Oversalted, overpeppered, overcooked: tips for restoring the taste of spoiled dishes
No matter how much housewives hone their culinary skills in the kitchen day after day, annoying mistakes and blunders happen to everyone.
The meat is dry, the soup is oversalted, and the gravy is so rich in pepper that your mouth burns?
There are ways to fix this and give your dishes the desired taste.
Added too much salt to your broth or soup? You can remove the excess by adding some unsalted vegetable or meat broth to the pot. It is not recommended to add water to oversalted soup, because it will change the taste of the entire contents.
If you don’t have any unsalted broth and don’t have time to prepare it, it’s enough to peel a couple of medium potatoes and put them in the soup/broth for a quarter of an hour.
Potatoes will absorb excess salt and will not worsen the taste of the food. It is good to have rice in cooking bags on hand: if you put such a bag into cooked and oversalted soup for a few minutes, the rice will absorb the salt from the liquid.
Did your hand shake and almost half of the contents of the pepper shaker spilled into the sauce or gravy? Remove the excess pepper with a spoon as quickly as possible before it has time to soak the dish.
And if you find too much pepper when trying your next meal, add a little sour cream to the sauce. It will soften the taste and give it a creamy note. Too much pepper in the salad? Balance it out by adding lemon or lime juice.
It's a shame when you were hoping to get a golden brown crust on your pie, but instead you saw blackened edges...
If you are afraid to cut off the burnt areas, you can do it a little differently. Take the pie out of the oven, let it cool a little, take a fine sieve and run it along the burnt edges to remove the top blackened and dry layer. And then disguise these abrasions with a layer of cream or whipped cream.
Is your meat tough and dry every time? One trick can help you save the situation: before frying or baking the meat, marinate it in a mixture with added Coca-Cola. Or hold the pieces in this soda for a while after they have been marinated in your usual way.
The meat will definitely become softer from such treatment. Not a fan of "chemistry"? Then before cooking, surround the meat portions with pieces of fruit - pears, pineapples, kiwi. The juice from these fruits will help soften the fibers and make the meat more juicy and tender.
It's also quite easy to overcook meat to the point of tasteless sole. What to do if this happens?
Cut the piece into thinner slices, put tomatoes on top, sprinkle with lemon juice, vinegar and vegetable oil, wait about 15 minutes and calmly eat the tasty and soft meat.
Didn't keep an eye on the boiling vegetables and now you have unattractive-looking and unappetizing mashed potatoes? You'll have to change the menu and make a tasty vegetable casserole instead of boiled vegetables as a side dish.
Place them on a baking sheet lined with paper, pour cream on top and put them in the oven for 10 minutes, preheating the oven to 200 degrees. Then, when the casserole is ready, decorate it with grated cheese and breadcrumbs.
Overcooked your pasta and it's become a sticky mass? Giving it a more appetizing appearance and taste is quick and easy: drain the water from the pan and fry the pasta in a frying pan, adding oil.
You can make a tasty and interesting sauce from the remaining water if you add herbs, tomato paste and spices to it.
