How to Make a Dish Less Salty

You slave away in a hot kitchen chopping, stirring, measuring and mixing all the ingredients necessary for a delicious meal only to taste it and discover it is too salty. You cringe thinking about throwing out all that otherwise perfectly good food, but you also don't want to serve an overly salted dish. You can try a few different tricks to fix the dish before you have to call it quits and start again from scratch.

• 1

  Peel a potato. Cut the potato into 1-inch cubes.

• 2

  Place a handful of the potato cubes in the center of a piece of cheese cloth if you are working with a soup. Tie the corners of the cheese cloth together to hold the potato cubes inside.

• 3

  Drop the cheese cloth full of potato cubes into the soup, or place unwrapped cubes of potato into the dish. Cover the soup and finish cooking it or let it continue to cook for an hour. Bake the dish you're making, if not soup, according to the recipe.

• 4

  Remove the potatoes before serving. The potato cubes should soak up some of the salt.

• 5

  Taste the soup or dish for saltiness. Add 2 teaspoons of vinegar or lemon juice to the soup if it is still too salty. You can also add more broth to the soup, let it cook and then spoon some of the excess broth off the top of the soup once the saltiness is fixed. Add more ingredients in the correct proportions to the dish if it is not a soup to combat the excess salt.