An ode to Kewpie Mayonnaise at GrubStreet. Which I quite agree with - its pretty spectacular. If you like Mayo that is. For all you mayo-haters out there, well, I suspect this isn't actually going to rock your world...
Kewpie mayonnaise, the Japanese mayo with a baby on the bottle, which you've probably seen in Asian markets, is umami incarnate. It's no wonder chefs love the stuff. In addition to being a satisfyingly rich, slightly sweet version of the world's greatest and most versatile sauce, Kewpie gets a serious boost thanks to its kind-of-secret ingredient: Monosodium glutamate. This stuff makes everything taste better.
[...] You can pick up a bottle for about nine bucks, which might seem prohibitive when compared to regular store-bought mayo, but think of it as an investment: All of your food will taste better because you can sneak Kewpie and its miraculous umami-boosting powers into just about everything. Over the years, I've put it to use in obvious ways, like deviled eggs and souped-up aioli. But I think it's more interesting when used as something other than a simple replacement to regular mayo: Try dosing Caesar-salad dressing with a tiny bit (bonus: Kewpie's industrial-strength ingredients help the dressing stay emulsified) or adding a squirt to vegetable purées and mashed potatoes. Used sparingly, the stuff pumps up the flavor of anything you add it to, without making the end result taste at all mayonnaise-y. If you really wanted to go nuts, I guess you could even use it as the base for Paula Deen's chocolate-mayonnaise cake, but that would also require you actually wanting to make something called a chocolate-mayonnaise cake
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