Dawadawa vs MSG
The short answer
The comparison West African kitchens have been making in practice for decades, as stock cubes took over part of the job dawadawa did. Both supply savouriness, and for the same underlying reason — free amino acids, glutamate among them. The difference is everything else. MSG is a purified salt with no aroma; dawadawa is a locust-bean seed fermented for days by Bacillus bacteria, pungent, ammoniacal and deeply savoury, and a soup seasoned with it tastes of the ferment. Swapping one for the other keeps the soup savoury and changes what it tastes of. Dawadawa also has to be cooked in, so the ammonia can leave; MSG can go in at any point.
Side by side
| Dawadawa | MSG | |
|---|---|---|
| Botanical identity | Parkia biglobosa (Jacq.) R.Br. ex G.Don | Not established |
| Part used | seed | — |
| Origin | The Sudanian and Guinean savanna belt of West Africa, from Senegal to Nigeria and beyond. | Tokyo, 1908, where Kikunae Ikeda isolated glutamate from kombu seaweed and proposed umami as a taste distinct from sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Commercial production began the following year, which makes MSG among the youngest seasonings in this catalogue by a margin of centuries. |
| Flavour notes | savoury, pungent, ammoniacal, fermented, umami | savoury, umami, mouth-filling, lingering |
| Heat | Scoville does not apply | None. MSG carries no pungency of any kind and no scale applies to it. |
| Flavour | Intensely savoury and slightly bitter, with a lingering fermented depth. In a finished soup it tastes less of itself than of meat or stock. | Savoury depth without a flavour of its own — the sensation of a dish having been cooked longer, reduced further or made with better stock than it was. On its own on the tongue it is faintly meaty and slightly salty and not pleasant. Its effect is entirely relational: it makes other things taste more like themselves. |
| Aroma | Strong, pungent and ammoniacal, with a deep savoury character — the smell of protein breakdown by Bacillus, and chemically a relative of natto. Much of the ammonia cooks off in the pot; the savouriness stays. | Not established |
Can you swap them?
Substitution is directional: the answer is often different in each direction, and both are recorded.
MSG
SituationalMSG, or a stock cube, supplies the savouriness of dawadawa and nothing of its aroma. The soup will be savoury and will not taste fermented — which is exactly the change that has happened in many West African kitchens as cubes replaced the ferment.
| Flavour | Aroma | Colour | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|
| partial | unrelated | different | n/a |
Works for
- Supplying savoury depth in a soup or stew
Does not work for
- Efo riro and other dishes where iru’s smell is part of the dish
- Anyone cooking to reproduce the traditional flavour
Cuisine: A modern substitution many cooks already make; the dish loses its fermented identity.