Fixing Too Salty or Too Sour Dishes

Fixing Too Salty Adobo

Adobo is the most common victim of over-salting because it uses both soy sauce and sometimes fish sauce — two intensely salty ingredients. One extra splash of Datu Puti and suddenly your adobo tastes like the ocean.

The quick fix: Add a quarter cup of water and a tablespoon of vinegar. The water dilutes the salt concentration. The vinegar adds brightness that tricks your palate into perceiving less saltiness. Stir well, bring it back to a simmer for 5 minutes, and taste again.

If it's still too salty after that, add half a teaspoon of sugar. Sugar doesn't remove salt, but it counterbalances the perception of saltiness on your tongue. This is the same principle restaurants use when they add a pinch of sugar to savory sauces. According to Serious Eats' guide on fixing salty food, balancing with acid and sweetness is far more effective than trying to remove salt directly.

Another approach: add more meat or vegetables to the pot. Throw in extra chicken pieces or hard-boiled eggs. They'll absorb some of the salty sauce and spread the seasoning across more food. You'll end up with a bigger batch, but at least it'll be edible.

Fixing Too Sour Sinigang

Sinigang is supposed to be sour — that's the whole point. But there's a difference between "pleasantly tangy" and "this is making my jaw clench." Too much sampaloc paste or tamarind concentrate can push the acidity past the point of enjoyment.

The sugar method: Add sugar one teaspoon at a time, stirring and tasting between additions. Sugar is the classic Filipino fix for oversour sinigang, and it works because sweetness directly counteracts sourness on the palate. Start small. You want to soften the edge, not turn your sinigang into a dessert.

The gabi (taro) root method: This is the old-fashioned approach that many Filipinos prefer. Cut a few pieces of gabi root into chunks and add them to the pot. As gabi cooks, it releases starch that thickens the broth slightly and mutes the sharp acidity. It won't eliminate the sourness, but it rounds it out into something smoother and more pleasant.

You can also add more water and additional vegetables. Kangkong (water spinach), string beans, and radish will absorb some of the sour broth and dilute the overall acidity. Let the new vegetables cook through before tasting again — raw vegetables won't have absorbed enough flavor yet.

Fixing Too Salty Tinola

Tinola is a delicate soup. Its beauty lies in the lightness of the ginger-forward broth. When it's oversalted, that delicacy gets buried under a wall of sodium. You can't just add more chicken broth because you probably used fish sauce or patis, which makes the saltiness taste deeper and harder to mask.

The potato trick: Peel a medium potato, cut it into quarters, and drop the pieces into the simmering broth. Cook for 15-20 minutes. The potato absorbs salt from the liquid as it cooks. Remove the potato pieces before serving (unless you want them in there — they taste great in tinola, honestly).

You can also add more broth or plain water, but do it gradually. Adding too much liquid at once thins the soup out and weakens the ginger flavor. Add half a cup at a time, simmer for a few minutes, and taste. You might need to add another piece of fresh ginger to restore the aromatic backbone.

Adding more green papaya or chayote also helps, since these vegetables are bland enough to absorb salt without introducing competing flavors. They act as natural diluters within the dish itself.

The Potato Trick (Works for Almost Everything)

You've probably heard this one, and you might be skeptical. But the potato trick genuinely works, and there's actual science behind it.

Potatoes are mostly starch and water. When you simmer raw potato in a salty liquid, the starch granules swell and absorb some of the surrounding liquid along with its dissolved salt. The potato acts like a sponge — not a perfect one, but effective enough to make a noticeable difference.

This technique works best in broth-based dishes like tinola, nilaga, and even some versions of sinigang. It's less effective in thick, sauce-heavy dishes like caldereta or mechado where there isn't enough free liquid for the potato to absorb.

Rice works similarly. A tablespoon of uncooked rice in a small muslin bag (or even just loose in the pot) can absorb salt from thin soups. Just fish the grains out before serving. Some Filipino grandmothers use a small cloth pouch of rice as their go-to salt absorber.

Coconut Milk: The Filipino Secret Weapon

Coconut milk is magic for mellowing out sharp flavors, whether it's too much salt, too much sour, or too much heat. The fat in coconut cream coats your tongue and creates a barrier between the aggressive flavor and your taste buds.

