Too Much Taco Seasoning? How to Fix Taco Meat That’s Too Salty, Spicy or Pasty

Taco meat that tastes harsh and salty? That’s the usual sign of too much taco seasoning: one McCormick packet in a pound of meat already carries close to a full day’s sodium. So dilute with unseasoned meat or beans first. Packets also contain cornstarch, which can make the sauce thick and pasty, and a splash of water fixes the texture but not the salt. Only sometimes is heat the real problem.

Quick answer

Check the packet: it’s mostly salt and starch

Here’s what two of the best-known packets say on their labels:

US labels list ingredients in descending order by weight,³ so salt comes third in both, after spices or chili pepper and corn starch. PepperScale describes the corn starch in packets as a thickener.⁴ For scale, FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day,⁵ so one McCormick packet in a pound of meat carries close to a full day’s worth. Two packets in that pound carry about 4,560 mg.

Spoon for spoon, the McCormick mix works out to about 63 mg of sodium per quarter teaspoon against 590 mg for Morton table salt,¹⁶ roughly a tenth as salty. The problem is volume. The directions call for the whole packet in one pound of ground meat.¹²

If your “taco” meat tastes tangy or sour, make sure the packet wasn’t fajita mix. McCormick’s fajita seasoning lists citric acid and lime juice concentrate;⁷ the two taco labels above list no acid.¹²

Too salty

Dilute with unseasoned food. It’s the only fix that lowers the salt in each bite. Brown another half pound or pound of plain ground meat and stir it in, or add rinsed beans, diced cooked potato, corn, peppers or onions. If the pan won’t hold it, cook a second batch with no seasoning and combine the two, the method Tasting Table gives for too much garlic.⁸ Two equal batches leave half the salt per serving. Freeze the extra.

For taco soup or chili made with the mix, add unsalted liquid. Sara Moulton’s fix for an oversalted dish is unsalted liquid, and she notes that unsalted stock or tomatoes keep more flavor than plain water.⁹ Use no-salt-added canned tomatoes and beans where you can.

Serve it with something plain. Unsalted rice, plain tortillas, shredded lettuce and diced tomato all dilute each mouthful.

Balance a slightly salty pan with sweetness. In a 2010 taste study, sugar 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.¹⁰ A pinch of sugar, or some sweet corn or roasted pepper, can soften the edge. It changes the taste, not the sodium.

Go carefully with lime. In a 1967 study, low levels of acid in water generally made salt taste saltier and higher levels made it taste less salty. In a green bean purée, the tasters split.¹¹ A squeeze of lime may help or may make it worse, so add a little and taste.

Too hot

We found no published heat measurement for any taco seasoning, so how hot a packet runs depends on how much chile is in it.

Dilute. PepperScale says dilution works in any overly hot dish, whatever the heat source, and is only practical when the dish is mildly too spicy.¹² The extra meat or beans above do the job.

Add dairy on top. PepperScale says casein, a protein in dairy, binds with capsaicin, and suggests sour cream, yogurt or milk.¹² Sour cream and shredded cheese are already taco toppings. In a Penn State study reported in 2019, 72 people sipped a capsaicin-spiked drink and then one of several beverages. Every one reduced the burn, and whole milk, skim milk and Kool-Aid reduced it most.¹³ That tested drinks after the burn, not dairy in food, so a glass of milk on the side is the closest match.

A little sugar. The Penn State researchers think the sweet Kool-Aid overwhelmed the burn with sweetness, not by removing the capsaicin.¹³ A pinch of sugar in the pan works the same way, within limits.

Thick, pasty or gluey

The cornstarch is there on purpose. Cook’s Country, testing a homemade packet replacement, found it gave the pan juices of ground beef a saucy body.¹⁴ Too much mix means too much starch, and the sauce can go gluey. The packet directions use 3/4 cup of water per pound of meat.¹² If you skipped or cut the water, add a few tablespoons and simmer briefly. Water only fixes the texture, though. If the meat’s still salty, dilute with more unseasoned meat or beans as above, because the salt stays in the pan whether you add water or not.

Dusty or earthy

When the meat tastes mostly of dried chile, cumin and oregano, not salt, dilute first. After that, fresh toppings do more than anything you stir in: lime, cilantro, raw onion, fresh tomato or pico de gallo, avocado. Neither label above names cumin, though both list “spices” or “spice” without spelling out every one,¹² and Cook’s Country adds cumin to its homemade blend for its earthiness.¹⁴ If a homemade blend is the culprit, see too much cumin and too much chili powder.

