Too Much Garlic Salt? How to Fix a Dish That’s Too Salty or Too Garlicky

Here’s the catch with garlic salt: it’s mostly salt. McCormick’s lists salt first, then garlic, an anticaking agent and garlic oil,¹ and a single teaspoon of it comes close to the FDA’s Daily Value for sodium. So when you’ve overdone it, fix the salt first, because that’s almost always the bigger problem. Too much garlic comes second. Dilution handles both, and a little sweetness can soften what’s left.

Quick answer

How salty is garlic salt?

Per 1/4 teaspoon, McCormick Garlic Salt lists 540 mg of sodium and Lawry’s Garlic Salt with Parsley 350 mg.¹² Morton lists its iodized table salt at 590 mg.³ Scaled up, by our arithmetic:

Spoon for spoon, McCormick’s garlic salt carries about 92% of the sodium of table salt (540 ÷ 590), and Lawry’s about 59% (350 ÷ 590). A single teaspoon of the McCormick blend comes close to the FDA’s Daily Value of less than 2,300 mg of sodium.⁴ With a McCormick-style jar, an extra teaspoon of garlic salt is very nearly an extra teaspoon of salt.

Too salty

Dilute. It’s the only fix that lowers the salt in each bite. Add unsalted liquid in small amounts, tasting as you go. Sara Moulton recommends unsalted liquid and notes that unsalted stock or tomatoes keep more flavor than plain water where they suit the dish.⁵ In a stew, chili or casserole, add more of the main ingredients. If the pot won’t hold more, Tasting Table suggests cooking a second batch without garlic and combining the two.⁶ Two equal batches leave half the salt and half the garlic per serving.

Serve it with something unsalted. Plain rice, pasta, bread or unsalted vegetables dilute each bite of a finished dish.

Balance with a little sweetness. In a 2010 taste study, sucrose cut the saltiness of a salt solution by 82.6%, though the authors say it’s unclear whether results from pure solutions hold for real foods.⁷ A pinch of sugar, or a sweet ingredient the dish already uses, can help a dish that’s only slightly too salty. Tasting Table also suggests honey or sugar to soften garlic’s sharp, sometimes bitter taste,⁶ so sweetness works on both problems. It changes the taste, not the sodium.

Go carefully with acid. In a 1967 study, low levels of citric acid in water generally enhanced saltiness and higher levels depressed it, and in a green bean purée the tasters split.⁸ Tasting Table recommends a squeeze of lemon for too much garlic,⁶ but in a dish that’s also oversalted, add a little and taste. It may make the salt stand out more.

Raw, harsh garlic

Garlic salt is made with dried garlic. America’s Test Kitchen found that garlic powder straight from the jar hasn’t developed its full flavor, and that mixing it with water brings that flavor out.⁹ Powder stirred dry into mashed potatoes tasted “harsh and garlicky but not particularly complex.”¹⁰ Those tests were on garlic powder; we found none on garlic salt. The harsh note shows up most in things that aren’t cooked after seasoning: dips, garlic butter, popcorn, a dry rub tasted raw.

Dilute the base. More sour cream, butter or oil lowers both the salt and the garlic.

Brighten it. Tasting Table suggests a fresh squeeze of lemon at the end and fresh herbs like parsley, pointing out how much of taste depends on smell.⁶ Keep the acid caution above in mind if the dish is salty too.

Bitter or acrid: it scorched

Ground spices don’t hold up to intense, dry heat and turn bitter when they burn.¹¹ Garlic salt sprinkled into a hot, dry pan, or on a heavily seasoned piece of meat over a very hot grill, can do this. Move soup, sauce or sautéed food to a clean pan and leave the scorched layer behind. Scraping the bottom only adds more burnt flavor.¹² In lab taste tests, sweet tastes suppressed bitterness, while citric acid was the weakest suppressor, so a pinch of sugar is a better bet than lemon. Salt suppressed bitterness in those tests too,⁷ but a garlic-salted dish has plenty already.

Caked on the surface

Scrape or wipe excess garlic salt off a roast, chicken pieces, vegetables or bread. Don’t rinse raw meat or poultry under the tap: the USDA doesn’t recommend washing raw poultry, beef, pork, lamb or veal before cooking, because rinsing raises the risk of cross-contamination.¹³

Fixes that don’t hold up

A potato in the pot. Robert L. Wolke’s test, as Moulton reports it, found that a potato simmered in salted water came out salty because it soaked up salty water instead of pulling out just the salt.⁵ A Tasting Table writer who uses the trick calls it “more of an aid than a final answer.”¹⁴ A potato you leave in and eat is dilution.

