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How to fix food that got extra salty?

Seasoned Advice Asked by Vinko Vrsalovic on October 1, 2021

How to fix food that got extra salty? I imagine this depends on what the food is. With spaghetti, you can add water or change water if you detect it on time. But what about grilled meat? Or a tomato sauce?

13 Answers

  1. Determine correct ratio of food to salt.
  2. Add more food until proper ratio is achieved.

Or just serve extra beer with it.

Correct answer by Shog9 on October 1, 2021

Slice a raw potato and add it to the over-salted sauce. As it cooks it'll draw in the salty liquid.

You may need to add more liquids to keep the sauce from drying out.

Answered by Kev on October 1, 2021

Good practice is to under-season food when cooking and adjust the seasoning at the end if necessary. It's very difficult to fix over-seasoned food at the end of cooking.

Answered by LeopardSkinPillBoxHat on October 1, 2021

Parsley, or other very leafy stuff. Specifically, I've noticed that adding parsley to a dish that's too salty works wonders. It's good for almost any sauce you're making, as well as pasta or casserole. Probably won't work so well with over-salted meat though. Perhaps a parsley and mint sauce for the meat?

Answered by Carmi on October 1, 2021

I sometimes add a bit of lemon juice... works to a degree.

Answered by Tobias Op Den Brouw on October 1, 2021

Spice it generously with pepper, curry and/or hot chili! When's very hot and spicy you don't taste the salt as much any more. But you will be very thirsty.

Answered by nalply on October 1, 2021

I made a potato lentil soup and used some ham base..... Wow... Too salty.... Added a couple of packets of spllenda and two TAB of balsamic vinegar.... Really helped... Slightly worried about it as it gets used up... Wondering g if the salty flavor will return as some evaps....!???? Thinking about adding more potato to help that??

Answered by Nancy on October 1, 2021

If the curry gets too salty, adding 2 to 3 wheat flour dough rolls helps a lot. It just absorbs salt the same way as raw potato does. And for dry cooked food (i.e. food without curry) adding lemon juice works perfectly for me.

Answered by neyo on October 1, 2021

Well, rinsing the pulled pork worked wonders! No problem bc we wanted to add sauce to it anyway.

Answered by Arby on October 1, 2021

If there is liquid in the dish (soup, sauce, etc) you can add peeled carrots to help absorb the salt. Pre-cut and peeled baby carrots work best. They aren't as easy to pick out at the end as a potato is, but you don't risk having the potato break down and over-starch/thicken your dish.

Answered by lostinthespiral on October 1, 2021

I add a large, peeled potato or several peeled carrots to the soup or stock as it cools. Cooking the desalinating root vegetable interferes with the osmotic process. As the salty soup cools, the starchy root vegetable(s) absorb the excess salt. This is not a quick fix and requires several hours or overnight refrigeration. Remove the root vegetable(s) and reheat. PS: Peanut butter (one big tablespoon) is a wonder for over salted, burned, or otherwise "ruined" dishes. Bon appetit!

Answered by Frederic Kahler on October 1, 2021

You can't remove salt from a dish once it's added, so Shog9 has the only correct answer to this question: add more ingredients to dilute the salt.

The commonly suggested "remedy" of adding potato in various forms is only really attempting to mask the salt flavor. It does nothing to actually remove the salt from the dish.

Any starch will lessen your perception of saltiness, hence why so many starchy dishes (think baked potato) require higher levels of salt to taste good.

Adding starch to the dish (potato starch, cornstarch, etc.) or serving the dish with a starch (bread, pasta, potato, etc.) can lower the perceived saltiness of the dish.

Do keep in mind that starch is not a panacea, as parts of the dish may still taste salty. Also, while starch does mask our perception of saltiness, it also masks other flavors as well, so your dish will taste blander overall.

Answered by JS. on October 1, 2021

Like a chef-instructor told us in one of our first classes: heavy cream fixes everything. Specifically, fat fixes oversalting if the dish can handle more fat. Fat coats the tongue which prevents as much salt from hitting your taste buds. If you have a very heavy, fatty sauce, it will need much more salt than, say, a tomato sauce. This makes heavy sauces challenging to season, but it can save your ass if you oversalt something.

Answered by ChefAndy on October 1, 2021

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