In cooking, salt is an important indispensable spice. There are times when cooking is not just for you, but even professional chefs will sometimes over-salt the food, resulting in the dish being too salty compared to the normal taste. So how to make something less salty so that the food doesn’t go to waste? Join KITCHENBAR to learn about how to make professional chefs offline!
7 Best Ways How to Make Something Less Salty
1. Add Water or Liquid to Your Dishes
For this approach, it is important to note that it is only applicable to liquid dishes. Such as soup, stir-fry, sauce… The decision to add any water or liquid depends on the recipe you cook that dish.
You know, the broth doesn’t have sodium or any other liquid, so based on your recipe it will dilute the excess salt. Of course, adding water to how to make something less salty increases the water content of the dish compared to the original recipe and results in the dish being diluted. Now for the dish to become as attractive as the original recipe, you only need to add a little cornstarch to the dish.
Alternatively, you can treat it by creating a roux, which will make your dish thicker. If you are making chili sauce or marinara sauce, we advise you not to add water but add a little tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes to make the sauce of the sauce and reduce the salty taste of this spice.
2. Add sugar
If your dish cannot add water or liquid to reduce the salinity, add sugar! Professional chefs often use this approach for dry dishes that cannot add water. The more accurate way to call this method is to add sweetness to your overly salty dish. So the sweet ones you can use include: honey, maple syrup, white or brown sugar, molasses, anything sweet that suits your dish.
So should you add a little or a lot at the first time? To perfect the dish we recommend tasting your dish to see how salty it is, then add the amount of sweetness according to its salinity!
3. Duplicate the Formula
When you cook, you find yourself overdoing it with salt. At this point in your kitchen, there are still quite a few ingredients ready for the dish, you can completely use them to know how to make something less salty.
After you add the ingredients, cook them and be careful not to add salt. Once the meal is cooked, try it now and add seasoning if you notice a lack of any spices. This way, after duplicating the recipe, you will have an amount of leftover food that you can freeze and save for the next meal. Isn’t that great?
4. Add Acidic Ingredients
If the ingredients in your kitchen are not enough for you to double your recipe and if you can’t add water or liquid to the dish to reduce the salinity, then there is another method we would like to share. This is to add an acidic ingredient like lemon juice or vinegar.
Why should you add acidic ingredients? Because a little acid can help enhance flavor, neutralize the flavors of the dish, the dish becomes richer. Adding acidic ingredients adds subtle freshness to your meal and hides the salinity.
5. Wash or Soak
We recommend that this method is suitable when you are undercooking your food, but only at the marinade step. If unfortunately during the marinade process, you accidentally add a lot of salt. Now you can remove the salt, if removing the salt still does not reduce the salinity of the recipe, you should wash the ingredients, then re-marinate with the ingredients of the recipe. let’s cook!
Why do we recommend that you do not use this method on cooked food? You know, when a dish is cooked it means that during cooking the ingredients are mixed with the sweet and savory flavors of the dish. So after you cook it, you wash or soak it, it will reduce the strong flavor of the dish.
And the nutrition in the dish is no longer kept as expected. However, your food is pork, ham, or maybe overly seasoned bacon. You can also use this method now. Soak the meat in the water for a few hours and let the salt soak into the water. Then prepare your recipe according to your recipe.
6. Add Milk
According to professional chefs, besides the acidic substances, the fat in milk is also a great neutralizer. The fat in milk contrasts very well with the salty taste. Adding a whipped cream ingredient to a salty dish can make your meal taste lighter and more appealing.
However, adding milk to the dish is the same as the methods we’ve shared above. You must see how well this method is for your food. For dishes made with sauces, using milk is a great combination. In addition to reducing the salinity of dishes, adding milk also makes them richer.
Besides ingredients like sour cream and plain yogurt are a great rescue solution for dishes containing chili, stew, or some delicious stuffed chili. If your stock is too salty, use Butter mixed with an equivalent amount of flour to make your dish more wonderful.
7. Add Pureed White Rice
As in the method above we have shared that you can add flour mixed with the corresponding amount of butter to make the dish less salty. Thus, the chefs also confirmed that adding non-starchy substances can reduce the salinity of the dish.
Most people know that adding a potato will significantly reduce the salinity of the dish. However, you may not know that in addition to absorbing the salty taste, the potatoes will also take a corresponding amount of water. Then in addition to reducing the salinity of the dish, the potatoes also take away quite a lot of water in your dish!
Our professional chefs recommend that adding vegetables, including potatoes, will be more helpful to your salty dish. Besides, instead of potatoes, you can try pureed white rice with a little water and remember not to add salt. Rice is a very starchy ingredient, and that will help soothe the salinity of soups and not reduce the consistency of the dish.
Recipes to Avoid Salty Food
- Always use the correct ingredients in the recipe. Especially the salt that is recommended for use in dishes. If you want to replace it with another salt check its salinity before using it. In particular, you should use kosher salt that has a larger grain than regular table salt. If you don’t have kosher salt, you can use any salt, as long as you check the salinity before you start, and use less than the recipe requires.
- To keep your food from being too salty, our chefs advise you to avoid buying and using high salt ingredients like store-bought marinated dishes. For your health best, be sure to choose sodium with little or no sodium so you can always control how much salt you will add to each dish.
- Next, you should get rid of the habit of adding salt or any other seasoning directly on the pan or pot while you are cooking that dish. Because adding seasonings directly on the cooking stove can lead to you spilling too much and you know, your food won’t be that appealing anymore. So we recommend measuring a certain amount of salt to match your recipe before adding it directly to cooking on the stove. Or you should also marinate the ingredients before cooking, then you need to taste it again to taste it.
- One very important rule we want to give you is never forget to taste your food before finishing cooking. Parmesan cheese, olives, pickles, capers, canned fish like anchovies, Worcestershire, or soy sauce, all of those ingredients have a very high salt content. Using these ingredients in cooking can easily make your food salty. So be careful when preparing dishes with these ingredients!
- The use of foods with too much salt in addition to spoiling the great taste of the food has many other negative health effects. There are salt jars on the dining table of any restaurant or any restaurant that anyone can add to increase the salinity of the dish. So you don’t need to add too much salt to any of your dishes.
Final Thoughts
We just shared with you top ways how to make something less salty from professional chefs. We hope this article helps you to partially fix your mistakes in the cooking process and better avoid them. If you found this post helpful, don’t forget to rate 5* and follow us!