Vol. XXIII · The Everyday Cook Plate 11 of 12rescuing a dish, too salty, too thin, too thick, split sauce, curdled, scorched, burnt, too spicy, too sweet, bland, fixing mistakes, potato myth, balanceF

Rescuing a Dish.

The raw potato dropped into an over-salted soup does not draw out the salt. It just absorbs some soup. What works is more of everything except salt.

Every rescue starts by naming the problem and pushing the opposite way. Too salty is the most common and the hardest: salt cannot be removed, so the cure is dilution — more of the unsalted base (stock, water, vegetables, rice, cream) until the concentration falls (XXII.4). Acid and sweetness do not remove salt but change how a balanced dish tastes (XI.11); a little can help, too much makes a second problem. The folk remedy of a raw potato absorbs liquid at the soup's own concentration, so it removes salt only as fast as it removes soup.

Other faults: too thin — reduce (XXII.8), or thicken with a slurry (XXII.9) or beurre manié (XXII.5); too thick — thin with hot liquid; split mayonnaise or hollandaise — start a fresh yolk (or a spoon of water) and whisk the broken sauce into it drop by drop (X.4, X.5); curdled custard — sieve or blend at once (XVII.5); too sweet — acid, salt or bitterness; too sour — sweetness, fat or dilution; too hot — dilution, dairy, sugar or starch; bland — salt first, then acid, then umami (XI.3–XI.5). Scorched on the bottom — pour the unburnt part into a clean pot without scraping and taste; burnt flavour that has spread cannot be removed (VIII.8). The workshop rescues a salty soup.

Below: the five tastes and balance score of a soup that was reduced until twice as salty (1.6 % salt), as you add unsalted stock, lemon juice or sugar (perceive model of XI.11; added stock carries the soup's other flavours but no salt).

What you will learn
Workshop
Perceive model of XI.11 against a savoury target. Base soup: 1.6 % salt, 0.15 % acid, 1 % sugar, 0.1 % umami (as MSG). Unsalted stock dilutes only the salt; lemon juice adds 0.005 % acid per gram per litre; sugar 0.1 % per gram per litre.

Push the opposite way; dilute salt

The over-reduced soup scores 0.75 on balance. Adding half its volume again of unsalted stock brings it to 0.91, and 80 % more to 0.96 — salt back near its target and everything else intact. Masking instead, with 20 g of lemon juice and 10 g of sugar per litre, leaves the salt where it was and pushes sourness and sweetness past their targets: 0.66. Dilution is the real fix; acid and sugar are for a dish that is only slightly over.

Prevention is easier than rescue: season in steps and at the end (XXII.4); reduce before salting (XXII.8); add emulsions' oil slowly (X.4); heat custards gently and stop early (XVII.5); stir thick pots from the bottom and lower the heat; taste at every stage (I.7). When a dish cannot be saved — burnt through, curdled past sieving, or spoiled — the rescue is a different dish: the over-salted soup becomes the sauce for unsalted rice, the broken custard becomes ice cream base, the overcooked vegetables become soup.

At the stove

Over-salt a small cup of stock on purpose. Fix half by adding unsalted stock until it tastes right, and try the other half with lemon and sugar. Compare.

The potato myth has been tested many times — by cookery writers and food scientists — always with the same result: the potato absorbs soup, and the soup left in the pot is just as salty as before.

Terms

Dilution
Adding unsalted base to lower a concentration.
Re-emulsifying
Whisking a broken sauce into a fresh yolk or liquid, drop by drop.
Masking
Balancing a taste with others instead of removing it.
Scorch
Burning on the bottom of the pan.
Name the fault and push the opposite way. Salt can only be diluted — the potato trick is a myth. Thin: reduce or thicken. Split: start fresh and whisk in. Scorched: move, don't scrape. Burnt cannot be undone.

Sources

  1. S. S. Stevens, Psychophysics, Wiley, 1975: taste intensity grows as a power of concentration; exponents near 1.3 for sucrose and sodium chloride. The course uses teaching exponents near the published ones.
  2. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.