For dishes that pair well with coconut — like Bicol Express, laing, or ginataang kalabasa — adding an extra splash of coconut milk can transform an aggressively seasoned dish into something rich and balanced.

Even for dishes that don't traditionally use coconut, a tablespoon or two of coconut cream can rescue the situation without dramatically changing the character of the dish. The key is to add it gradually and taste as you go. You're not trying to make everything taste like coconut. You're using the fat to smooth out rough edges.

Sugar as a Flavor Balancer

Filipino cooking uses sugar more liberally than most Western cuisines, and it's not because we have a sweet tooth. Sugar plays a structural role in flavor balance. According to Fine Cooking's flavor science guide, sweetness doesn't just mask saltiness or sourness — it actively suppresses the perception of those flavors on your palate.

A teaspoon of sugar in a pot of sinigang doesn't make it sweet. It rounds off the harsh acidity into a more complex, layered sourness. A half teaspoon in oversalted adobo creates the illusion of less salt even though the salt is still there. Your brain processes the sweet signal and turns down the volume on the salt signal.

Brown sugar works particularly well in Filipino dishes because its molasses undertones add depth alongside the sweetness. White sugar is cleaner and more neutral. Muscovado adds a rustic, earthy quality. Pick whichever fits the dish.

The Acid + Sweet Balance Principle

Filipino cuisine is built on the interplay of sour and sweet. Adobo balances soy (salty) with vinegar (sour). Sinigang balances tamarind (sour) with the natural sweetness of tomatoes and onions. Sweet-sour dishes like sweet and sour chicken make the principle explicit.

When something goes wrong with seasoning, you're really dealing with an imbalance in this equation. Understanding the principle helps you figure out what to adjust:

• Too salty: Add acid (vinegar, calamansi) + sweetness (sugar) to create counterweights
• Too sour: Add sweetness (sugar, coconut milk) to soften the acid
• Too sweet: Add acid (vinegar, citrus) or salt (fish sauce, soy sauce) to cut through it
• Too bland: Add salt (fish sauce) + acid (vinegar) to wake everything up
• Too spicy: Add fat (coconut milk, oil) + sweetness (sugar) to coat the tongue and reduce burn

Every rescue involves moving one or more of these flavor levers. Once you internalize this framework, you'll stop panicking when something goes wrong and start thinking in terms of adjustments.

Prevention: Seasoning in Stages

The best way to avoid seasoning disasters is to season gradually throughout cooking rather than dumping everything in at once.

Add half the soy sauce or fish sauce at the beginning. Taste midway through cooking. Add more if needed. As liquids reduce and concentrate, flavors intensify. What tasted perfectly seasoned with a full pot of liquid can become unbearably salty once half the water has evaporated.

For sinigang, start with less tamarind paste than you think you need. You can always add more sourness at the end. Removing sourness is harder. Add the sampaloc or tamarind in stages, tasting between each addition until you hit the right balance.

The same goes for fish sauce. Many Filipino cooks add patis at the very end of cooking, almost like a finishing seasoning. This gives you maximum control over the final salt level and lets the fish sauce flavor stay bright and pungent rather than cooking down into muddiness.

When to Start Over vs. When You Can Save It

Honesty time: some dishes are past saving. Here's how to know the difference.

You can probably save it if:

• It's only slightly over-seasoned (you grimace but don't gag)
• The dish has liquid you can dilute
• You haven't been cooking for more than an hour (concentrated flavors are harder to fix)
• Only one element is off (too salty OR too sour, not both)

Start over if:

• The dish is so salty it's actually unpleasant to swallow
• You've already tried adding sugar, acid, and water and it's still too strong
• Multiple things went wrong (burned AND oversalted AND oversoured)
• The dish has been reducing for a long time and the salt is deeply concentrated into the meat

Starting over feels wasteful, but serving food that tastes bad is worse. Better to spend another hour cooking than to force your family through a meal nobody enjoys. Save the overseasoned version for fried rice the next day — small amounts of overly salty meat work great mixed into garlic rice where the blandness of the rice absorbs the excess flavor.