the dish tastes salty, treat it like any oversalted dish: dilute, and add no more salt, soy sauce or bouillon. Serve it with plain rice, noodles or bread. Our too much salt and too much soy sauce pages cover the salt fixes in detail.

Fixes that don’t hold up

A potato to soak it up. The potato trick comes from oversalted soup, and even there Robert L. Wolke’s test, as Moulton reports it, found the potato soaked up salty water instead of pulling out just the salt.¹² We found no test of a potato against MSG. A potato you leave in and eat is more unseasoned food, which is dilution.

Is too much MSG a safety problem?

Here’s what regulators say, in their own terms.

United States. FDA considers adding MSG to food generally recognized as safe. It says a 1990s report by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology concluded that MSG is safe, while noting that some sensitive people who eat 3 grams or more of MSG without food may have short-term, generally mild symptoms like headache, numbness and flushing. FDA adds that eating more than 3 grams without food at one time is unlikely, that a typical serving of a food with added MSG contains less than 0.5 grams, and that it was never able to confirm that MSG caused the effects people reported to it.¹⁰ Britannica reports that later research found no conclusive link between those symptoms and normal levels of MSG.¹³

European Union. In 2017 the European Food Safety Authority set a group acceptable daily intake of 30 mg per kg of body weight per day for glutamic acid and its salts, E 620 to E 625. By our arithmetic, that’s 2.1 grams a day for a 70 kg adult.¹⁴ EFSA found that people in every age group whose diet is high in foods with these additives may go over it, and that some highly exposed people may exceed doses linked to effects like headache. It recommended reviewing the maximum levels allowed in foods.¹⁴

Putting a kitchen mistake in those terms. By the Kroger listing’s weight, a teaspoon of MSG is about 4 grams and a tablespoon about 12 grams.⁶ A tablespoon stirred into a pot that serves four works out to about 3 grams a serving. A teaspoon in the same pot, about 1 gram. FDA’s 3-gram figure is for MSG eaten without food, and EFSA’s figure is a daily intake for all added glutamates together. We found no regulator figure for a single meal with MSG in it. Diluting brings the amount per serving down, along with the taste.

Preventing it next time

Published starting amounts differ by about four times:

These answer the same question differently, so we show them side by side and don’t average them. As a starting point, begin at the low end, about 1/8 teaspoon per pound or so of food, taste, and add more only if the dish still seems to be missing something. By the Kroger label’s weight, Accent’s 1/2 teaspoon is about 2 grams,⁶ or 0.33 to 0.5 grams a serving across 4 to 6 servings (our arithmetic). That’s in line with FDA’s typical serving of under half a gram.¹⁰

Count the other umami and salt. Taste before adding MSG to a dish that already has soy sauce, Parmesan, anchovies, bouillon or a seasoning blend that lists MSG.⁴¹⁰

Pre-mix it with salt. With a ready-made salt and MSG mix like Holzman’s, it’s hard to add a lot of MSG by accident, because the salt would show up first.²

Related

• Monosodium glutamate (MSG) and cooking with MSG
• MSG vs. salt and MSG substitutes
• Too much salt and too much soy sauce
• Sazón seasoning and lemon pepper, blends that can contain MSG