How to Fix Too Much Salt in My Pork Roast

How to Fix Too Much Salt in My Pork Roast
Published: May 16, 2011
Updated: Jan 10, 2019
2 minute read
roast pork plated meal
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Even the best cooks are sometimes too free with the salt shaker. Before you know it, your perfect pork roast is seemingly ruined. In this case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, because as soon as a dish has too much salt, it's not easy to rescue. Avoid the problem in the first place by adding salt just a bit at a time. You can always add more, but you can never really remove it. Still, a few techniques may help mask it.

Serve the roast with a sauce containing acidic ingredients such as wine, lemon juice or vinegar. The acid lends another flavor profile to the dish, making the salt seem less prominent.

Make a slightly sweet sauce to counteract the saltiness of the pork. The trick is getting just the right proportion to diminish the salt without being too sweet, a balance that may take some practice.

Make a rich, fatty sauce to go with the pork, such as a thick gravy. Use butter, oil or animal fat in the sauce, but don't use salt. The fat adds a tongue-covering texture that will help mask the saltiness of the meat.

Serve a side dish for your roast, such as rice or noodles, with no salt added. When eaten together, the salty pork may pair well with the unsalted side dish.

Remove the outer 1/8 inch of roast, which will also remove some of the seasoning. If you brined the roast, this step will not have the desired effect, because brining sinks further into the meat.

Tips

You may have heard that you can add potatoes or bread to a dish to soak up the extra salt, discarding them before serving. No evidence proves that this works, and, in fact, at least one experimenter — Robert Wolke in "What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained" — concluded that it definitely doesn't.

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