Chinese Food--Salt, Soy Sauce, MSG, and Sugar, and a Discussion on Depth/Clarity

If you’ve read a Chinese recipe or watched a cooking video of a Chinese chef, you often find that there are not many measurements. People often say “add some salt/sugar/soy sauce/MSG” until it tastes good. What does that mean??

I want to present a solid framework on how to fine tune a dish once you’ve added the main ingredients. A good way to think about it is through thinking about a dish’s depth or clarity, which I’ll explain below. Cooking Chinese food often goes by taste/experience, but hopefully these tips help one demystify it. At the end, I’ll also add some explanation on what to do if the recipe only contains a sauce ratio but doesn’t say exactly how much sauce you want.

Salt and Umami

In addition to making things taste salty, salt is a very important ingredient to bring out other flavors. If you don’t know what this means, definitely check out the technical note on salt. In a nutshell, when you add a lot of spices to an undersalted dish, you might be able to smell the spices very well, but you can’t taste it well. Adding salt actually helps your taste buds perceive these other flavors better, and in this way, salt adds clarity to the dish by making these flavors more clear. A classic symptom of a dish not having enough clarify is that it smells really good, but when you eat it, you can’t actually taste the spices well.

Umami, on the other hand, is the sort-of “savory, deep” flavor you experience in certain dishes. It makes something feel rich and satisfying and adds depth to a dish. As some examples:

• A slow cooked bowl of beef/chicken soup
• A rich bowl of miso soup
• A rich tomato sauce with parmesan cheese
• A strong shiitake mushroom broth

These are dishes that when you taste, it feels very deep and feels like it has a lot of layers. This in contrast to salt, which makes things taste salty and more clear, but not necesarily endowing them with this richness.

To summarize, depth is like a dish having many dimensions and feeling deep. By clarity, I mean that you can taste all of the elements of a dish, and none of the flavors taste muddled or unclear. In general, salt/sodium helps enhance your dish’s clarity (up to a point, don’t oversalt your dish!), and umami (MSG) flavors enhance a dish’s depth. This is the beginning of our framework in thinking about how to fine tune a dish.

Understanding umami flavors and where they come from: umami flavors come primarily from a class of chemicals called glutamates (MSG is monosodium glutamate). These are found naturally in tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed, miso, kombu/bonito flakes, soy sauce, cheese, fermented foods, meats, fish, fish sauce, cured ham. Basically, fermented things, aged meats/cheeses, sea products, and tomatoes/mushrooms. Contrary to what some people think, MSG isn’t actually bad for you; I’m pretty sure that was just a racism thing from back in the day.

Now that we know about depth, clarity, and what glutamates are, how do we fine-tune dishes? Here are some general tips:

• If you feel your dish has a lot of deep flavors (e.g., you’ve already added fragrant things with glutamates such as mushrooms, tomatoes, soy sauce, seaweed, etc.) but you just can’t taste it well, add some salt. Salt will bring out these complex flavors. Some examples of this are:
  • A broth with lots of ingredients that smells good, but just tastes watery
  • A stir fry that smells great, but doesn’t taste like much
• If your dish is well-salted already but tastes boring, add some MSG or an ingredient that contains glutamates. Some examples are:
  • Chinese vegetable stir fries usually have oyster sauce, and is why they taste so good and complex. If they were stir fried with only garlic and salt, it would taste much more one-dimensional.
  • You have a chicken soup that’s well salted, but tastes a little boring. Consider adding some mushroom or tomatoes, or both! This will add depth and more dimensions to it.

Finally, what about sugar?

Sugar, in addition to tasting sweet, is good for toning down strong flavors. If you have a dish that is too bitter, too sour, too salty, too spicy, or something like that, adding some sugar will help regulate some of those sharp flavors.

Say you cooked a spicy tomato beef broth, and now it’s tasting too sour and too spicy. Adding some sugar will even it out. Or say you have a garlic/vegetable/oyster sauce stir fry and it’s tasting a little bitter (maybe the vegetables are old or you burned the oil slightly). Add some sugar to round out the flavor!

How to follow a Chinese recipe without exact measurements?

You might be mystified when you see a Chinese recipe where someone just says add a spoon of this, a couple spoons of that, some salt, sugar, etc. You might think it’s impossible to replicate the recipe due to how vague it is.

What I usually do is keep an eye out for the ratio of the main sauces. For example, when I watch a video, I don’t look for the absolute amounts of the ingredients they put in, but I pay attention to the ratios. For example, if some person says 160 grams of sugar, 100 grams of soy sauce, the main thing to keep in mind is that it’s roughly a 3:2 ratio. This will control the main taste of the dish. As for the absolute amounts, that depends mostly on how you’re planning to make, which is why I don’t really like adding absolute amounts. Then, when you’re fine-tuning the dish at the end, use the above guidelines to tweak the final flavor to what you want it to be.

One important thing also is that Chinese food can be subject to your own interpretation. Even for a standard dish like 红烧肉 hongshaorou, some people like it sweeter than others, some people like it with a darker color (in which case you need more dark soy sauce), etc. One can definitely alter dishes here and there! Though every dish has more or less a standard taste, so if you veer too far from that then one might say that you are doing it wrong. To know what it should taste like and what taste you would prefer, you should go to some good Chinese restaurants and try them out!