Over-(insert spice here)ed, now what?
Last night I made Mario Batali's "chicken with green sauce" which I honestly believe is the easiest, tastiest verde sauce out there - I make it all the time.
Unbeknownst to me I ended up with the hottest serrano pepper the market had to offer - and realized it after I'd pureed it into the sauce. Now I L-O-V-E hot, spicy dishes, in all shapes and forms, but this was eye-watering miserable. After spending an hour tweaking, adding water, chicken stock, more cilantro, anything I could think of, I finally had it edible, and dinner turned out fantastic.
However, it got me thinking - is there some trick or remedy to counter-balance spiciness? What are other things you do when you over-salt, over-spice, or over-acidify(real word?) your foods, without tossing out the whole batch and starting over?
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4 Comments:
Less is more with salt, peppers, ect. But when I do over make something that is so hot it would blow you to mars I first will see if the recipe would not be too marred if I add some sour cream and serve some cool sour cream on the side. If that is not the case then I will do like you did and add water or stock. If tomato based then maybe some tomato sauce puree ect. If I over salt say a soup I put a halved raw potato into it. If a burn something and the flavor now has a char/burn flavor to it, sadley I will toss it, I have not found a way get that nasty taste of that burn/char taste out yet
pjracz10 at 2:49PM on 02/19/09
When I over salted a chicken braised dish I threw some torn up bread into it. Didn't affect the flavor, balanced the salt and thickened the sauce.
bessfour at 3:11PM on 02/19/09
As pjracz has said, sour cream will work wonders. In fact, any dairy product can be used to counterbalance intense spiciness. This is due to both the unique properties of capciacin (what makes chiles 'hot') and the enzymes in milk. What capciacin does to create the hot sensation is bind tightly to your taste buds, all of them, and confuse the neurological messages sent to the brain, which are interpreted as pain. What milk and other dairy products do is bind to the capciacin more tightly than it binds to the tongue, essentially winning a tug of war with the taste buds. You can use any dairy product to achieve this result, from sour cream to yoghurt to milk, cheese, and ice cream. Hope this helps.
gouchermaxms at 4:27PM on 02/19/09
With something like a sauce, I'd make another batch, maybe half a batch, sans the overdone ingredient. Then add the batch with the overdone to the regular one until you hit the right flavor profile. If you go the other way, you run the risk that you'll end up with a 55-gallon drum of the stuff before you've got it muted enough.
Then, you can come up with other ways to use up the rest of the too-hot batch. So if it's too much as a sauce, maybe it would be better as a condiment, like a hot sauce that you'd sprinkle on rather than douse. Or it could be the spicy element in another dish, again just adding enough to make it taste right.
dbcurrie at 5:59PM on 02/19/09