Every few months someone asks us the same question: if there's no MSG in it, why does it taste like that?
Fair question. "No MSG" is one of those phrases that gets used as a badge and almost never explained. So rather than ask you to take our word for it, here's the actual mechanism — which vegetables carry savoury depth, why, and how they multiply each other in a pot. Once you know it, you can taste it. And you can build it yourself on a Tuesday night with a chopping board.
First: what umami actually is
In 1908, a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University named Kikunae Ikeda boiled down a great deal of kombu seaweed trying to isolate the taste that made Japanese dashi so satisfying. What he crystallised out was glutamic acid — and he named the taste umami. His paper sat in relative obscurity for decades until it was translated into English in Chemical Senses in 2002. It took until the early 2000s for researchers to identify the actual receptors on the tongue (T1R1/T1R3 and related glutamate receptors) and settle the argument: umami is a basic taste, sitting alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
Here's the bit that matters for cooking. The tongue doesn't detect "MSG". It detects free glutamate — glutamate that's floating loose rather than bound up inside a protein chain. Monosodium glutamate is simply one delivery vehicle for it: a crystallised salt of glutamic acid. A ripe tomato is another. A dried mushroom is another. Chemically, the glutamate is the same molecule in each case.
Which means the honest version of "no added MSG" isn't no savoury enhancer. It's: we got the glutamate from the vegetables, where it already lives.
The label, ingredient by ingredient
Tomato — the workhorse
Fresh ripe tomato carries roughly 150–250 mg of free glutamate per 100 g (Ninomiya, Food Reviews International, 1998). Dry it, and the water leaves while the glutamate stays: sun-dried tomato has been measured several times higher. Concentrate it into paste and you've made one of the most glutamate-dense ingredients in an ordinary kitchen.
Ripening matters too. Green tomatoes have very little free glutamate; as the fruit ripens, proteins break down and glutamate is liberated. This is why an underripe tomato tastes sharp and thin and a properly ripe one tastes almost meaty. It's also why tomato is in more bouillons than any other vegetable — it does the heavy lifting.
Celery root — the backbone
Celeriac is quieter on glutamate than tomato, but it brings something tomato can't: phthalides. Sedanolide and 3-n-butylphthalide are the aroma compounds responsible for that distinctly "stock-like" smell — the one your brain files under soup before you've tasted anything. Celery root also contributes a rounded, slightly sweet body when cooked, and a mineral edge that stops a broth reading as flat.
Aroma is not taste, strictly speaking. But perceived savouriness is built from both, and celery root is mostly working through your nose.
Lovage — the one nobody knows
If you've ever wondered why a Central European broth tastes like a Central European broth, it's usually lovage. Levisticum officinale is a tall, unruly herb that tastes like celery turned up to eleven, dominated by (Z)-ligustilide. In Germany it's literally called Maggikraut — Maggi herb — because it smells so much like commercial seasoning that people assumed the seasoning was made from it.
We'll be straight with you: lovage isn't a glutamate story. It contributes almost nothing on that front. What it does is make a broth smell like it simmered for four hours. It's the cheat code of vegetable bouillon, and it's been growing in kitchen gardens around our part of Hungary for generations.
Dried mushroom — the multiplier
This is where it gets genuinely clever. Dried shiitake carries substantial free glutamate — reported around 1,000 mg per 100 g. But it also carries 5'-guanylate (GMP), a nucleotide that develops during drying as the mushroom's own enzymes break down RNA. Slow rehydration in cool water builds more of it than a blast of boiling water does.
Why does that matter? Because of synergy. Shizuko Yamaguchi's work in the late 1960s showed that glutamate and ribonucleotides don't add together — they multiply. Combining them can increase perceived umami intensity many times over compared with the same quantity of glutamate alone. Later receptor studies explained it: the nucleotide binds to a second site on the receptor and makes it far more sensitive to glutamate.
So a pinch of dried mushroom in a tomato-based broth isn't an additive flavour. It's a lever on everything else in the pot.
Roasted onion, roasted root, and the Maillard bonus
Anything browned before it goes in the pot arrives with hundreds of new aroma compounds it didn't have raw. Roasting onions, carrot or celeriac until the edges catch generates Maillard products — pyrazines, furans, thiols — that read to the palate as depth, roastiness, savouriness. It's free flavour. It costs you twenty minutes and an oven you were heating anyway.
The yeast extract question, answered honestly
Yeast extract shows up on our Cupster labels and we're not going to be coy about it. It's autolysed yeast — yeast cells encouraged to break down their own proteins — and the result is naturally rich in free glutamate and in nucleotides. Both halves of the synergy, in one ingredient.
Is the glutamate in yeast extract chemically different from the glutamate in MSG? No. Your tongue can't tell. What's different is what else comes with it: a complex mix of amino acids, small peptides and nucleotides that carry their own savoury character, rather than one isolated crystalline salt doing a single job. That's the distinction, and it's the only one we'll claim. We're not making claims. We're reading you the label.
Build it yourself
Four rules, and you'll never make a thin vegetable broth again:
- One glutamate base. Tomato paste, roasted or sun-dried tomato. Non-negotiable.
- One nucleotide multiplier. A few grams of dried mushroom, soaked cool for 30 minutes. Use the soaking water.
- One aromatic backbone. Celery root, and lovage if you can find it — a teaspoon dried is plenty.
- Enough salt. Umami perception drops sharply in an undersalted broth. Season, taste, season again.
Fat helps too, because a lot of aroma compounds are fat-soluble and won't reach your nose properly in a fat-free liquid. That's part of why there's avocado oil in every Cupster rather than nothing at all.
When you'd rather not do all that
Some nights you want the chopping board. Some nights you want a jar. The Cupster Chef-Pack Premium Vegetable Bouillon Mix 200g is our version of the four rules above, built to the same logic: vegetables doing the savoury work, zero MSG, plant-based because of how it's made rather than as a marketing position. Use it as a broth on its own, as the liquid for risotto or grains, or as the salt in a braise.
Either way, you now know what you're tasting. That was rather the point.
Sources
- Ikeda, K. (1908/2002). "New Seasonings." Chemical Senses, 27(9).
- Ninomiya, K. (1998). "Natural occurrence." Food Reviews International, 14(2–3).
- Yamaguchi, S. (1967). "The synergistic taste effect of monosodium glutamate and disodium 5'-inosinate." Journal of Food Science, 32(4).
- Mouritsen, O. G. & Khandelia, H. (2012). "Molecular mechanism of the allosteric enhancement of the umami taste sensation." FEBS Journal, 279(17).
- Beck, T. K. et al. (2014). Research on celery and celeriac volatile phthalides.
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Miklos Founder & CEO, Mill & Folks |
