Fixing Kitchen Mistakes

Tips for fixing flavor mistakes 🔥

There’s nothing more disheartening than hosting a dinner for friends or family and then disaster strikes. 🤦‍♂️

The stew is too salty, your sauce is too sweet, you overcooked the pasta or your meat gravy is lumpy as all get-out. 😩

Below are some tips for fixing a lot of common mistakes that happen to the best of us. It doesn’t even have to apply for cooking a dinner for people, if you mess up a dish for yourself it’s nice to know some easy fixes that will help you enjoy your meal more and be all the wiser for the next time.

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Oversalted:

Ironically, most home cooks under-season food but in the case your dish is too salty here’s some tips to tone down the salt:

• Add acid: citrus, vinegar, etc to dilute the saltiness.

• For soups: add more broth or water

• If the dish has dairy add in milk, cream or sour cream to mute the salt.

• For stews, drop in pieces of potato to absorb the salt; the starch will counter the salt.

• If you have over brined or season raw protein, soak in water briefly and then dry thoroughly.

Too Sweet:

To reduce sweetness:

• add an acid (like vinegar, lemon juice or lime juice) to round out the sweetness

• Use a fat like olive or avocado oil to reduce mute the sweetness.

• You can also try adding in a pinch of salt to bump of the savory aspects

Too Tart:

If your dish is too sharp or acidic:

• add a sweetener to round out the acid, like sugar, agave or honey (note: honey has a distinct flavor that does’nt always work depending on the application.)

• In some cases you can add cream or even caramelized onions to dilute the acid-forward flavors.

• For a stew add in diced carrot pieces to counter the acid.

Too Spicy:

I love spice but depending on the dish, some balancing may be needed.

For overly spicy food, you can add dairy like heavy cream or yogurt. If it’s a chilled sauce consider using mayo to knock the spice down.

You could also consider adding sweet to counter spice, like honey or sugar and in special cases nut butters can work well.

Overcooked Vegetables:

Mushy vegetables suck.

There’s no way around it.

If you happen to overcook vegetables, turn this mistake on its’ head by making a wonderful puree. This is a wonderful hack to use and can add a velvety smoothness to your plate that tastes delicious.

Your guests will never know and some purees end of being the star of teh show (like the parsnip apple puree I dropped a while ago)

Lumpy Gravy:

Ok, I’ve seen a lot of people saying “oh just put your gravy in a blender to take out lumps”

The problem with this is that if your gravy has a starch thickener then blending it can make it gluey and gross!

Your best bet is to pass it through a fine mesh strainer and use a ladle to push the gravy through.

Gluey gravy is a sin, probably worse than lumps IMO! Pass it through a strainer 🤝

Overcooked Pasta:

This one really does kind of suck, but in worse case scenario plunge the overcooked pasta in cold water (or place in colander and run under water), dry, toss in some oil, then heat up a pan and saute (or pan fry) the noodz until browned or crispy on the outside in some places.

Meat is Not Browning:

When searing meat, two things to remember.

1. Do not overcrowd your pan. This crashes the temperature and results in steaming your meat not searing. This will fix 90% of your problems.

2. If using frozen meats that have thawed, these tend to exude water (due to ice crystal formation) so even if you dont overcrowd your pan it can be a challenge. To fix this, reduce your flipping and stirring so the meat is contact longer with the hot pan. This will help mitigate the steaming effect.

Broken Mayo or Aioli

I’ve been pretty lucky in that in all my years cooking in kitchens I’ve only rarely broken a mayo or aioli. I will say that confidence plays a big factor here… and reps.

If you make mayo at home every week or two you are far less likely to be breaking emulsions.

But! If you do break a mayo don’t throw it all out.

Instead, grab an egg yolk and whisk with a little lemon juice or acid in a clean bowl. Stream in a few TB of oil to get your emulsion started and then slowly add the broken mayo in and you’ll be good to go. 🙌

Greasy Food

I’m not a fan of air fryer and deep frying has had a bad wrap for far too long!

I wrote a whole substack years ago about deep frying and how when done properly it’s not some boogie-monster to be scared of.

The issue is keeping the oil temperature at the right level so the oil is kept out of your ingredients. This happens by steam being created when you drop in ingredients to the hot oil. The high temperature causes steam to be forced out of the ingredient (because water is evaporating) which makes a kind of magic forcefield cloud… which keeps oil from entering your ingredients.

It’s just simple physics and science.

The problem happens when people drop in cold ingredients or too many so the oil temp crashes.. then yes, your end product will be greasy.

Fry in small batches relative to your container to maintain proper oil temps… adn you’ll be feasting on crispy (not oily or soggy) goodness.

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Obviously we dont’t want to be in the above situations in the first place, but if you are the above tips will help salvage your efforts so you can enjoy a tasty meal.

Hope this helps you with your kitchen efforts to make tastier meals… stay tuned for a Q&A next where you can throw out any troubleshooting questions for me to help with.