Several days ago, I thought I had reverse engineered a fantastic technique for making fried rice. It was brilliant; who knew plain fried rice with egg, garlic and a pinch of szechuan pepper would be so good.

Later, I saw that the szechuan pepper powder contained the following: szechuan pepper, salt, MSG.

Shit, MSG.

Today, I repeated the recipe, omitting the sinister szechuan pepper powder. The rice turned out as expected, but without that mind-blowing edge. The technique works, but it’s not a silver bullet, one-shot-kill kind of trump card.