If there's one lesson to take from cooking, it's that you can usually add more but it's hard to take too much out. Obviously if your dish needs salt, you can add a little, but if you've got too much salt? There are a bunch of folk techniques involving potatoes and probably praying to Odin, and I'm here to tell you that sometimes, you added too much salt and there's no coming back from it.
I am a person who likes his seasonings (as is probably clear). Once, when I was a poor college student working for pennies a day in an internship, I had scraped together one last meal out of my week's grocery budget, a nice sauce of tomatoes and crumbled up meatloaf (ok, so it was a nice meal for my budget) and I was just putting the finishing touches on it, adding some salt, just a pinch, and then a little pepper. And the top of my pepper bottle came off (I wish I could have afforded a grinder, but I was using pre-ground) and poured an entire dollar's worth of pepper onto my sauce, which I was engaged in stirring at the time.
About 50 cents of pepper had already been inextricably stirred into the sauce by the time my brain managed to halt the automatic motions of my stirring hand (this was an internship without much opportunity for sleep; please don't do this to people). And I had no more food. Friends, I tried to scrape off as much of the pepper as I could, and I tried to spoon out the worst-affected areas of the sauce where I couldn't, and I'm sorry to say that there was no coming back from it and I went hungry that night. As I didn't get much chance to sleep, I had less time to cry into my pillow. Please pay your interns a living wage and obey work safety regulations at all times.
So yes, there are times when no matter what you do, you can't take too much out. But what about if it's just a little too much? Folk remedies involving potatoes and Odin?
One thing you can always do is dilute a meal. Suppose you're making a pasta sauce and you add a bit too much salt. You just created leftovers. Use half as much sauce and save the rest for later. Sometimes it's enough to just use less spread over more, as in the case of pasta or rice. Sometimes, like in a soup, you can get away with adding a little water and some more of other seasonings. This works best with salt, but if you add a little too much chili to your chili and it's on the hot side, try adding some water and another can of beans. Basically, make a larger portion of what you were already making and save some for later.
If that's not an option either, there are some things you can tweak a little. A bit of sweetness will tame something that's too sour, though it won't make it less acidic. You'll find that works best with tomatoes that are a little on the sour side. If you add too much sugar, sometimes, only sometimes, you can cut that sweetness with a little sour, but it usually works a lot better going the other way.
Too much salt really should be diluted in some way. Adding a starchy vegetable can help the final dish, but only if you eat it. The folk remedies where you add a cut potato and it somehow leaches salt out of your broth are mostly nonsense, but adding some cut up potatoes to a soup can keep it from being too salty. Carrots or other root vegetables work well for this too, as does cauliflower. This won't help if it tastes like a heaping bowl of salt, but if one of the people you're feeding finds it too salty, try serving some bread with whatever it is.
Too spicy? Cook it for a while longer if you can. A lot of flavor compounds, including the ones your tongue registers as heat, break down in the presence of actual heat. If you wind up accidentally dumping a pile of oregano into your sauce, for instance (not based on personal experience at all) pull out what you can and then cook the sauce for longer. Some flavors break down more easily, some are more resilient, but it's worth a try.
Lastly, if you find that your dish has too much of one flavor profile, maybe try adding something from a different profile to break it up and make it less one-note. You'd be surprised how a little splash of vinegar or citrus at the end can liven up a leaden, earthy bean soup. Sometimes it goes the other way, and things are too bright. In that case, adding something warm and earthy, like cumin (though there are other options like fennel, mustard, or even oregano at times) can bring it back down to earth. Or maybe you need to warm things up more with cinnamon. As you taste your spice palette and gain experience, you'll get to know what flavors go together but also what flavors cut through one another. And since you know all about tempering, you never have to worry about getting to the end of the cooking time and finding that you needed to have added a spice way back at the beginning.
All of this is to say that sometimes you can come back from it, and as long as you're careful and don't go too far, experimentation shouldn't cause you too much worry. But part of learning is failure, and embrace that. I still remember the first meal I cooked myself, which was pancakes (they really are the easiest thing to make) with warm spices in them, and I put enough spice in to be able to see through time*. I learned from that experience. So can you.
Go out and flail around a little. You'll recover. This is cookable.
*Time is light purple with Wednesday highlights.
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