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When I Oversalt Blank, I Blank


Pontormo

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Yes, yes, I already know what the target audience of the Food Network would say.

Tsk.

And, yeah, okay, there is a telephone and enough cash to tip the guy for the pizza.

But what else do you do?

When I oversalt________________, I __________________.

Disclaimer: This thread is NOT inspired by recent events. Not at all. Really.

"Viciousness in the kitchen.

The potatoes hiss." --Sylvia Plath

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For me there are three separate options:

When I oversalt, I stir in 1 teaspoon each sugar and vinegar and then I taste again.

When I oversalt, I add a sliced, peeled raw potato and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes and then remove the potato and retaste.

When I oversalt, I can often add cream or more of the pureed vegetables if it is a soup.

Does that make sense? :rolleyes:

Melissa Goodman aka "Gifted Gourmet"

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When I oversalt, if it's reasonable, I make a second batch, with very little salt (if any) and combine the two recipes. Obviously, this doesn't work for everything. But sometimes it saves the day.

And it's why I have 13 containers of tomato bisque in my freezer... :biggrin:

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For me there are three separate options:

When I oversalt, I stir in 1 teaspoon each sugar and vinegar and then I taste again.

When I oversalt, I add a sliced, peeled raw potato and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes and then remove the potato and retaste.

When I oversalt, I can often add cream or more of the pureed vegetables if it is a soup.

Does that make sense?  :rolleyes:

Melissa, I just wanted to say that I LOVE your quote. I am so jealous I didn't think of it first. That happens to be my favorite book.

-Becca

www.porterhouse.typepad.com

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On a sort of related note...back when I cooked, Chef Lemonte told me that if you needed a drink (booze) real bad and the only thing available was cooking wine; you should cut the ends off a loaf of bread and pour the wine through it. This would remove enough of the salt and you could drink it.

This being said, I've never needed a drink that bad, and have my doubts that merely bread would remove salt dissolved in wine.

A island in a lake, on a island in a lake, is where my house would be if I won the lottery.

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Yep. It is all a myth. All you can do is dilute. I guess, if you were so inclined, you could rig up some sort of reverse osmosis membrane gadget and do it that way. Sort of like the salt water desalinization plants. That would be awfully expensive, though. :blink:

I do find that if acid works with the dish, adding a bit of lemon juice or vinegar does make it taste, or seem to taste less salty. Same thing for sugar.

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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A really old-fashioned way to "cure" a too salty soup or stock, before adding water to dilute it, is to suspend a muslin bag filled with raw rice in the liquid.

The rice will take up quite a bit of the liquid but leave most of the flavor behind and then water can be added to reduce the concentration of salt.

The ratio of rice to total liquid is 1/2 cup of rice for each quart of liquid.

I have used this method successfully several times - I do use the rice - I generally freeze it and use it in vegetable and meat/poultry recipes that require cooked rice but am careful not to use any seasoning until the end of the cooking process.

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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A really old-fashioned way to "cure" a too salty soup or stock, before adding water to dilute it, is to suspend a muslin bag filled with raw rice in the liquid.

The rice will take up quite a bit of the liquid but leave most of the flavor behind and then water can be added to reduce the concentration of salt. 

The ratio of rice to total liquid is 1/2 cup of rice for each quart of liquid. 

I have used this method successfully several times - I do use the rice - I generally freeze it and use it in vegetable and meat/poultry recipes that require cooked rice but am careful not to use any seasoning until the end of the cooking process.

Now that is a workable idea! I have never seen that one before.

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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I learned it from my grandfather's cook, when I was a child. One of the kitchen helpers had a very heavy hand with the salt, perhaps diminished taste buds or something, and I would watch as the cook would measure rice into one of the muslin bags used for steaming puddings, or straining jelly, and suspend it in the pot of soup or stew, tied to a handle, so it could be easily retrieved.

In particular I remember her doing it with a huge batch of she-crab soup, since one of my uncles had driven to Maryland and back, bringing a big tub full of live crabs for my grandpa's birthday and she didn't want the soup ruined.

With just adding water you have to add so much to dilute the salt, that you then have to spend many hours reducing it to have it correct. This solves that problem.

Also one has to leave plenty of room for the rice to expand

Edited by andiesenji (log)

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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I learned it from my grandfather's cook, when I was a child.   . . .

. . . . .

Well, there ya go. Another testament for getting all we can out of our older folks before it is lost. You have just passed this down to a new generation. It may have been lost if you hadn't. I really mean it when I say I am surprised that I haven't heard of this. I have a fairly extensive collection of "food science" books, all of the familiar suspects and some more technical, and I have searched for a solution to this very problem.

Hmmmm . . . I think I smell a new topic.

