Too Much Lemon Pepper? How to Fix a Dish That’s Too Salty, Peppery or Sour

Wings too salty, too peppery and too sour, all at once? Too much lemon pepper can do all three. Start with the salt, because most store blends are seasoned salts. McCormick’s Lemon & Pepper lists salt first,¹ and US labels list ingredients in descending order by weight,² so a jar that starts with salt is mostly salt. Dilute with unsalted butter, oil or more of the dish, and hold off on extra lemon juice, which can make the salt stand out more.

Quick answer

How salty is lemon pepper?

It depends on the jar. McCormick Signature Seasonings Lemon Pepper lists 170 mg of sodium per 1/4 teaspoon.³ Morton lists its iodized table salt at 590 mg in the same measure.⁴ By our arithmetic:

So a spoonful of that blend carries a little under 30% of the sodium of the same spoonful of table salt (170 ÷ 590), and a tablespoon comes close to the FDA’s Daily Value of less than 2,300 mg.⁵ A homemade blend can be much less salty. The UC Master Food Preservers’ recipe uses 2 tablespoons of salt, “or to taste,” in about a cup of blend made mostly of dried lemon zest and cracked pepper.⁶ That works out to roughly 1/8 teaspoon of salt per teaspoon of blend. We didn’t find sodium figures for The Spice House’s blend.

Too salty

Dilute. It’s the only fix that lowers the salt in each bite. In a sauce or soup, add unsalted liquid a little at a time; Sara Moulton notes that unsalted stock or tomatoes keep more flavor than plain water where they suit the dish.⁷ For pasta, add more unsalted pasta and a little more butter or oil. For a pan sauce, or the butter wings get tossed in, McCormick’s own suggestion is to stir lemon pepper into melted butter or olive oil,¹ so more unseasoned butter or oil is the natural way to thin it out. If the dish can’t take more, Tasting Table’s method for too much garlic works here: cook a second unseasoned batch and combine the two.⁸

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.⁹ A pinch of sugar or a little honey can help a dish that’s only slightly too salty. It changes the taste, not the sodium.

Hold off on extra lemon juice. 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.¹⁰ The blend may already carry citric acid,¹¹¹ so a squeeze of lemon can push a salty dish either way. Add a little and taste.

Too peppery

Dilute. More of the main ingredients, or more unseasoned butter or oil, lowers the pepper and the salt together.

Strain or scrape. A fine strainer can catch some of the coarsely cracked pepper in a sauce, and you can scrape pepper off a crusted fillet. Fine pepper won’t strain out.

Serve it with something mild. Rice, bread, plain potatoes or a mild sauce on the side dilutes each bite. We found no source testing sweetness, fat or dairy against black pepper’s bite, so if you try any of those, go by taste. For more, see too much pepper.

Too sour or sharp

Some blends get their sourness from citric acid. It’s the third ingredient on McCormick’s list and the fourth on The Spice House’s.¹¹¹ In a lab study of taste mixtures, sucrose significantly reduced each of the other tastes it was paired with, including citric acid’s sourness, and was the dominant suppressor overall.⁹ A pinch of sugar is the simplest fix. Salt also sharply depressed sourness in the 1967 study,¹⁰ but a lemon pepper dish is usually salty already, so sugar’s the better pick. Both are lab results with simple solutions, not tests on food.

Caked on the surface

Lemon pepper often gets shaken straight onto fish, chicken and wings. Scrape or wipe off what you can. 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.¹² If the wings are already cooked and tossed, toss a batch of unseasoned wings in plain butter and combine them with the heavy ones. That’s dilution, and it evens things out.

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.⁷ A Tasting Table writer who uses the trick calls it “more of an aid than a final answer.”¹³ A potato you leave in and eat is dilution.

Fresh lemon to make it taste “more like lemon and less like salt.” This rarely works on a salt-first blend. The dish gets more sour, the salt stays, and acid can make salt stand out more.¹⁰ If you want more lemon, a little grated zest adds lemon aroma without adding salt.

When it’s a health matter

The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day,⁵ and the World Health Organization recommends adults stay below 2,000 mg, naming raised blood pressure as the main health effect of high intake.¹⁴ If you’re cooking for someone who’s limiting sodium, dilute, and pick a salt-free or homemade blend next time.

Preventing it next time

Start with a recipe’s amount. McCormick’s Lemon Pepper Fish uses 2 teaspoons of its lemon pepper seasoning for 1 pound of tilapia, serving 4.¹⁵ Use that as a starting point for a pound of fish or chicken and taste before adding more.

Spread it in fat. McCormick suggests mixing the blend into melted butter or olive oil before brushing it on.¹ That also spreads it evenly, so you don’t get salty patches.

Read the first ingredient. If salt comes first, season with the blend before any plain salt, then taste.

Make your own. A homemade blend lets you control the salt separately. Our lemon pepper substitutes page has the UC recipe and scaled amounts.⁶

Related

• Lemon pepper and lemon pepper substitutes
• Too much pepper and black pepper
• Too much salt and too much sea salt
• Seasoned salt and garlic salt
• Monosodium glutamate (MSG), in some lemon pepper blends

Footnotes

1. McCormick Lemon & Pepper Seasoning, product page, McCormick & Company. mccormick.com · Merchant ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. 21 CFR 101.4, Food; designation of ingredients, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. ecfr.gov · Regulator ↩

3. McCormick Signature Seasonings Lemon Pepper, label ingredients and Nutrition Facts as listed by Stop & Shop. stopandshop.com · Merchant ↩ ↩²

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

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

6. Lemon Pepper Seasoning, recipe by Master Food Preserver Laurie Lewis, UCCE Master Food Preservers of El Dorado County. ccfruitandnuts.ucanr.edu · Reference work ↩ ↩²

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

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

9. 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

10. Pangborn RM, Trabue IM, Detection and apparent taste intensity of salt–acid mixtures in two media, Perception & Psychophysics, 1967 (abstract). doi.org · Peer-reviewed ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Lemon Pepper Seasoning, product page, The Spice House. thespicehouse.com · Merchant ↩ ↩²

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

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

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

15. Lemon Pepper Fish, McCormick Kitchens, McCormick & Company. mccormick.com · Merchant ↩