More garlic powder to “balance” it. That just makes the dish more garlicky. It won’t lower the salt per bite unless you add more food too.

When it’s a health matter

The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day,⁴ and the World Health Organization recommends adults stay below 2,000 mg, naming raised blood pressure as the main health effect of high intake.¹⁵ By McCormick’s label, one teaspoon of its garlic salt carries about 2,160 mg.¹ If you’re cooking for someone who’s limiting sodium, dilute. Sugar and acid change the taste, not the sodium.

Preventing it next time

Don’t swap garlic salt in clove for clove without doing the salt math. NDSU Extension gives 3/4 teaspoon of garlic salt as the equivalent of one medium clove of garlic.¹⁶ For a recipe calling for 4 cloves, that’s 3 teaspoons of garlic salt, about 6,480 mg of sodium at McCormick’s label figure (our arithmetic), before any other salt in the recipe.¹ When a recipe calls for several cloves, use fresh garlic or garlic powder and salt separately.

Treat it as the salt. Use garlic salt in place of some or all of the recipe’s plain salt, not on top of it, and taste before adding more.

Check the brand. McCormick’s carries about 54% more sodium per spoonful than Lawry’s (540 ÷ 350),¹² so a recipe written for one can come out noticeably saltier with the other.

Wet it first. Going by America’s Test Kitchen’s finding for garlic powder, stirring garlic salt into a little water, butter or the dish’s liquid before using it should bring out more garlic flavor.⁹ We found no test of this on garlic salt itself.

Related

• Garlic salt and garlic salt substitutes
• Garlic powder vs. garlic salt and garlic powder
• Too much garlic powder and too much garlic
• Too much salt and too much sea salt
• Other flavored salts: celery salt, onion salt, seasoned salt

Footnotes

1. McCormick Garlic Salt, label ingredients and Nutrition Facts as listed by Stop & Shop. stopandshop.com · Merchant ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Lawry’s Garlic Salt with Parsley, label ingredients and Nutrition Facts as listed by Stop & Shop. stopandshop.com · Merchant ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Morton Iodized Table Salt, product page, Morton Salt. mortonsalt.com · Merchant ↩ ↩²

4. Sodium in Your Diet, U.S. Food and Drug Administration. fda.gov · Regulator ↩ ↩²

5. Sara Moulton, Oversalted it? There is one solution, saramoulton.com, 2012 (updated 2016), reporting Robert L. Wolke’s experiment. saramoulton.com · Publication ↩ ↩²

6. Harmony Colangelo, Simple Ways To Tone Down The Pungency Of Garlic, Tasting Table, 2023. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Green BG et al., Taste Mixture Interactions: Suppression, Additivity, and the Predominance of Sweetness, Physiology & Behavior, 2010. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Peer-reviewed ↩ ↩²

8. Pangborn RM, Trabue IM, Detection and apparent taste intensity of salt–acid mixtures in two media, Perception & Psychophysics, 1967 (abstract). doi.org · Peer-reviewed ↩

9. Carolyn Grillo, For Great Garlic Bread, Hydrate Your Garlic Powder First, America’s Test Kitchen, 2021. americastestkitchen.com · Publication ↩ ↩²

10. Experiment: Bringing Out the Best in Garlic Powder, America’s Test Kitchen. americastestkitchen.com · Publication ↩

11. Marco Rossi, How To Improvise Instant Pot Seasoning Without Burning Your Spices, Tasting Table, 2023. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩

12. Karen Greco, What To Do With Burnt Soup, Tasting Table, 2022. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩

13. Washing Food: Does it Promote Food Safety?, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. fsis.usda.gov · Regulator ↩

14. Alison Spiegel, How To Fix An Oversalted Soup, Tasting Table, 2016. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩

15. Sodium reduction, World Health Organization fact sheet, 2026. who.int · Regulator ↩

16. Julie Garden-Robinson, Ingredient Substitutions, NDSU Extension, 2018. ksre.ksu.edu · Reference work ↩