Forum: cooking.stackexchange.com
Tags: <salt><flavor>
Title: How to fix food that got extra salty?
Question: 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?

Answers:
sents: text: Determine correct ratio of food to salt. Add more food until proper ratio is achieved.
text: Or just serve extra beer with it.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/86/Shog9
score: 38
sents: text: I sometimes add a bit of lemon juice... works to a degree.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/8457/Tobias Op Den Brouw
score: 33
sents: text: Slice a raw potato and add it to the over-salted sauce.
text: As it cooks it'll draw in the salty liquid.
text: You may need to add more liquids to keep the sauce from drying out.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/33/Kev
score: 19
sents: text: Good practice is to under-season food when cooking and adjust the seasoning at the end if necessary.
text: It's very difficult to fix over-seasoned food at the end of cooking.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/141/LeopardSkinPillBoxHat
score: 14
sents: text: Spice it generously with pepper, curry and/or hot chili!
text: When's very hot and spicy
text: you don't taste the salt as much any more.
text: But you will be very thirsty.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/1377/nalply
score: 5
sents: text: Parsley, or other very leafy stuff.
text: Specifically, I've noticed that adding parsley to a dish that's too salty works wonders.
text: It's good for almost any sauce you're making, as well as pasta or casserole.
text: Probably won't work so well with over-salted meat though.
text: Perhaps a parsley and mint sauce for the meat?
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/611/Carmi
score: 4
sents: text: If the curry gets too salty, adding 2 to 3 wheat flour dough rolls helps a lot.
text: It just absorbs salt the same way as raw potato does.
text: And for dry cooked food (i.e. food without curry) adding lemon juice works perfectly for me.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/12647/neyo
score: 2
sents: text: I made a potato lentil soup and used some ham base.....
text: Wow...
text: Too salty....
text: Added a couple of packets of spllenda and two TAB of balsamic vinegar....
text: Really helped...
text: Slightly worried about it as it gets used up...
text: Wondering g if the salty flavor will return as some evaps....!????
text: Thinking about adding more potato to help that??
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/None/
score: 1
sents: text: Well, rinsing the pulled pork worked wonders!
text: No problem bc we wanted to add sauce to it anyway.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/15021/Arby
score: 1
sents: text: 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.
text: The commonly suggested "remedy" of adding potato in various forms is only really attempting to mask the salt flavor.
text: It does nothing to actually remove the salt from the dish.
text: 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.
text: 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.
text: Do keep in mind that starch is not a panacea, as parts of the dish may still taste salty.
text: Also, while starch does mask our perception of saltiness, it also masks other flavors as well, so your dish will taste blander overall.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/37131/JS.
score: 1
sents: text: Like a chef-instructor told us in one of our first classes: heavy cream fixes everything.
text: Specifically, fat fixes oversalting if the dish can handle more fat.
text: Fat coats the tongue which prevents as much salt from hitting your taste buds.
text: If you have a very heavy, fatty sauce, it will need much more salt than, say, a tomato sauce.
text: This makes heavy sauces challenging to season, but it can save your ass if you oversalt something.
answer_details: author: cooking.stackexchange.com/users/60392/ChefAndy
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
It is difficult to correct over-seasoned food, but you can increase the other spices to match or the other ingredients to bring the recipe back to the right balance. Cream, raw potato slices, lemon juice and heavy cream can also help, as can 2 to 3 wheat flour dough rolls in an overly salted curry.
You can try many different techniques to cover or remove the saltiness but in general it is very difficult to cover it up.