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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A really old-fashioned way to "cure" a too salty soup or stock, before adding water to dilute it, is to suspend a muslin bag filled with raw rice in the liquid.

The rice will take up quite a bit of the liquid but leave most of the flavor behind and then water can be added to reduce the concentration of salt. 

The ratio of rice to total liquid is 1/2 cup of rice for each quart of liquid. 

I have used this method successfully several times - I do use the rice - I generally freeze it and use it in vegetable and meat/poultry recipes that require cooked rice but am careful not to use any seasoning until the end of the cooking process.

I was so intrigued by this I had to test it. So I brought 1L (1.05 quarts) of water up to a boil:

water1.jpg

Added 20gm of iodized table salt which made it a 2% salt solution. This was just barely offensively oversalted to my tastes:

water2.jpg

I got 1/2 a cup of rice and a clean, porous cloth (I don't have any muslin):

water3.jpg

Wrapped it up:

water4.jpg

And let it simmer in the water for 30 minutes.

This is the end result:

water5.jpg

The one on the left is the simmered one, the one on the right is the pre-simmer. To make sure temperature was not a factor, both were put in the microwave until boiling, then allowed to cool for about 3 mins. I enlisted the help of my brother for a single blind tasting.

And the results...

Unfortunately, the rice seemed to have no effect whatsoever. If anything, the riced one was slightly saltier that the pre-rice one and there was a bit of a ricey flavour as well. One possible explanation is that some water boiled off the riced one which would make the salt more concentrated. Another is that the rice actually does the reverse an absorbs more water than salt. Since I neglected to weigh the rice bundle beforehand, it was impossible for me to determine how much water it had absorbed so I cannot tell which theory is correct but I did note that, when tasting the rice, it seemed a bit less salty than the water.

Of course, if I read andie right, it seems as if he's saying that it's not that the rice absorbs LOTS of salt, it's that it absorbs not much of anything else. In that case, it is still plausible that this might work but I'm not prepared to waste 1L of chicken stock finding out. I'm just going to note, however, that rice dishes that involve cooking the rice in a flavourful liquid usually does have the rice become fairly flavourful in it's own right.

Incientally, this is an EXCELLENT way to cook rice. The grains came out delightfully fluffy and with an excellent chew and no chance whatsoever of burning it.

PS: I am a guy.

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I am not sure that test was a good model of what goes on with a more complex solution such as a soup. The way this should work is that the rice selectively absorbs the liquid, mostly the salty water, leaving a large portion of the proteins, carbohydrates and whole bits behind. That is what the starch in the rice will do. Rice is just a convenient high surface to volume ratio of "starch packages" to do this.

But here is the key . . . The rice is removed taking the salty water with it. Then, the original soup pot has water added back to it to dilute the salty liquid that remains, thus reducing the saltiness of the soup. If you don't add that water back to the original volume, you haven't changed anything, concentration-wise. In fact, if you reduced the volume by simmering uncovered you are concentrating the salt solution. I didn't see in the trial where water was added back to the original volume before tasting.

At least, that is what I think is happening. I haven't tried it yet.

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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The rice does not remove much of the salt - it does absorb a lot of liquid, so that when water is added to the stew or soup, you do not have a huge amount of liquid that needs to be reduced for a long time.

I leave the rice in the soup for an hour or more. The rice should expand at least double in volume. On one occasion, when I was fixing a large pot of soup at the office and had no rice, I used a box of instant couscous in a wire colander that I suspended in the hot soup, using a (carefully cleaned) bindery clamp to hold it to the side of the pot.

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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I am trying it. Stay tuned.

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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It works.

I carefully measured 1 quart (4 cups) of water into a heavy sauce pan. I added 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. (My scale isn't accurate enough to get a weight.) The saltiness was about what my last batch of gumbo was, a level that I could remember the taste. . . almost too salty to eat comfortably. (It was made with smoked turkey carcasses that had been liberally seasoned so I had little control. It was ok over unsalted white rice if you like salty food, which I do.)

I measured 1/2 cup of regular long grain white rice into cheese cloth and tied it up, leaving plenty of room for the rice to expand.

I simmered for 1 hour with the lid on.

I removed the rice "bag" with tongs and allowed it to drain thoroughly. The rice was put in a colander to deal with later.

Pouring the water from the sauce pan back into the measuring cup, I had to add 2 cups of water to bring the liquid back to where it started. That is half the liquid that the rice absorbed and carried away with maybe some little bit lost to steam. The final result was that the restored 1 quart of liquid has a salt level that is now pleasant and about what I aim for in soups and such.

Boy, do I wish I had a hydrometer. But, the starch from the rice might have messed up the readings.

