Too Much Herbes de Provence? How to Fix a Piney, Soapy or Medicinal Dish

Ratatouille tasting piney, resinous and medicinal, or even faintly soapy? Too much herbes de Provence does that, and the soap means your blend has lavender in it. Unlike a lot of seasoning blends, it usually has no salt, so the herbs themselves are the problem. Skim what you can, then dilute. Lavender is the hard one: there’s no tested way to take a soapy note back out.

Quick answer

What’s in the jar

There’s no single recipe, but there is one protected one. France’s Label Rouge specification for herbes de Provence sets fixed shares of four herbs: 19% thyme and 26 to 27% each of rosemary, savory and oregano. That blend contains no salt or lavender.¹

Commercial blends outside the label vary. Rosemary, fennel seeds, thyme, marjoram and savory are among the most common herbs, and some blends include lavender.² Check your label. Lavender, fennel and the share of rosemary make a big difference to what an overdose tastes like.

Why it takes over

Dried herbs are concentrated. The University of Delaware’s extension guide says dried herbs are stronger than fresh because their flavor chemicals are more concentrated, and warns that an herb’s flavor “can be extremely objectionable if too much is used.”³

A quarter of it is rosemary, a strong herb. The same guide puts rosemary among the strong or dominant herbs, and thyme, oregano, savory and marjoram among the medium ones.³

The rest share medicinal phenols. Summer savory oil is rich in carvacrol,⁴ thyme oil in thymol,⁵ and oregano oil in both.⁶ With three herbs sharing the same phenols, it makes sense that an overdose tastes like one loud medicinal note.

Sheer volume: too much herb for the dish

Take out what you can. In a thin soup, braise or sauce, dried leaves float, so skim the surface with a fine strainer or slotted spoon. Whole rosemary needles stay tough and are worth fishing out; Kaplan advises grinding the rosemary and fennel when you make the blend.²

Dilute. Adding more of everything except the seasoning is the one fix that lowers the herb in each bite: more tomatoes, stock, beans or vegetables in a stew or ratatouille, more potatoes or vegetables on a roasting tray. If the pot won’t hold more, cook a second batch without the herbs and combine them. That’s the method Tasting Table gives for too much garlic.⁷

Finish with something fresh. America’s Test Kitchen’s chicken Provençal seasons with fresh herbs as well as herbes de Provence,⁸ and the Herb Society’s ratatouille stirs fresh basil in at the end.⁹ A handful of fresh basil or parsley, or a squeeze of lemon, gives you something else to taste. That’s balancing, not removal. We found no source showing any of them neutralizes the herbs’ flavor compounds.

Soapy or perfumed: lavender

If your dish tastes of soap or perfume more than pine, lavender is the likely culprit. The Takeout’s Iva Sorsa-Sunic writes that high-quality lavender “can give a soapy taste if too much is used.”¹⁰ Variety matters. The Herb Society of America’s Paola Legarre calls Lavandula angustifolia the most delightful species to cook with, and says lavenders high in cineole and camphor have a strong, astringent aroma and bitter taste.¹¹ The Daily Meal’s Julianna Marie says species like Lavandula stoechas can quickly turn a dish bitter and soapy.¹² A blend’s label rarely says which lavender it uses.

There’s no tested way to take a soapy note back out. Dilution helps in proportion. For a small amount of food, like a pan sauce, a marinade or a few chicken thighs, it’s often quicker to redo that part with a lavender-free blend or plain thyme and rosemary. For a homemade blend, The Spice House suggests skipping the lavender, or using a very small pinch of lemon zest for brightness instead.¹³

Bitter edge

If the dish tastes bitter as well as herby, reach for sweetness or salt. In controlled taste tests with pure solutions, both sugar and sodium salts suppressed bitterness, sugar was the dominant suppressor of other tastes, and citric acid was the weakest.¹⁴ That was a lab study, not a test on food. Start with a pinch of sugar in a tomato-based dish, or a sweet ingredient like roasted pepper or caramelized onion, and taste after each addition. Herbes de Provence usually brings no salt of its own,¹ so a little salt is an option if the dish is under-seasoned.

Caked on the surface

When the blend is crusted on lamb, chicken, fish or a tray of vegetables, scrape or wipe off the excess and season again lightly. 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, and says rinsing raises the risk of cross-contamination.¹⁵

Fixes that don’t hold up

Simmering it longer. America’s Test Kitchen classes rosemary, thyme and oregano as hearty herbs whose volatile flavor compounds are somewhat more heat-stable than those of delicate herbs.¹⁶ In its tests, dried thyme, rosemary and sage held up reasonably well through cooking times over 20 minutes with plenty of liquid.¹⁷ The Herb Society’s ratatouille adds 3 tablespoons of the blend and then simmers for about two and a half hours on purpose.⁹ We found no test showing that more simmering brings an overdose down.

A potato in the pot. The raw-potato trick comes from oversalted soup, and even there a Tasting Table writer who uses it calls it “more of an aid than a final answer.”¹⁸ We found no test against herbs. Potato that suits the dish still counts as dilution.

More of one herb to “balance” the blend. Adding dried thyme or oregano just adds more of the same phenols.⁵⁶ Fresh basil or parsley is different. It’s a contrast, not a correction.

Preventing it next time

Use a named recipe’s amount. Amounts vary a lot with the dish:

With a lavender blend, start at the low end. The Daily Meal calls even culinary lavender incredibly potent and says 1 to 2 teaspoons of dried lavender is plenty for most recipes.¹² In a blend, lavender is only a fraction of each spoonful, but its effect is out of proportion to its share. Or pick a lavender-free blend; the Label Rouge recipe has none.¹

Add it in stages for long-cooked dishes. The University of Delaware guide suggests adding herbs during the last 45 minutes when a recipe calls for long simmering.³ Add part then and taste before adding the rest, and you won’t overshoot.

Related

• Herbes de Provence, herbes de Provence substitutes, cooking with herbes de Provence and herbes de Provence uses
• Herbes de Provence vs. Italian seasoning
• Lavender, cooking with lavender, rosemary, thyme, summer savory
• Too much Italian seasoning, too much rosemary, too much thyme, too much oregano