Too Much Italian Seasoning? How to Fix a Dish That Tastes Too Herby

Tomato sauce tasting dusty, piney and medicinal? Too much Italian seasoning lets the herbs crowd out the tomatoes, meat or cheese they were supposed to back up. Unlike a lot of seasoning blends, the usual jar has no salt, so the problem is almost always the herbs themselves. Skim off floating herbs, then dilute. Don’t count on a longer simmer to cook them off: dried rosemary, sage and thyme hold up reasonably well to long cooking.

Quick answer

What’s in the jar

These two brands list herbs only, no salt:

US labels list ingredients in descending order by weight,³ so the first herb is the biggest share. If your dish tastes salty, look elsewhere. The USDA’s purchasing specification has a separate salt-free “Italian” seasoning built on garlic, onion, oregano, rosemary, parsley and celery seed,⁴ and Tasting Table notes that cilantro, fennel, red pepper flakes and garlic powder occasionally turn up in Italian blends.⁵ Check the jar you used. If salt or garlic is on it, the fixes on too much salt and too much garlic powder apply too.

Why it takes over

Dried herbs are concentrated. The University of Delaware’s extension guide says dried herbs are stronger than fresh because the chemicals behind their flavor are more concentrated, and warns that an herb’s flavor “can be extremely objectionable if too much is used.”⁶

Two of the herbs are strong ones. The same guide puts rosemary and sage among the strong or dominant herbs, and oregano, basil, thyme, marjoram and savory among the medium ones.⁶ Both brands above contain rosemary and sage.¹²

Oregano and thyme share the same main flavor compounds, carvacrol and thymol. With that overlap, it makes sense that an overdose often tastes like one loud medicinal note and not a mix of herbs.

Sheer volume: too much herb for the dish

Take out what you can. Dried leaf pieces float in a thin soup or sauce, so skim the surface with a fine strainer or a slotted spoon. You won’t get it all, but whatever you remove stops adding flavor.

Dilute. Adding more of everything except the seasoning is the one fix that lowers the amount of herb in each bite. Add more tomatoes, stock, beans or pasta water to a sauce or soup, or more of the main ingredients to a casserole or meatball mix. If the pot won’t hold more, cook a second batch without the seasoning and combine the two. That’s the method Tasting Table gives for too much garlic.⁷ Freeze the extra.

Give yourself something else to taste. Fresh parsley or basil, a squeeze of lemon or a grating of cheese adds a competing flavor. None of them removes the dried herbs, and we found no source showing any of them neutralizes carvacrol, cineole or thujone.

Bitter or harsh 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.⁸ That was a lab study, not a test on food. Start with a pinch of sugar in a tomato sauce, or a sweet ingredient the dish already uses, and taste after each addition. Add salt only if the dish was under-salted to begin with.

Caked on the surface

When the blend coats a roast, chicken pieces 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.⁹

Fixes that don’t hold up

Simmering it longer. You’ll often hear that herb flavor cooks off. America’s Test Kitchen classes rosemary, sage, thyme and oregano as hearty herbs whose volatile flavor compounds are somewhat more heat-stable than those of delicate herbs.¹⁰ In ATK’s own test, dried thyme, rosemary and sage held up reasonably well in dishes with fairly long cooking times and a good amount of liquid.¹¹ We found no test showing that extra simmering brings down an overdose of dried herbs, so don’t count on it.

Adding more of one herb to “balance” it. Piling on more dried oregano or thyme adds more of the same carvacrol and thymol. Fresh basil or parsley is different. It adds a competing flavor; it doesn’t correct anything.

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.”¹² We found no test of a potato against too much of any herb. If potato suits the dish, leave it in and count it as dilution.

Preventing it next time

Use a measured amount. McCormick’s Italian Meat Sauce, which serves 14, uses 2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning with 1 pound of ground beef and two 28-ounce cans of crushed tomatoes, plus a separate 1/2 teaspoon of oregano.¹³ The University of Delaware guide suggests medium-strength herbs in amounts of 1 to 2 teaspoons for 6 servings.⁶ Neither is a rule for every dish, but both are a long way below the tablespoon or two a heavy shake can add.

Know your blend’s lead herb. McCormick’s leads with marjoram and Simply Organic’s with oregano,¹² so the same spoonful can taste different from jar to jar. Tasting Table points out that Italian recipes don’t call for a mix of dried herbs in equal measure,¹⁴ so when one herb should lead, single herbs give you more control.

Add it in stages for long-cooked dishes. The extension guide suggests adding herbs during the last 45 minutes when a recipe calls for long simmering.⁶ Add part of the seasoning then and taste before adding the rest, and you won’t overshoot.

Shake into your hand, not over the pot. That way a loose shaker lid spills onto the counter, not into dinner.

Related

• Italian seasoning and Italian seasoning substitutes
• Italian spices, herbes de Provence vs. Italian seasoning
• Oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary, sage, marjoram
• Too much oregano, too much thyme, too much rosemary, too much sage, too much basil