Burnt or acrid

Ground spices don’t do well under intense heat and can turn bitter.¹⁵ Seasoning sprinkled on dry meat in a very hot pan, before the water goes in, is the likeliest to scorch. Move the meat to a clean pan without scraping the bottom, which only adds burnt flavor.¹⁶ If some bitterness hangs on, a pinch of sugar helps more than acid. In controlled taste tests with pure solutions, sugar was the dominant suppressor of other tastes and citric acid the weakest bitterness suppressor.¹⁰ Skip extra salt here. The dish has plenty.

Fixes that don’t hold up

A potato to soak up the salt. In Robert Wolke’s experiment, as Sara Moulton reports it, potatoes soaked up some salty water but didn’t selectively pull out the salt.⁹ A Tasting Table writer who uses the trick calls it “more of an aid than a final answer.”¹⁷ Diced potato cooked into the meat still counts as dilution, so leave it in.

Rinsing the meat. You’ll sometimes see advice to rinse cooked taco meat in a strainer to wash off extra seasoning. We found no test of it. It may take off some of the sauce, and some salt with it, but it also strips the flavor you want to keep. Dilution is more predictable.

Water alone. It loosens a pasty sauce, but every gram of salt is still in the pan. Add bulk, not just liquid.

Preventing it next time

One packet, one pound. Both packets are measured for 1 pound of ground meat and 3/4 cup of water.¹² With less meat, use part of the packet. With a pound of turkey, or a pound of beans and meat combined, the full packet is still the most the label calls for.

From a shaker can, measure. A shaker gives you no dose. Cook’s Country’s homemade blend makes 1/4 cup, designed to replace one packet,¹⁴ so about 1/4 cup per pound of meat is the ceiling for a homemade mix. For a store-bought can, read the serving size and sodium on the label and stop at about one packet’s worth per pound.

Make your own and salt separately. A homemade blend lets you leave the salt out and add it to taste at the end. See taco seasoning substitutes and spices for taco meat for recipes and proportions.

Safety: sodium

By the labels’ figures, one McCormick Original packet carries about 2,280 mg of sodium and one Old El Paso Gluten Free Original packet about 1,400 mg,¹² against FDA’s Daily Value of less than 2,300 mg a day.⁵ If you’re limiting sodium, too much taco seasoning is a salt problem in the plainest sense, and dilution plus plain sides is the fix that actually lowers what each person eats.

Related

• Taco seasoning and taco seasoning substitutes
• Spices for taco meat, fajita vs. taco seasoning
• Too much chili powder, too much cumin, too much cayenne pepper
• Too much salt, too much Cajun seasoning

Footnotes

1. McCormick Original Taco Seasoning Mix, ingredients, nutrition label and directions, via Giant Food Stores. giantfoodstores.com · Merchant ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Old El Paso Gluten Free Original Taco Seasoning Mix, ingredients, nutrition label and directions, via Giant Food Stores. giantfoodstores.com · Merchant ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. 21 CFR 101.4, Food; designation of ingredients, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. ecfr.gov · Regulator ↩

4. Matt Bray, Taco Seasoning Ingredients: What’s In That Packet?, PepperScale, 2019. pepperscale.com · Publication · PepperScale is also owned by Matt Bray, the editor of this site. ↩

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

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

7. McCormick Fajita Seasoning Mix, ingredients and directions, McCormick. mccormick.com · Merchant ↩

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

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

10. 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

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

12. Matt Bray, Dish Too Hot? How to Make Food Less Spicy, PepperScale, 2022. pepperscale.com · Publication · PepperScale is also owned by Matt Bray, the editor of this site. ↩ ↩²

13. Milk: Best drink to reduce burn from chili peppers, Penn State news release via ScienceDaily, 2019, reporting a study in Physiology & Behavior. sciencedaily.com · Publication ↩ ↩²

14. Matthew Fairman, Homemade Taco Seasoning, Cook’s Country, America’s Test Kitchen, 2023. americastestkitchen.com · Publication ↩ ↩² ↩³

15. Marco Rossi, How To Improvise Instant Pot Seasoning Without Burning Your Spices, Tasting Table, 2023. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩

16. Karen Greco, What To Do With Burnt Soup, Tasting Table, 2022. tastingtable.com · Publication ↩

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