Which people invented MSG?
Almost a hundred years ago, Kikuo Ikeda, a chemistry teacher at the University of Tokyo in Japan, came home late, and his wife heated up the leftovers for him to eat. When he took a sip of the soup, he suddenly felt that it was very delicious, so he carefully checked the dishes in the soup, but there were only some kelp silk and a few slices of cucumber in the soup. When asked about the recipe, his wife told him that it was just a dish that was not finished at noon and made with some water. Ikeda didn't give up, and he decided that there must be something mysterious in the soup, so he took the kelp to the laboratory for research, and finally found a substance called "sodium glutamate" in the kelp. In this way, MSG was invented by Ikeda, and it soon became popular all over the world.
Speaking of the invention of MSG, it is purely accidental. One noon in 1908, Kikuo Ikeda, a professor of chemistry at Imperial University of Japan, sat down at the dining table. After completing a difficult experiment in the morning, his mood was particularly relaxed at this moment, so when his wife brought a plate of kelp cucumber sliced soup, Ikeda's unusually fast-paced eating habits began to taste slowly.
Ikeda's taste was out-of-point. He found that today's soup tasted more delicious than anything else. At first, he thought it was because he was in a particularly good mood today, and after a few more sips, he felt that it was indeed fresh. "These kelp and cucumber are very ordinary foods, how can they produce such an umami taste?" Ikeda said to himself, "Well, maybe there is something in each belt." As soon as the professor left the dining table, he got into the laboratory. He took some kelp and studied it carefully.
This research took half a year. Half a year later, Professor Ikeda published his research results. A chemical called sodium glutamate can be extracted from kelp. If a very small amount of sodium glutamate is added to the soup, it can make the taste extremely delicious.
After Ikeda published the above research results, he turned to other work.
At that time, a Japanese businessperson named Sanlangsuke Suzuki was working with others on the production method of extracting iodine from kelp. When he saw Professor Ikeda's research results, he immediately changed his mind, "Wow, let's not do iodine extraction, let's use kelp to extract sodium glutamate!"
Suzuki rang the Ikeda doorbell, and a scholar and a businessperson joined hands. Ikeda told Suzuki that it was not practical to extract sodium glutamate from kelp for sale as a commodity, because only 0.2 grams of the substance could be obtained per 10 kilograms of kelp. However, the substance is also contained in the protein of soybeans and wheat, and it may be possible to produce large quantities of sodium glutamate from these inexpensive raw materials.
The collaboration between Ikeda and Suzuki soon came to fruition. Soon after, a product called "Ajinomo" appeared in a store in Asakusa, Tokyo, with a big advertisement - "Home Ajinomo, white water turns into chicken juice". For a moment, people who bought "Ajinomo" almost squeezed through the door of the store.
The Japanese "Ajinomoto" soon spread to China. This wonderful white powder moved the heart of a chemical engineer named Wu Yunchu. He bought a bottle and went back to study to see what this white powder, which was strictly kept secret by the Japanese, was. After a test, it turned out to be sodium glutamate. After more than a year, he independently invented a method for producing sodium glutamate: in wheat bran (gluten), the content of glutamate can reach 40%. He first hydrolyzed the gluten with 34% hydrochloric acid under pressure to obtain a black hydrolyzate. After being decolorized by activated carbon and vacuum-concentrated, the white crystalline glutamate was obtained. Then the glutamate was reacted with sodium hydroxide, concentrated and dried to obtain sodium glutamate.
Wu Yunchu called his "flavor element" MSG, and he was the first person in the world to produce MSG by hydrolysis. In 1923, Wu Yunchu founded the Tianchu MSG Factory in Shanghai and introduced the Chinese "flavor element" - "Bergamot brand" MSG. Later, Bergamot brand MSG not only sold well in the Chinese market, but also entered the US market. Wu Yunchu also won the title of "MSG King".
The production of MSG by hydrolysis is not economical because this method requires a lot of grain, and it costs at least 40 tons of wheat to produce 1 ton of MSG. Moreover, when extracting sodium glutamate, a lot of bad-tasting gases are released, and the hydrochloric acid used is also easy to corrode machinery and equipment. It also produces a lot of harmful sewage. Therefore, the Japanese MSG company has to continue its research work in order to produce better products with better methods.
In this work, Japan's Xiehe Fermentation Company is at the forefront of its peers. A group of scientists organized by Xiehe Company found that glutamic acid can also be obtained from sugar and urea under the action of microorganisms, but since different bacteria will have different products after reproduction, it is necessary to select the appropriate one In 1956, Concorde announced that they had found this "little craftsman", which was the brevibacterium brevibacterium. The fermentation method of producing sodium glutamate was born. Concorde scientists mixed sugar, water and urea into a culture liquid, then used high-temperature steam sterilization to kill all the bacteria, and then inoculated the cultivated pure brevibacterium in the most favorable environment, allowing them to reproduce. Thanks to the efforts of the "little craftsmen", most of the sugar and urea were converted into glutamate, and finally, it was neutralized into sodium salts.
The new method invented by Concorde to produce MSG requires only 3 tons of wheat per ton. Not only is the operation simple and the cost is greatly reduced, but the purity of MSG is improved and the umami taste is stronger. However, Concorde's invention soon lost its luster.
At the end of 1964, the Japanese press selected the top 10 inventions of Japan that year, one of which was "Strong MSG". Its freshness was 160 times that of "Concord MSG"!
The invention of "powerful monosodium glutamate" can be traced back to the beginning of this century. At that time, Japanese scientist Dr. Daisuke became very interested in the question of why mushrooms are so delicious. He also went into the laboratory like Professor Ikeda of Imperial University to study the ingredients of mushrooms. After analysis, it was found that the mushrooms were delicious because they contained a substance called "sodium uranylate". But due to the technical conditions at that time, he thought of many ways, but he could not make it. Daisuke had to stop this futile research.
It was not until the 1960s that a new generation of Japanese scientists rethought Daisuke's discovery, because biochemistry was developing rapidly at that time, and biocatalysis technology was very mature and could be used in this field. In this way, by 1964, strong monosodium glutamate based on sodium sulfonate was finally available.
Interesting to say, the umami of sodium ouroside itself is actually similar to that of ordinary MSG. Only when it is added to food, and the food contains a small amount of sodium glutamate, it will have a "synergistic effect" with sodium glutamate, which immediately improves the freshness of the food. Therefore, strong MSG is actually made with a small amount of sodium ouroside mixed into ordinary MSG.
In fact, even before the invention of strong MSG, experienced chefs had already used this chemical principle to improve the umami taste. When they roast chicken and meat, they often add a little MSG, because meat also contains sodium uranylate, and the added MSG can work synergistically with it to greatly improve the umami taste.
People's pursuit of "freshness" did not end there. When the old man of history took the last few steps in the 1980s, someone invented a "super fresh MSG". Its main chemical component is 2-methylfuranoside. It is more than 600 times fresher than MSG! It seems that the development of things is endless, and freshness is endless!
