We’ve partnered with Ajinomoto Co. Inc. to celebrate our favorite taste—umami—with a series that digs into its history, its complexity, and its many, many culinary applications. Here, we’re giving fall vegetables a crunchy, umami-rich upgrade with some help from pepitas, lemon, and a dash of MSG.
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When you think of your typical holiday spread, seasonal vegetables probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. They’re in there, to be sure, but usually they’re so outplayed by cheese, cream, butter, and bacon, that you can hardly even recognize them. Gratins, stuffing, mashed this and thats…all delicious dishes that make us wake up the next morning looking for something crisp and refreshing.
Strip away all the food coma-inducing ingredients, though, and what are you left with? A platter of roasted vegetables might be nice, but perhaps not festive enough to delight your friends and family. Instead of dressing up roast vegetables by making them heavier, make them lighter and brighter with a crunchy topping, the makings of which can reflect your tastes.
The basic idea is to provide roast vegetables with a topping that’s puckery, fresh, and all around toasty-crunchy. I’m partial to a combo of lightly pickled shallots, lemon zest, parsley, and toasted pepitas and quinoa held together with some olive oil. You could swap the shallots for scallions or red onion, the parsley for any other herb, and the seeds for nuts or even bread crumbs. Any which way, it’s a fun, flavorful jumble that enrobes your roast vegetables and brings a little pizzazz to your holiday meal.
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In order for your dish to get noticed among all the huggable cream coats, though, each vegetable needs to bring great flavor to the dish. But produce in the winter can be unreliable and harder to come by (maybe that’s why we cling to the dairy aisle). By adding just a little MSG to your shallot, parsley, lemon, and seed mixture, each ingredient’s natural flavor is not only more pronounced, but also works to create a perfectly balanced result; instead of being drowned out, they all shine together. (If you’ve ever wondered why your grandma’s green bean casserole is so good, it might have something to do with the MSG in the canned cream of mushroom soup.)
Whereas salt seasons, MSG ties together and enhances flavors, especially those of raw vegetables and fruit. To taste the difference, try taking a bite of a raw cucumber and one sprinkled with a little MSG. One’s more cucumber-y, right? On your roasted vegetables with the crunchy seeded sprinkle, everything’s more roasty, toasty, zesty, and bright. You’ll wake up the next morning still looking for vegetables, but only because the ones from the night before were that good.
We’ve partnered with Ajinomoto Co. Inc. to spark new conversations about MSG and bring you a series of recipes, stories, and videos that celebrate the fifth taste: umami. This rich, savory essence can be played up in almost any dish by adding a dash of MSG, a seasoning that’s pure umami flavor. When cooking with MSG, note that MSG contains less sodium than regular table salt. The general rule of thumb: Use about two-thirds of the table salt you’d normally use, and then add one-third MSG back in. You can also learn more over at the Umami Information Center and World Umami Recipes on Instagram.
