We spend hours in the kitchen cooking what we hope will be an amazing meal and then … the seasoning is wrong! Lots of seasoning mistakes can be fixed. It’s all about understanding flavors and balance. There are six basic flavors in cooking: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, spicy and savory. A good dish will have a balance of these flavors. If you go overboard or underboard on one flavor, it can be balanced by another. So before you throw your dish away, try to fix the mistake.

Here is how to fix the most common seasoning mistakes.

1. Avoiding Salt Completely

Too much salt is not a good thing for anyone’s health, but too little salt is not a good thing for a dish. Salt has this magical ability to bring out the best flavor in any food. It can even make sweet foods taste sweeter; that’s why we add a pinch of salt in baking and desserts. Without salt, food tastes bland and unappetizing.

You need to taste the food and decide for yourself if it could taste better by adding more salt.

Every Level

Seasoning is not a one-time event when cooking. There are many levels to a dish and the seasoning needs to be at every level.

Seasoning at every level doesn’t have to mean using a ton of salt or spices. You can divide the amount of seasoning you want to use between the various layers of the dish.

3. The Food is Too Salty

What to do? If the dish is asoup or stew, like this Eggplant, Onion and Tomato Stew, add more water to dilute the salt. You can also add a raw, sliced potato to the pot as potatoes absorb salt very well. If you have more of the ingredients you were using, you can add more to the dish so the ratio of salt to food will be lessened. Adding acid or sweetness to the dish also helps balance salt so a touch of lemon juice, vinegar or sugar can help.

4. The Food is Too Spicy

measure your spices rather than just tossing them in straight from the jar (and I always remove those lids with the little holes because sprinkling slows me down). But if you do make something too spicy, there are things you can do to fix it. Add some acidity by squeezing some lemon or lime on it or add something sweet like sugar or agave to balance out the heat. If you have more of the ingredients other than the spice that went into the recipe, add them so the percentage of spice will decrease.

5. The Food is Too Sweet

when your savory food turns out way too sweet for everyone and dinner tastes more like dessert, you can fix it. You can dilute the sweetness by adding more liquid to the dish. If dilution is not an option, as in this Savory Sweet Potato Quiche, balance out the sweet with other flavors such as acid. Add a squeeze of lemon or lime juice or a spoon of apple cider vinegar. You can Balance the sweet taste with more seasoning to make the dish spicier or a fat such as olive oil or avocado. Do not add more salt since salt brings out the sweetness of food and that’s what we want to avoid in this case.

6. The Food is Too Acidic/Sour

The best way to counterbalance too much sour is to add sweet, salty or savory flavors.

7. The Food is Not Acidic/Sour Enough

Whenever you think a dish tastes dull or is missing something, try adding a squeeze of lemon or lime or a bit of vinegar or wine to it to wake it up.

Bitter

The most common foods that might be too bitter are leafy greens such as kale, collard greens, and mustard greens. Other foods that may taste bitter include cocoa, coffee, espresso, chocolate, and some herbs and spices such as parsley, paprika and cayenne pepper. Bitter is the opposite of acidic/sour so adding citrus juice, vinegar or tangy non-dairy yogurts can help balance the dish.

You can also try adding something sweet such as agave or sugar. I also always add a dash of grated nutmeg to my bitter dishes. It adds a nutty flavor that I love and it seems to help balance the flavors in the dish.

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