It’s easy to accidentally over-salt soup, stocks and stews and for ages I thought that there wasn’t anything you can do about it. But it turns out it’s quite easy to repair something that’s too salty: just put a raw potato in the soup or stew. As the potato cooks it will absorb some of the salt and then before you serve up just remove the potato. Simple.
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August 20, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Plus, you end up with a salty potato. Bonus.
August 25, 2007 at 1:46 am
[...] How to reduce saltiness in soups/stews [...]
September 4, 2007 at 11:31 am
Myth.
July 15, 2008 at 11:31 am
this is not a myth
you never study osmosis at school?
July 15, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Yes, I did. And I also de-bunked this myth by doing a practical experiment during A-level biology, using various salt solutions, plain water, and potatoes. Oh and an electrical conductivity meter. If you want more details, just ask.
October 4, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Or You can use Washed charcoal to remove salt
Take few pisces of wooden charcoal and wash it throughly. Cover it with few pieces of kleenex. Place the covered charcoal pieces in a clean cloth (like cheese cloth) and place it inside your soup for 5 min. Stir the soup lightly.
The Chracoal absorbs the dissolved salt from the soup.
December 16, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I have just read this thread, and have to say that Fixup’s experiments must have been inadequately controlled.
If you cook a potato in a pan of unsalted water and compare it to one cooked in salted, the taste clearly shows that some of salt must have moved into the potato (not sure how you could measure this though).
Perhaps some of the starches from the potato move into the water, such that Fixup’s meter registered the same conductivity (or perhaps he did not make proper allowance for the water that would have evaporated whilst the potato cooked, thus increasing the effective salt solution).
Whilst the effect might be small, Science says that it must also be real.
The downside is that Science also says that the potato will take on some of the other flavours from the soup/stew, so you might have been better simply pouring away some of the salty stock, and topping up with clean water.
July 6, 2009 at 3:28 am
So the potato does remove salt from the water. Very little in my experience. But the science experiment Fixup suggests must have been faulty, as common sense and taste proves otherwise.
But generally speaking, we don’t want to impart potato flavour into just any soup. If you truly want to reduce the saltiness of a soup you can add more nage, or light broth. Depending on your soup, just boil related flavours into another pot of water, remove those vegetables, and add the nage to the salty soup as required. This is an essential tool in all busy kitchens. I have at least a liter of nage next to my Bain-Marie everyday.
September 16, 2009 at 4:24 pm
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