Too Much Mint? Fixes for Food and Drinks

Mojito gone bitter and grassy? Too much mint shows up two ways: either the cool, sharp mint smell has taken over a salad, sauce or dessert, or the dish or drink has turned bitter, which in cocktails usually comes down to how hard the mint was muddled. The good news is that mint often goes into drinks, teas and garnishes as whole leaves or sprigs, so some of it can simply come out. Strain or pick out what you can. If it’s chopped in, dilute.

Quick answer

Which mint, and why it’s strong

The two common culinary mints, peppermint and spearmint, taste different, and you can taste the difference in an overdose. Too much peppermint comes across as cooling and medicinal, too much spearmint as sweeter and greener, and peppermint is the harder one to hide in a savory dish. More in spearmint vs. peppermint and types of mint.

Drinks: strain it out

In a mojito, julep or iced tea, the leaves are usually still in the glass, so this is the easiest mint overdose to fix. Pour the drink through a strainer into a fresh glass, or fish out some sprigs. Still too minty? Add more of everything else: more lime and soda in a mojito, more tea in a pitcher.

If it tastes bitter, the muddler may be to blame. Tasting Table says pressing mint too hard releases its vegetal and bitter qualities, can make a drink taste earthy or grassy, and breaks the leaves into small pieces. Straining gets rid of the bits, though not the bitterness already in the drink. A little more sweetener can soften what’s left (more on bitterness below). Next time, press gently, or shake the leaves with ice in a cocktail shaker instead.¹

Food: take it out early

You can lift whole sprigs and torn leaves out of a soup, a pot of peas, or a salad. If you catch it early, skim chopped mint off the top of a soup with a slotted spoon. Mint minced into meatballs, kofta or a sauce won’t come back out, so go straight to dilution.

Sheer volume: too much mint for the dish

Dilute. Add more of every ingredient except mint: more ground meat, garlic and other seasonings to a meatball mix, more peas or broth to a soup, more yogurt to a raita. If adding to the dish isn’t practical, Tasting Table suggests (for garlic) making a second batch without the overdosed ingredient and combining the two.² The math works the same for mint. Dilution works in any dish or drink because it changes the ratio of mint to everything else; it isn’t trying to hide anything.

Desserts: more of the base. For an over-minted ice cream base, frosting or chocolate filling, add more of the unflavored base. If the culprit is mint extract, not leaves, dilution is the only real fix.

Rebalance with acid. Lime, lemon or vinegar gives you something sharp to taste alongside the mint, and tomatoes can do the same in a tomato-based soup. That’s balancing. We found no source showing that acid neutralizes or masks mint’s aroma compounds.

Bitterness

In controlled taste tests with pure solutions, sweet tastes and sodium salts suppressed bitterness, and sugar was the strongest suppressor of other tastes; citric acid was the weakest.³ That’s a lab finding, not a test on mint, but it backs up what cooks already do: a little sugar or honey in a sweet dish or a drink, or a pinch of salt, will do more against bitterness than more lime. In savory dishes like minted peas or carrots, add sweetener in small amounts and taste each time.

Cooking it out

LSU AgCenter lists mint among the delicate herbs best added a minute or two before cooking ends, because long heat causes flavor and aroma losses.⁴ A few more minutes of simmering may soften fresh mint in a soup. We found no test of how long that takes.

Fixes that don’t hold up

A potato to draw out the mint. The raw-potato trick comes from oversalted soup, and even there a Tasting Table writer calls the potato “more of an aid than a final answer.”⁵ We found no test of a potato absorbing mint or neutralizing bitterness. A potato left in pea soup adds bland bulk, which is ordinary dilution. Pull it out before serving and most of that benefit goes with it.

Preventing it next time

Add fresh mint late. LSU AgCenter suggests adding delicate herbs, mint included, in the last minute or two of cooking, or sprinkling them on just before serving.⁴

Go easy on the muddler. Press gently, or shake with ice instead.¹

Convert carefully between fresh and dried. LSU AgCenter’s rule of thumb is one teaspoon of crumbled dried herb for one tablespoon of fresh.⁴

Start small. Add part of what the recipe calls for, taste, and add the rest if you want it.

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