What to Do When Your Food is Too Salty?

Salting is necessary in cooking food and over-salting is the most common cooking disasters. What will you do if you have over-salted your food? Throw it away? Add water? or serve it anyway?

A salty stew tests the toughest diner. Quickly peel some potatoes and slice them into rounds. Add these to the stew to lighten the salt a little. The raw potatoes will absorb the salt as they cook briefly (until they look translucent) and then you can remove them (fish them out with a slotted spoon). The remaining stew should be less salty. Another quick fix is to add a few spoons of milk to the stew.

For over-salted vegetables, the same fix applies if the veggies are in water or broth as for the stew. If they are steamed or stir-fried, you will probably need to start again, although you can try rinsing steamed veggies if the over-salting is merely because the diner sprinkled too much salt on.

Many canned vegetables are seasoned and preserve with large amounts of salt. A salty brine inside the can often absorbs deep into the vegetables as they sit on the shelf. To cut salt on canned goods, rinse canned vegetables first before cooking.

I need to actually salt and pepper my food myself, I could care less if it tastes perfect, in fact I rarely taste it prior to seasoning it. After my seasoning it I taste and frequently add more salt and pepper, habit I can't break, nor do I want to, salt freak here... how about you?