/ck/ - Food & Cooking

you can actually readily buy pure glutamate as L-glutamic powder yet for some reason no one does this for their cooking. why not? apparently if you eat glutamate by itself it tastes supposedly sour (can't find any clear information on this anywhere either kind of hinting at its unpopularity) but its neutralized when added to salt which is why msg (mono SODIUM GLUTAMATE) tastes salty not sour. in other words no one eats glutamate in a vacuum and the presence of sodium completely alters its flavor to something resembling salty. why don't you buy some L glutamic acid and test this out for yourself its the only way to really prove to you that glutamate by itself isn't umami and if msg = umami and msg = salty then umami = a derivative version of salty