How To Fix Over Salted Food Easily: 6 Ways

It’s hard to cook a meal without adding salt. You may, however, accidentally add more salt than what is actually needed for your meal. Over salted dishes are a nightmare not only for your taste but also for your health.

So, how can you fix over salted food? Below, we will show you how to remove excess salt from food correctly with some useful tips.

How To Fix Over Salted Food?

There are six ways to deal with saltiness in food. You can take a look at each of them to see which one will be suitable for your situation.

#1 Dilute Your Dish

How to draw salt out of food? It is easy to dilute your dish or add more liquid into your over-salted food.

The liquid you choose should go well with the dish you are making. For example, if you want to remove salt from soup, the liquid you need to use is simply water. Be careful with the ratio of water you use to dilute too much salt in soup, as an excessive amount of water will turn your soup into a tasteless dish. What’s more, you should mix water with a cornstarch slurry to make sure that the soup’s thickness remains.

So, you now know how to remove too much salt from soup. If you are cooking other cuisines, what should you do? 

In some cases, you can crush the ingredients of the food you are making to form the liquid for dilution. For instance, tomato, pineapple, or carrot can be a decent source of liquid for your over-salted food.

Moreover, dilution is easier to carry out when the food is still raw. Specifically, wipe out the salt on raw ingredients like meat, vegetables, or rice under the water faucet. This is also the solution to “How to remove salt from uncooked meat?”

#2 Thicken

As mentioned above, too much water add-in may result in a tasteless dish. Hence, we will give you another option for “How to cut saltiness in food?”. It’s the thickening method using slurry.

The optimal ratio for processing slurry is 50% liquid and 50% starch. Many cooks assume that the starch itself will decide how thick the food will become. Unfortunately, this is not true. In fact, after reaching a specific temperature, starch is efficient in generating the appropriate thickness for the food.

Before getting to know how to neutralize salt in food, you need to know the many types of starch there are to process slurry. In particular, there are three primary starches: all-purpose flour, cornstarch, and arrowroot. Thickener from cornstarch and arrowroot is more transparent than the flour type.

Different starches require a unique temperature for the slurries to come into effect. So, determining when to apply slurries will be helpful to answer “How to fix too much salt?”

Cornstarch, the most common slurry, only works well when you apply it at a hot and boiling temperature. On the contrary, slurries like all-purpose flour and arrowroot will be effective when you add in at a lower temperature.

No matter what type of slurry you select, you should put it into the cooking dish when the processing stage is going to end.

Taking everything into account, only in this section, you have three ways to conquer the problem “What to do when you add too much salt?”

#3 Add Acid

It’s been years that people believed they could use potato to remove salt. Professional cooks have proved the adverse opinion. Potatoes can’t neutralize salt in food, but the acid can!

The acid we are going to mention is acidic safe for culinary purposes like vinegar or acidic juice. Applying extra acidic ingredients to over-salted food actually doesn’t rinse off the salt from the food. On the other hand, the acidic flavor (sour) will affect your taste and somehow minimize the feeling of saltiness.

When opting for acidic additives, you need to focus on the ratio of acid. Or else, excessive amounts of add-in acid may hinder the thickening from forming.

#4 Increase The Recipe

If you don’t mind eating a little more food than expected, try this method as a solution to “How to take saltiness out of food?”

By putting more ingredients into the over salted cooking dish, you can evenly spread the concentration of salt. The extra ingredients are often mild vegetables or leafy greens. Since these veggies hardly have flavor, they can somehow absorb the excessive saltiness from your over salted dish. Additionally, the extraction from the vegetables when boiling them will become a type of liquid for dilution.

If you don’t worry about spending more time, you can try to cook a whole new batch of the same dish. Don’t put any salt in the newly cooked dish. In contrast, transfer the already processed but over salted portion into the recently made batch. When the flavor reaches your desired taste, stop the combination.

#5 Use Fat To Mask The Flavor

We will show you another tip on how to tone down salty food. It’s by using the fat from cream, milk, or cheese. We bet that you have at least once enjoyed the mixture of fat and salty dishes in fast-food chains.

For instance, cooks opt for sour cream or avocado to go with the taco meat, mayonnaise salad to reduce saltiness in steak, or peanut butter to deal with over salted burger patties.

#6 Reseason With Other Seasonings

You can see this section as a last resort to cope with the situation “How to take salty taste out of food?” 

The seasonings here are fresh herbs or ground spices. Before putting these ingredients into your over salted food, you need to sauté each aromatic first. If you don’t know, Sauté is a cooking technique originating from India which requires you to fry food quickly in a low volume of fat. After processing the extra seasonings, add them to the salty dish right before the cooking period ends.

Tips To Avoid Over Salting

You don’t need to know how to make food less salty if you can avoid the over saltiness from happening in the first place. Follow these tips to get rid of over salted food:

• Only adding a little volume of salt whenever needed. A moderate ratio of salt may not immediately deal with the tastelessness, but you can add more salt until the flavor matches your taste. Adding salt is always easier than rinsing it off your food.
• Following the first tip is what you need to do, along with adding salt. It’s tasting the food. For each salt add-in, you should take time to try out the salted dish.
• Kosher salt may be a more favorable addition than table salt. The diet salt is not as salty as the casual salt, so it won’t be serious when you accidentally add more than needed.
• You need to determine the salt ratio inside the ingredients you are cooking. The food itself also contains a specific level of saltiness. Knowing how salty the raw ingredients are will allow you to mix them with salt properly.