How can one remove the excess salt from the food?

Cooking is an art that has love and cares apart from just filling your tummy. Everyone from your mom to wife and chefs that work in hotels put in a lot of effort to give the perfect taste and look for its item. The preparation starts from selecting the best ingredients to cutting, chopping and mixing in the right quantity to get the best quality for any dish. Any ingredients in excess may spoil the full work and salt plays the worse character in a dish. A slightly less or more can take away the taste of the dish, the advantage of less salt is that it can be added but excess may spoil the full broth and thus need to take care while adding salt in any dish. Now let me provide some common tips to remove or subdue the excess salt to some extend:
i) Raw or boiled Potato - Choose few raw potatoes, wash, peel and cut them into four and put them in the dish and let it stay in it for about 25 minutes. You can remove the potato slice afterwards if not required. When using boiled potatoes, do cut it according to the size of other vegetables so as not to give any hint of the same. It is believed that potatoes soaks the excess salt and help in reducing the salt content in the dish.

ii) Raw or fried Onion - When using raw onion, cut it into big pieces i.e. into 2 or 4 slices and put it in the curry but remove it after some time. The raw onion will soak the excess amount of salt from the curry. When using fried onion, fry the onion to crisp as it will give a smokey flavor and help in balancing the taste.

iii) Flour dough balls- Make 3-4 small balls of flour dough depending upon the quantity of curry and insert it in the curry. Let it for 9 - 12 minutes in the curry so as to soak the excess salt from the dish. Remember to remove the flour dough balls before taking the dish to the dining table.

iv) Vinegar and sugar - Depending upon the dish and gravy type, adding a tablespoon of vinegar preferably white vinegar with a tablespoon of sugar to the gravy will help to balance the overall taste by its sweet and sour flavor.

v) Curd or tomato or malai - For Indian curry like Punjabi dishes, you can add 1-2 tablespoons of curd or malai (depending upon the quantity of dish)or 1-2 finely chopped tomatoes (depending upon the quantity of curry)to balance the taste of the curry and reduce the excess salt in the gravy.

There are many ways to reduce excess salt in food. We can't remove it but we can adjust to the required level.
1. Add a little tamarind juice: Take tamarind. Put in water and make some thick paste of tamarind. Then slowly add the required quantity of this tamarind juice to the food where the salt is more. You can't add all at a time. Add a little mix. Taste it. If still, you want to reduce add a little more and then again taste it.
2. Add lemon juice: Another way to reduce the excess salt is to add some quantity of lemon juice. You can take a lemon. Make it into two pieces and take the juice. Remove the seeds and then add this to the food where you want to reduce the salt. Add in portions and in between see the taste and stop when correct quantity is added.
3. Add chili powder: Add a little red chili powder to the food and mix properly. That will make the food eatable. You should add the chili powder in which there is not salt powder added.
4. Mix some potato pieces or tomato pieces: You can boil some potatoes separately. Make it fine paste and mix the required quantity of the above paste so that salt will come down.
5. The best way is to add an additional quantity of the same material without putting salt in that. Then automatically the salt will get reduced and the quantity of food will increase. You can keep the excess material in the fridge and consume afterward.
6. Adding some onion pieces is another way to reduce the salt content.

Salt is one of the main ingredients in the foods as it determines the final taste of the dish. If it is more in a dish then there are many methods to compensate or balancing it by adding water, tomato pulp, cottage cheese, cream etc but removing it from the already cooked dish requires some other skills. Let us see in details what those methods are -

1. Potato - We have to cut the potatoes in small pieces and dip in the curry from where we want to remove salt. Let the curry boil once and then let it remain in simmering heat for 15-20 minutes. Let it cool down. Remove the potato pieces and one can also use them in some other vegetable or dish either immediately or after preserving in the fridge for some time. One can discard these half cooked potato pieces also.

2. Onion - Cut the raw onion in big pieces and dip in the curry for 10-15 minutes. It would absorb some salt fro the dish. These onions can be used for quick dishes like omelette or sandwiches or even can be discarded.

3. Flour - Small kneaded balls of wheat flour can be dipped in the curry for 10-15 minutes by which time they absorb some salt from the dish and are to be removed out and discarded.

4. Diluting - This is one method which can be used in specific cases to reduce the salt but it will entirely kill the taste of the original curry. In this method we add sufficient curd or milk or cream or water to the dish and then mix it well and remove a bowl of curry from it and use that for preparing a soup or stock. This is an extreme method used when a person can not stand even a little salt in the dish.

Sometimes in course of cooking, we are either confident or there is miscalculation while adding salt. The end result is that the prepared food looses its natural taste due to excess salt addition. Under that condition, we can apply a few tips to rescue the over salt from such foods - 1) Dilute with the addition of some hot water - The entire preparation has to be diluted with some amount of hot water and the contents accompanying the sauce has to be reboiled for a couple of minutes so as to have the consistency in the taste of the final product.
2) Add more items in the prepared food - The salt can be minimised with the fresh preparation of the same dish without adding salt and then add the entire volume to the already prepared batch. After recombining, allow it to boil some time so as to get the consistency of the taste.
3) Add more greens such as spinach, kale or mustard green so as to dilute the excess salt. Even some pieces of tomatoes can be added and the contents are boiled roughly for ten minutes so as to have the palatable taste.
4) Add some amount of Besan, Atta, Barley etc so these items will absorb excess salt if after the addition of the said contents are thoroughly stirred and boiled so as to make the gravy homogeneous. Boiling should be continued for ten minutes.
5) Add some sugar or honey - A little amount of sugar or honey can provide rich taste of the product but the same has not to be done in excess so as to spoil the taste.
6) Add curd or lemon in the resultant product - This is the most appropriate step to dilute the excess salt but the entire mixture has to be stirred thoroughly and allow the content to boil for sometime with the addition of some amount of boiled water if the gravy is thick enough.

An additional salt in the cooked food cannot be cosumed. It all depends on which food you have cooked.
1. If it is rasam, sambar - you can put tamarind water, lemon juice or grated coconut and little amount of water. Mix any one of the above and recheck the salt level.
2. If it is a vegetable curry- use grated coconut and lemon juice to subside the salt level.
3. If it is curd rice-add a bit more curd or water.
4. If it is chappatis-reduce the salt in the chutney or curry used as supporting dish with chappathi.
5. If it is dosa or idli mix- add some rice flour to reduce salt.

Salt is the main ingredient of food, if salt is more or less it spoils the taste of the food. If the salt is less then it can be added according to the taste, but if it is more then it would be little different to level the salt as the taste can change. The level the salt you can increase the quantity of the food u r making or you can add a ball of flour dough or vinegar, lemon juice or tamarind.
It is always better to add little salt, taste and then add.