On our street, this rollercoaster warm-then-cold March, chives began to grow wild on the median about three weeks back. As a child, I loved picking chives out of the garden to eat while we were waiting for dinner to be ready, but have never really had a deep well of ideas of what to do with them, beyond chopping and sprinkling as an optional garnish. My own child likes to pull handfuls up and present them to me, an act that’s only really helpful if I’m about to make some deviled eggs.
But recently, I found myself immersed in a Food & Wine piece about MSG, or monosodium glutamate, the flaky, salt-looking additive made via a fermentation process. This feature ran alongside a recipe for chive ranch with MSG, by Brooklyn chef Calvin Eng.
When it comes to using MSG at home, I’m late. The American food media has been rehabilitating the additive’s once-negative reputation in the States for about 25 years now. After finishing up that Food & Wine piece, but before mixing up my first batch of chive ranch, I hopped around online reading “you should use MSG, don’t be scared” arguments in publications from the New Yorker to FiveThirtyEight. (The original “debunking” essay from the late 1990s—the perfectly-headlined “Why Doesn’t Everyone in China Have a Headache?”, by Jeffrey Steingarten in Vogue—appears not to be available online, which is a shame.)
All right, I thought, what do I have to lose? I went to Panda Market, on East State, and got a giant packet of MSG for a cheap price. I made Calvin Eng’s chive ranch with the latest batch of green spikes, still hot from my child’s hand. Verdict: It is so good! The flavor really sings. It sharpens up the chive and onion powder, making every other element of the mixture taste super-present in your mouth. I have made this every week since and kept it in the fridge in a squeeze bottle, to be applied to everything from the daily greens to a slice of Avalanche pizza. (And no. No headaches.)
In service of science and this column, I also made a batch of this ranch without MSG, just the kosher salt called for here. It was fine. But it was even better with the Magic Touch!
Chive Ranch, With Or Without the Magic Touch
Adapted from Calvin Eng, Food & Wine
Ingredients
- ¼ cup buttermilk (or ¼ c milk + a dash of apple cider vinegar)
- ¼ cup mayonnaise (Eng suggests Kewpie; I used Duke’s)
- ¼ cup sour cream
- ¼ cup thinly sliced garlic chives, or ¼ cup garden chives + 2 cloves garlic, grated
- 1 1/2 teaspoons grated lemon zest plus 1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (if you have access to Meyer lemons…why not use them for this?)
- 1 1/2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
- 3/4 teaspoon black pepper
- 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 3/4 teaspoon onion powder
- 3/4 teaspoon MSG (optional … but come on — join me)
Directions
Prep could not be simpler:
- Mix all ingredients together in a bowl, using a whisk.
Lasts in the fridge for about a week.
Serve with mixed crudites (Eng suggests blanching vegetables in water seasoned with both salt and MSG). Or use as you would any ranch dressing — perhaps on a big bowl of Blaney Family Farm’s Zestfully Green salad mix, which you can buy at the part of the farmers’ market that’s currently held inside the Athens Community Center.
