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Recipe Rescue! What To Do If You Oversalt

2009-07-23-Oversalted.jpgHow many times have we delicately salted a dish...and salted a little more...and a wee bit more...and then, oops! Suddenly our dish has gone from under-seasoned to tasting like seawater. Can anything be done to save a dish once we've added too much salt?

 
 

Unfortunately, once it's in there, there's no getting it back out again - no matter how long you stare at the pot and curse under your breath!

The best thing to do is add more ingredients to the dish to dilute the salt. You might not end up with your original dish, but at least it will be edible.

Another cup of stock will thin out a thick soup or turn an over-salted stirfry into one. A handful of grains or noodles will absorb much of the salt and even taste better for it. Adding more vegetables is yet another option, and a good one if you want to keep the dish as close to the original as possible.

Do you have any other tricks for fixing an over-salted dish?

Related: Cooking Confessions: Do You Eat Your Mistakes?

(Image: Flickr member ginnerobot licensed under Creative Commons)

Tags

Tips & Techniques, Health, Seasonings, Ingredients - Pantry, salt, salting, salting to taste, rescue dinner, salty-sweet, over-salt, recipe rescue

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Comments (14)

Adding potatoes and/or onions. Potatoes require a lot of salt, so adding them is a good way to fix an over-salted dish. Onions seem to cut the saltiness, too.

posted by ShellyIN on July 23rd 2009 at 2:24pm
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I end up splitting the dish in two, if possible and adding more ingredients/diluting or using something to counterbalance the saltiness (sweet/sour,etc.). I've even taken it in a different direction (chicken for enchiladas was turned into tortilla soup). Not ideal, but it worked great.

posted by keltrue on July 23rd 2009 at 2:35pm
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Sugar has worked for me in the past. You don't need much, maybe a teaspoon or tablespoon if the dish is large. It does a pretty good job of cutting the salt to a tolerable level and if you use it sparingly won't make the dish sweet.

posted by gswiszcza on July 23rd 2009 at 2:50pm
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Funny, I've been having this problem a lot lately as I recently bought sea salt to replace my last container of regular salt that ran out, and I can't get used to how much saltier it is...

posted by Brooklynnina on July 23rd 2009 at 3:14pm
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My mom says you can put a few large chunks of potato in and let it cook, then remove the potato which will be too salty to eat. I've never tried this, but I've heard it other places too.

posted by HannahS on July 23rd 2009 at 3:29pm
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I've heard the add a potato trick as well, but never tried it. The only time I had a salty oops was as a child, measuring over the cake batter bowl. There was a lot of painstaking scooping to remove the excess. Lesson learned.

posted by angorian on July 23rd 2009 at 3:35pm
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Not everyone likes the flavor, and it only works for certain dishes, but nutritional yeast definitely cuts the salt with its yeasty nuttiness. Use it in any dish that would be complimented by Parmesan cheese.

posted by MidwifeMegan on July 23rd 2009 at 4:20pm
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I take rather drastic measures and dump the dish into a strainer, wash off the sauce and start over with new sauce or seasonings. If it's during baking, I try to fish out as much as possible and some things are best left for the cats on the back of the porch. Salt is very hard on my little system so I try to pay attention to what i'm doing.

posted by lona on July 23rd 2009 at 4:30pm
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The potato trick, as good as it sounds, is truly an old wives' tale. Potatoes do draw some salt out of the dish, but only along with liquid as well, so the end result has the same salinity, it's just distributed among the potatoes as well. If i can, more veggies or starch always helps a bit. Depending on the dish, I've added more sugar, more vinegar or more citrus juice to counterbalance the salt on the taste buds.

posted by doctorrose on July 23rd 2009 at 6:43pm
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The potato trick mentioned above seems like it could work well.

I find that if I use kosher salt, which is less dense than regular salt, it's harder to over-salt. It's easier to eyeball it with the kosher salt.

posted by technicolor troglodyte on July 24th 2009 at 10:45am
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I've used the potato trick and it's worked. Place the potato in, let it suck up some of the salt, and remove.

posted by maddhatter on July 24th 2009 at 3:51pm
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I usually go for a squeeze of fresh lemon.

In my family's tradition, oversalting a dish shows that you're in love. I guess the idea is that you're so dreamy and distracted by love that you let the salt pour and pour. So, an oversalted dish usually gets a declaration that the chef is in love along with some good-natured ribbing.

posted by laila on July 24th 2009 at 5:01pm
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The potato trick works especially well in soups - we used to do it at the restaurant all the time as the soup cooked down during the day or if a customer complained. (That was actually the only thing we kept potatoes for, it was a nuke & puke style place)

posted by anaximander on July 25th 2009 at 9:01pm
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Lemon and the same story abt love in our home :)

posted by oldsplice on July 26th 2009 at 8:39am
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