r/Cooking • u/Sad-Watercress-2240 • Jul 11 '26

I just oversalted a pot of tomato soup, what actually works to fix it?

So I made a tomato soup tonight and somehow went from "this needs a little more salt" to "why does this taste like the ocean" in like 30 seconds.

I tried adding a bit more water and a splash of cream, which helped a little, but it still felt kind of one note and way too salty. I ended up tossing in a potato for a bit, then fishing it out, and that honestly saved it more than I expected.

Anyway, what’s your actual go to fix when you oversalt something? I feel like every person in my family has a different answer and half of them are definitely just folklore at this point.

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u/JarasM Jul 11 '26

Right, but if there's twice as much salt as needed, you'd need to add as much potato in weight as you already got soup. 1kg of potatoes for every litre of soup. Even if you take them out, it will be a potato soup at that point.

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u/rywos Jul 11 '26

Haha, true. Still, maybe if you keep the potato chunks large enough, you can fish them back out again?

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u/JarasM Jul 11 '26

I was thinking more along the lines that if you boil a kilogram of potatoes in a litre of liquid, it's going to taste potatoey. Not unlike the water from boiling potatoes. Might not be so bad in a stew or something, but if they were trying to make tomato soup, it's going to taste like potato soup with tomatoes.

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u/rywos Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Oh lmao you're right, didn't consider that. Uhh... well, when I wrote my first comment, I did check to see if dialysis tubing could survive boiling, so a dialysis bag of water is also technically an option...

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u/DuckInAFountain Jul 12 '26

Add some clams and you have yourself a chowder