The famous potato trick might not be as effective as we thought. What other things can I do to fix it?
In the kitchen there is an ingredient that is absolutely definitive. This famous ingridient is salt. It can enhance the flavor of whatever we’re cooking or it can ruin the entire dish. And it doesn’t matter if it’s fried eggs, a T-bone steak, a stew or some sautéed vegetables… or any kind and type of food.There is not a single dish in this world that improves by being salty. However, there are times when we can solve the problem and reduce the excess salt a bit.
You have to be very careful with salt, because just adding a pinch of more can completely ruin a dish.
Does the potato thing work?
Theory and popular wisdom is saying that adding a few potato wedges to an overly salty dish will absorb excess salt and correct the flavor of the dish. However, scientist Robert Woke ,the author of “What Einstein Told the Cook About Him: The Science of Cooking Explained,” he is explaining that this miraculous trick didn’t really work.
What happens is that when we put the potato in a stew, it doesn’t really absorb the excess salt… it just absorbs the flavor of the broth like a sponge would. And in his experiments, Woke is claiming that no matter how many potatoes he was adding, he was continuing to taste the food and ” there was no detectable difference in salt concentrations before and after simmering with potatoes.”
However, there are many sources that claim the opposite . They are explaining that the starch contained in the potato can absorb the salt if it is left in the stew long enough. In addition, there are also other alternatives to potatoes that should also be explored, such as bread or -even- wooden toothpicks. But hey, even if Robert Woke was right and -effectively- the potato trick was absolutely useless, that does not mean that there is nothing we can do. Depending on the recipe we are cooking and how the ingredients interact, it is possible that one of the following solutions can help you solve the problem:
First of all, we can add a little lemon juice , whose acidity can balance the flavor a bit. Some also suggest adding a pinch of sugar so that the sweetness offsets the excess salt. In any of the cases, if we want to do the test we must be restrained and not make the dish even worse. In other words, it is a remedy that will only be useful when the salt error has not been excessive.
The best situation that can be presented to all of us is that it is about those elaborations that are containing a little stock , meat or poultry broth … and that we still have a little of the liquid available. In these cases, the easiest thing to do is to add a little more broth or -even- replace the salty one with “new fresh broth” .
If we add more broth or more water, we have to worry about reducing it again.
Another option would be to do the same with a little water , but that would not be ideal, because the more water we add… the more the flavors will be diluted and it’s not gonna be any taste. And in either case, by adding the broth or water, the mixture will become much more liquid, so we could thicken it using fine cornmeal previously dissolved in a little cold water or even butter.
