Well, no wonder why I like instant dashi powder! I never bothered to look at the ingredients. My fav is to boil edamame in dashi broth and ALSO to sprinkle some on like salt on top after drained.

Oh well…I think I’m immune to MSG by now.

Routhier’s recipe is also where I came up with the parsnips; she says it was her mother’s addition.

Now, other authors I have since read, Diana My Tran and Corrine Trang, do not use fish sauce in their pho.

There are two reasons I can think of for this. One, is that it is a regional variant. Or, two: the former two authors are both chefs who own restaurants, and the other two authors are as I recall, home cooks. This may be a difference between restaurant food and home food. I don’t honestly know. All I know, is when I was asked to teach a class on pho, I had to figure out how it was made, and so I turned to recipes from cookbooks and the internet, and from asking around at the restaurants where I ate. (The restaurant where I ate pho was run by a Thai-Vietnamese family–so the fish sauce may also have some Thai influence on the recipe, now that I think of it. But they told me to use fish sauce, too.)

So that is where I got the fish sauce and the parsnips.

As for the MSG–I think what I will do in general is leave it out to be added at the table by those who wish it. I generally think it is safe, but I never know who may or may not react badly to it as an ingredient, so I will leave it out. I think that your mother’s judicious use of it is the way to go, though, and if I am cooking just for my immediate family, I would probably do as you suggest.

As for using fish sauce, kombu or black mushrooms or any other food source of umami–I think I will not do that for this recipe. I will put fish sauce in a great many different foods, including American style stews and soups, but only when they are strongly enough flavored to hide the fish flavor.

This particular stock is fairly delicate in flavor–and I am pretty certain that the fish sauce, mushrooms or kelp would show up in the flavor profile if I used them–which is why I didn’t do it in the first place.

In terms of the seasoning of MSG before or after, it’s a pretty essential ingredient in my mom’s kitchen in regards to making any broth. I think the “oomph” you’re talking about doesn’t take that much MSG to accomplish, in a HUGE stockpot I’ve seen my mom put in no more than two teaspoons of it and it just adds enough to the broth to give that enhancement that your husband is talking about. Just an observation I’ve seen, and she’s been making broths for Vietnamese/Chinese noodle dishes for years. Maybe try that next time when you make a pot of broth? Since it’s so little that’s going in compared to the amount of stock in the pot, I doubt there would be side effects unless there was someone who couldn’t outright eat it. So far in 20 years, I haven’t seen anyone sick from my mom’s methods .

And in reading your Vietnamese recipes, I was wondering where you taking reference from or if it was a regional difference in how the dishes are prepared, namely the pho. I’m assuming the parsnips were your own personal touch (I prefer the rock sugar myself), but the fish sauce is what’s leaving me at a loss, since I’ve never seen it as a flavoring component for pho, much less most Vietnamese broths.

This is much better than blindly following the advice of others; maybe it’s right and maybe it’s not, but with a test you actually know.

I use MSG all the time, mostly through the ubiquitous fish sauce, but also as a substance all by itself. It takes very little, a few crystals, to alter a dish for the better. Some of the recipes in the past called for teaspoons full of the stuff; no wonder people got headaches.

It really is dandy stuff if used in moderation, and the world is full of tasty foods that are full of glutamates already. If you find it to be a useful addition to food, fine.