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Can you buy Chinese takeout style garlic sauce in a jar?
I really like the "Broccoli in Garlic Sauce" dish offered in Chinese takeout restaurants.
I have a few big Asian food markets near me.
Is it possible to buy the garlic sauce the takeout places use in a jar? If so, what would it be called? I imagine there is more than one type of jarred sauce called "garlic sauce" in the world.
So the "garlic sauce" that you get with that dish isn't really a single sauce you can get in a jar, but rather a mix of a few common Chinese staples into one sauce. That said, it's nothing particularly exotic, especially if you have access to a Chinese supermarket, and mixing up a sauce isn't super hard (certainly less effort than chopping up the broccoli imo).
I've found a few different recipes around the web that are largely similar but differ in some specifics. Which one you like best is definitely going to depend on your preferences and what you're trying to emulate. Here are a few good recipes I've found:
Adam Ragusea's recipe is very transparently Westernized but that's probably what you're going for and it comes with a video. That said, he adds a few weird ingredients that you can definitely leave out or sub for other stuff. His suggestions about blanching broccoli and adding cornstarch slurry are really good though so I recommend watching even if you use a different recipe. And he doesn't try to scare you away from MSG which is nice - a sprinkle can really help a dish like this, especially if you're emulating takeout.
This recipe uses Chinese broccoli (gai lan) but is otherwise identical to the minimal set of ingredients I'd give for this type of sauce. To adapt for Western broccoli you just need to blanch it and add the blanched broccoli after you cook the sauce a bit, as in Adam's video.
This recipe used a lot of the classic Chinese pantry staples (including Chinese-style soy sauce, a mixture of light and dark) and is probably the one I'd try of these three (though I might add some oyster sauce and add less sugar to compensate, I'd def add a pinch of MSG, and I'd def be too lazy to make my own chili oil). They provide links with more info for the more Chinese ingredients, and everything there should be easy to find at any Asian supermarket.
Does any food tuber say anything else about it though? Maybe some say add if you want to or outright skip it but I haven't encountered anyone who out right believes that racist myth.
It's kind of a weird story, but about from the inception of the controversy over MSG it was referred to as "Chinese restaurant syndrome". Some people view criticisms of it as still carrying those undertones, particularly when its directed at MSG from a bottle while greater amounts of naturally-found MSG in Italian cuisine get a free pass.
The wiki has a section on natural sources of glutamate, and parmesan is the one I recalled being pretty high, which is why I mentioned Italian cuisine.
The other reply I made mentioned we get ~13g of glutamate a day naturally, with 3g being the cutoff for someone that might be sensitive to it on an empty stomach.
While there is a small subset of people who have a reaction to MSG if they have large quantities on a nearly-empty stomach (i.e., not with food), if you have symptoms after eating Chinese food with MSG it's most likely to be symptoms of having food that's high in salt while also not drinking enough water. I don't think there's any biological basis to distinguish between a sauce with tomato and parmesan (both high in msg) and a stir fry sauce with a pinch of powdered MSG. But I'm not a medical expert so if you feel worse adding it, feel free to leave it out and add a bit more of other seasonings to compensate.
I don't think there's any evidence that MSG in Chinese food causes the effects you describe. The only studies that have shown effects on a subset of hypersensitive people used quantities much larger than would be used in cooking, consumed without food. It was also not compared to consumption of table salt in similar quantities in those studies.
But if you don't want to add MSG to your cooking, no one's forcing you. Since it's usually just adding a pinch to the sauce, it's easy enough to omit from pretty much any recipe.
J. Kenji López Alt has said that we do not have enough evidence to say that no-one suffers effects from MSG, and he's right about that.
Unless you're referring to something besides this it seems like he is saying something more measured:
Cautioning against the use of MSG because a sensitive subgroup might experience short-term adverse effects in amounts that wouldn't be experienced in recipes using it doesn't seem called for.
If I understand it, the study used a citrus-flavored (to cover taste) beverage with 0/1.25/2.5/5g of MSG, and they treat the 0 grams as the placebo. I have a disabled parent who is supposed to follow a CATS diet who will have adverse reactions to salt, so I'd be interested in a study using comparable amounts of salt to rule that out.
*A literature review from 6 years after the other study acknowledges reports of a MSG-sensitive subset of the population has disputes that it has been found in placebo controlled studies, but I haven't looked at it (and I'm not qualified to).
After reading the study, even that seems completely wrong. They used citrus-flavored soda because another study compared it to tomato juice and found it to be equally effective at concealing the taste of MSG, but argued it would be the better option because people don't have an expectation for the base flavor.
The subjects were put through four subsequent protocols. The first two were the soda tests, and the results seemed to indicate a statistically significant correlation. But this completely disappeared with the third protocol were subjects received pills with either MSG or placebo. Only the consistent responders to MSG but not placebo reached this stage and should therefore be most likely sensitive, but out of 12 people only 2 had a consistently negative response to the MSG pill, and not placebo, on the two occasions they were tested, and zero of them had the same symptoms throughout the different protocols.
To me it seems more likely that they didn't identify people sensitive to MSG but instead those who could taste the addition of it to the soda, who then had placebo induced symptoms. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to make sense how the signal completely disappeared with the pills.
Sure, but the burden of the proof is on the claimant. Additionally, we know that any effects cannot be widespread or severe, as the sheer amount of people that consume msg would show that already.
Most of the foodtubers I know are good about it but if you stray into the recipe blogs there are a lot more crunchy moms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt5zzI_3-VA
I am pretty sure that is the video. Ragusea is a good resource as a food-interested creator, who doesn't bring a ton of baggage of tradition.
Ah sorry I must've messed it up, I'll edit to hopefully fix it.
I'm not wholly sure what you mean by garlic sauce in terms of (I presume) Westernised Chinese cuisine but this is a type of garlic sauce that might be an equivalent. It's called yu xiang sauce.