Recipes for Redemption ; Chefs Give Tips for When Kitchen Mishaps Make Good Dishes Go Bad

By Mark Fisher Staff Writer

We who toil in the kitchen sometimes revert to what we learned in the “D’oh!” school of cooking. In other words, we blow it.

The souffle is scorched. The soup is salty as seawater. The sauce — spicy enough to blow the top of your guests’ heads clean off their bodies.

It’s a lousy feeling, spending all of that time, energy and money working with quality ingredients and a delicious-sounding recipe — and a moment of inattention or inexperience sabotages the dish.

But wait — there may be hope.

In some cases — not all — those kitchen disasters can be fixed with some culinary sleight of hand.

For advice on emergency intervention of cooking mistakes, we picked the brains of some local chefs whose job it is to train the next generation of kitchen wizards, and we turned to a Web site called Chef Talk (www.cheftalk.com), which bills itself as “A food lover’s link to professional chefs.” The Web site includes an entry titled “When Things Go Wrong: A Guide to Fixing Kitchen Disasters,” which addresses some of the most common mistakes and offers a few remedies. For example:

The problem: too salty

Maybe you put salt in twice, or maybe you’ve salted a dish early in the cooking only to have the dish “cook down” and intensify the saltiness beyond your tastes. What now?

The solution: Try adding sugar and cider vinegar to neutralize the salt, the Chef Talk folks say. I’ve added wine and gotten good results — a dry white such as sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio or a dry, fruity red such as gamay, pinot noir or merlot. If making a soup, both the Chef Talk folks and Edward Stanziano, who oversees the culinary arts program at the Montgomery County Career Technology Center, suggest adding a peeled potato, cut into large chunks, and simmer for 15 minutes, then remove. Of course, you can also simply add more of the other ingredients to the dish to essentially dilute the salt. Or try serving it over pasta or boiled potatoes that have been cooked in plain (not salted) water.

The problem: too (gasp!) spicy

Maybe you grabbed the Dave’s Insanity sauce instead of the Tabasco. Maybe you forgot to remove the seeds and ribs from those jalapenos. For whatever reason, one bite and every pore in your head and neck are now gushing sweat, and your mouth is aflame. What to do?

The solution: Other than just adding more of the other nonspicy ingredients, there are three options that can help: sugar, acids and dairy products, Chef Talk specialists say. “Try adding a can of crushed pineapple to your chili. It will virtually disappear, leaving very little traces of itself while helping to counteract the heat,” the cooking specialists say. “Give that super spicy salsa a few squirts of lime juice to help tame it, or, if appropriate, add some dairy, in the form of sour cream or yogurt into a spicy sauce. At the table, offer sour cream and cheese to help counteract the heat or offer chopped cilantro, which also seems to have a cooling effect on the mouth.” Or try the remedy favored by Bill Castro of El Meson: Add a bit of honey.

The problem: burned, scorched, blackened

The solution: Sometimes, according to Chef Stanziano, a tablespoon of peanut butter can counteract scorched flavors. But first you’ve got to stop the scorching quickly before it ruins the dish.

Here’s what the Chef Talk folks recommend for a pot of soup that is starting to scorch: Quickly remove the pan from the heat and plunge the bottom of the pan into cold water (do not try this with Pyrex glass or earthenware cooking pans). Doing so will stop the cooking process and prevent any more from burning. Then, carefully, pour the soup or sauce into another pan, leaving behind the last little bit on the bottom.

Do not scrape anything from the old pan into the new pan. Taste the soup. If you don’t taste any burnt flavors, then you reacted quickly enough; if not, then there is only one thing to do: Start over.

Steve Cornelius, who oversees Sinclair Community College’s culinaryarts program, cautions against trying too hard with such rescue efforts. Cornelius believes some “fixes” are old wives’ tales, or, at the very least, they add new flavors to a dish that may be edible or acceptable, but don’t complement the dish, he said.

For mistakes that can’t be fixed, be creative and find alternate uses, Cornelius said.

Think overbaked cookies, which may be too dry to eat, but which can be crumbled and folded into ice cream, he said. Overbaked bread can be turned into croutons.

Sometimes, though, we just have to wave the white dish towel.

“Too often we try to fix things, and sometimes we end up putting as much money and time into trying to fix it as we would have if we had started over,” Cornelius said. “Sometimes you just have to throw it out.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2258 or mfisher

@DaytonDailyNews.com.

(c) 2007 Dayton Daily News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.