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16
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2015
the
Savings
issue
A few tips for saving a dish gone wrong.
by
Pableaux Johnson
In the kitchen, as in life, sometimes things go terribly wrong.
After a long day, you might be sleepwalking through a stir-fry you’ve made
a thousand times. Or maybe you’ve finally gotten around to trying out that
heirloom beef stew recipe from your mom’s sainted Aunt Gertrude — a faded
index card scrawled by a woman not known for her flawless penmanship.
Your kitchen smells great, but as you take the first “cook’s taste,” you realize that
something is not quite right. It could be a blast of searing jalapeño heat, a flinch-
making level of salt or a burnt flavor that makes you want to scrape your tongue
immediately
. Either way, you’re looking for the UNDO button on your stovetop.
After the initial response (“It’s BAD!”) you’ve got a simple choice: try to save
the dish or switch to Plan B — a quick po-boy or the pizza delivery.
Before you reach for the phone, consider this a chance to practice Culinary
Damage Control, a lesser-known but extremely
valuable kitchen skill. This Wednesday-night spaghetti
sauce might taste like a deer season salt lick, but most
times, a little tweaking could help it make the jump
from “EWWWW” to “not so bad.”
If you understand fundamental concepts of flavor
dynamics, you can salvage a surprising amount of
disappointing stovetop experiments.
The Basic Moves
Isolate
Start off by isolating the main problem — usually the
taste that made you flinch. Did you hit the gumbo
with too much salt? Did you accidentally add four
TABLEspoons of hot sauce instead of ¼ teaspoon?
Take a second and compare the flavor of the damaged
batch to ones that are done right.
Analyze
Now that you’re thinking about flavors, put it into a
more detailed category than the first brain flash.
The most common categories are:
• Too Spicy
• Too Sweet
• Too Salty
• Flat-out Burnt
The first three are pretty simple: they’ve got the right
ingredients, but need rebalancing to get closer to your
ideal. (Burnt food requires its own set of steps.)
Tweak
Once you know the flavors that are overdone, you can
counteract the extreme flavor with its chemical opposite.
(Keep in mind that because of the infinite variety of
recipes, there is no exact formula or “one-size-fits all”
solution, so experiment.)
• Spice
— Neutral dairy products like sour cream
or plain yogurt can mask
capscicum
(the chemical
responsible for the burn) and add richness to many
dishes.
• Sweet
— Balance with acids like lemon juice or
vinegar (for savory dishes).
• Salt
—The key here is to dilute the dish, either with
a liquid (stock or water) or in the case of more chunky
dishes (salads, etc.), add more chunks. (If you’ve
heard about putting potato chunks in soups to cut
saltiness: bad news. It doesn’t really work. Sorry.)
Salvage
Overcooked foods require their own corrective dance steps.
•
Cool Off
—Get your dish off of the heat and cooled
off as quickly as possible.
Save the
Dish