The rice is a bit mushy and a little salty but will make some fine "fritters" . . . or something like that.

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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It works.

I carefully measured 1 quart (4 cups) of water into a heavy sauce pan. I added 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. (My scale isn't accurate enough to get a weight.) The saltiness was about what my last batch of gumbo was, a level that I could remember the taste. . . almost too salty to eat comfortably. (It was made with smoked turkey carcasses that had been liberally seasoned so I had little control. It was ok over unsalted white rice if you like salty food, which I do.)

I measured 1/2 cup of regular long grain white rice into cheese cloth and tied it up, leaving plenty of room for the rice to expand.

I simmered for 1 hour with the lid on.

I removed the rice "bag" with tongs and allowed it to drain thoroughly. The rice was put in a colander to deal with later.

Pouring the water from the sauce pan back into the measuring cup, I had to add 2 cups of water to bring the liquid back to where it started. That is half the liquid that the rice absorbed and carried away with maybe some little bit lost to steam. The final result was that the restored 1 quart of liquid has a salt level that is now pleasant and about what I aim for in soups and such.

Boy, do I wish I had a hydrometer. But, the starch from the rice might have messed up the readings.

The rice is a bit mushy and a little salty but will make some fine "fritters" . . . or something like that.

You can use the rice in soup, just don't add any salt, just the other seasonings.

I often use it for "Spanish" or "Mexican" rice, just stir some salsa into it and toss some less salty cheese, like the queso fresca the Mexican market sells in chunks in the meat dept. It is very bland, with little salt but melts nicely.

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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It works.

I carefully measured 1 quart (4 cups) of water into a heavy sauce pan. I added 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. (My scale isn't accurate enough to get a weight.) The saltiness was about what my last batch of gumbo was, a level that I could remember the taste. . . almost too salty to eat comfortably. (It was made with smoked turkey carcasses that had been liberally seasoned so I had little control. It was ok over unsalted white rice if you like salty food, which I do.)

I measured 1/2 cup of regular long grain white rice into cheese cloth and tied it up, leaving plenty of room for the rice to expand.

I simmered for 1 hour with the lid on.

I removed the rice "bag" with tongs and allowed it to drain thoroughly. The rice was put in a colander to deal with later.

Pouring the water from the sauce pan back into the measuring cup, I had to add 2 cups of water to bring the liquid back to where it started. That is half the liquid that the rice absorbed and carried away with maybe some little bit lost to steam. The final result was that the restored 1 quart of liquid has a salt level that is now pleasant and about what I aim for in soups and such.

Boy, do I wish I had a hydrometer. But, the starch from the rice might have messed up the readings.

The rice is a bit mushy and a little salty but will make some fine "fritters" . . . or something like that.

Yes, the rice will absorb the salt, thats established. What isn't established is will it not absorb all the other flavours of the soup? If it does, then it's no better than just diluting the soup.

PS: I am a guy.

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When I oversalt, if it's reasonable, I make a second batch, with very little salt (if any) and combine the two recipes.  Obviously, this doesn't work for everything.  But sometimes it saves the day.

And it's why I have 13 containers of tomato bisque in my freezer... :biggrin:

This is my solution, which is not a whole lot different from the solution of adding more liquid.

So, this is why that small batch of venison chili morphed into something we'll be eating all winter long (and maybe into the spring).

Susan Fahning aka "snowangel"
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. . . . .

Yes, the rice will absorb the salt, thats established. What isn't established is will it not absorb all the other flavours of the soup? If it does, then it's no better than just diluting the soup.

The rice does not just absorb the salt. It absorbs the salty water. It may absorb some of the flavor components of the soup, proteins and carbohydrates, but those will be negligable compared to the salty water. While the rice may absorb some of the flavor components, that will be minor due to the properties of starch in the rice grains. Starch prefers to absorb water. And diluting the salty soup is what you are trying to do. We are back to the axiom that the only way to solve a too salty problem is to dilute it. It seems to me that the rice solution is a way to go. Yes, you may lose some flavor components to the rice, but at least you have saved the soup. And, you can use the rice for something else.

edit to add: I could go into the molecular structure of the proteins and complex carbohydrates that are in the flavor components of the soup and why they would not be readily absorbed into the starch grains of the rice. But that would get a bit complicated. There will be some flavor carried over into the rice but it will be mainly from a surface wetting effect rather than an osmotic effect into the starch "globules," for lack of a better term.

Edited by fifi (log)

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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  • 1 month later...

I am bumping this thread up since I missed the amazing post by Shalmanese.

So far, she is this year's contender for the Harold McGee Award for Scientific Experimentation at EGullet.

"Viciousness in the kitchen.

The potatoes hiss." --Sylvia Plath

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