Too Much Salt? How to Fix an Oversalted Dish

Oversalted it? Move fast, because salt dissolves into everything in the pot. You’ve got two ways to actually lower the salt in each bite: dilute the dish, or get the salt out before it dissolves. Sugar, acid and cream only change how salty it tastes, and a squeeze of lemon can even make it taste saltier. As for the old potato trick, Sara Moulton recommended it for years before deciding she was “completely wrong.”¹

Quick answer

Dilute: the fix that actually lowers the salt

Add unsalted liquid in small amounts. Water works in a soup or sauce, but it thins out every other flavor too. Sara Moulton, former host of Food Network’s Cooking Live, recommends adding unsalted liquid and points out that unsalted stock or tomatoes keep more flavor than plain water where they suit the dish.¹ Add a little, stir, let it heat through and taste before you add more.

Add more of everything except the salt. In a stew, chili or casserole, add more of the main ingredients. If you can’t stretch the pot, cook a second batch with no salt and combine the two. Two equal batches leave half the salt per serving. Then rebalance the other seasonings and the thickness, since you’ve thinned those out too.

Serve it with something unsalted. When a finished dish can’t be diluted in the pot, plain rice, unsalted potatoes, plain bread or unsalted vegetables on the plate do the diluting bite by bite.

Get it out before it dissolves

Salt you can still see hasn’t spread through the dish yet. Brush extra crystals off a steak or roast, scrape them off vegetables, and spoon a visible mound out of flour or other dry ingredients before you mix.

Don’t rinse raw meat. You’ll sometimes see advice to run a salted roast or chicken under the tap. The USDA doesn’t recommend washing raw poultry, beef, pork, lamb or veal before cooking, and its research found that rinsing meat or poultry raises the risk of cross-contamination.² Brush or wipe instead.

Balance: make it taste less salty

These don’t remove any sodium, but they can make a slightly oversalted dish taste right again.

Sweetness. This one has the strongest lab support. In a 2010 taste study, sucrose was an especially good suppressor of saltiness: mixed with a salt solution, it cut perceived saltiness by 82.6%. That was a test of pure solutions sipped and spat out, and the authors say it’s unclear whether their results hold for real foods.³ At the stove, use a pinch of sugar, or a sweet ingredient the dish already has (tomato, carrot, onion cooked until sweet, a little honey in a glaze), and taste after each addition. Too much sugar creates a new problem, so save this for a dish that’s only a little too salty.

Acid: it can help or hurt. Whether sourness cuts saltiness depends on how much you use. In a 1967 study of salt and citric acid, lower acid levels in water generally boosted saltiness and higher levels lowered it. In a green bean purée, half the tasters found the mix saltier as acidity rose and half found the reverse.⁴ Moulton says lemon juice will mask salt more than anything else.¹ If you try a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar, add a little and taste, because it may make the dish taste saltier.

Something creamy. Cream, sour cream, yogurt, coconut milk or avocado adds volume and a mild, rich flavor that can soften the overall impression. Some of what it does is plain dilution. We found no source showing that dairy or fat makes food taste less salty, so pick something that belongs in the dish and don’t expect miracles.

Fixes that don’t hold up

A potato in the pot. The classic advice is to simmer a raw potato in an oversalted soup and fish it out. Robert L. Wolke tested it by simmering potato in plain water and in salted water. As Moulton reports his result, the potato from the salted water tasted salty, because it soaked up salt water and didn’t selectively pull salt out of it. Moulton had recommended potatoes, pasta and rice for years and writes that she “realized I was completely wrong.”¹ A Tasting Table writer who still uses the trick calls the potato “more of an aid than a final answer.”⁵ Take the potato out and you’ve removed the salty liquid it soaked up, nothing more. Leave it in and eat it, and it’s just more unsalted food in the pot, which is dilution.

Rinsing salted raw meat. See above. Brush it off instead.²

When too much salt is a health matter

A dish that tastes too salty is a flavor problem, but sodium is also a health concern, especially if you’re on a sodium-restricted diet. The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day, which it says is about one teaspoon of table salt, while Americans average about 3,400 mg.⁶ The American Heart Association puts a teaspoon of table salt at 2,400 mg of sodium.⁷ The WHO recommends adults keep sodium under 2,000 mg a day (under 5 g of salt) and names raised blood pressure as the main health effect of high-sodium diets.⁸

Only dilution and removal lower the sodium in a serving. Sugar, acid and cream change the taste, not the sodium count. If you’re cooking for someone limiting sodium, dilute.

Preventing it next time

Know your salt. Salts measure very differently by volume. America’s Test Kitchen gives 1 teaspoon of table salt as equal to 1½ teaspoons of Morton kosher salt or 2 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, because the coarser crystals pack less into a spoon.⁹ Pour table salt into a recipe written for Diamond Crystal and you’ve roughly doubled the salt. The AHA notes that kosher salt and some sea salts may carry less sodium per teaspoon for the same reason.⁷ More in kosher salt vs. table salt and the best salt for cooking.

Salt reductions at the end. A sauce that boils down gets saltier as it reduces. One restaurant chef quoted by Tasting Table salts reduction sauces at the end because over-reducing makes them “really salty.”¹⁰

Count the salty ingredients. Stock, soy sauce, cheese, cured meats and seasoned salts all bring salt before you reach for the shaker. Add salt in stages and taste as you go.

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