Added Too Much Soy Sauce To Your Dish? Tone It Down With Some Lemon

Soy sauce is a wonderful ingredient in cooking. It's most associated with Japanese cuisine, especially as a dipping sauce for sushi, but soy sauce's uses extend far beyond that. Any time you want to add a deeper, richer salty flavor to a dish — of any cuisine, really — soy sauce is what you should reach for. But as with any salt-based ingredient, it's certainly possible to add too much soy sauce to something, at which point it's going to overpower your dinner.

So what do you do in that situation? Just throw away what you've been working on and start from scratch? Well, you could ... but maybe you don't have to. There are ways to save dishes with too much soy sauce, and chief among them is one of the simplest methods: add lemon juice. Acids naturally counteract salts, offsetting any overly salty flavors. Plus, lemon juice in particular is a versatile flavor that can find a home in most dishes, so along with balancing out salt, it also just adds an extra burst of goodness to your meal.

Lemon juice has tons of uses, both in cooking and cleaning — you can even use it to clean your dishwasher — but its primary cooking function is as an acid to brighten things up. Lemon juice can go toe-to-toe with soy sauce's potent flavor, providing a balance for your dish. By adding lemon, you're not actually reducing the amount of salt a dish has. Instead, you're basically tricking your taste buds into no longer realizing how much soy sauce is in there.

This doesn't just work with soy sauce; acids, and citrus in particular, are the best thing to use if you want to counteract something you've oversalted in one way or another. One important caveat, though: You should be careful not to add too much lemon juice. The very thing that allows it to counteract soy sauce — its strong flavor — can easily go overboard, resulting in a Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly situation where you've replaced one problem with another. Start by adding a splash or half a tablespoon of lemon juice and then tasting your sauce. Keep adding small amounts until you've reached the flavor profile you desire.

Lemon isn't the only way to deal with food that's been oversalted. Much like lemon juice, other acids like vinegar or tomato juice will work to counteract saltiness by providing a counterpoint — although these are harder to mesh with soy sauce, because they're not as universal. Sugar also works well here; the reason sweet and salty is such a popular dessert combo is because of the balance the two tastes provide each other — and sugar works very well to tone down soy sauce in particular. And if you're working with a soup or some other liquid, you can also simply add more of the unsalted liquid component, like broth, dairy, or wine, to balance the salt out (this may be the easiest method).

Whichever method you use, just know you have options. And if you ultimately do have to throw the whole thing away and start from scratch, there's no shame in that; it happens to all of us sometimes.