Use these simple hacks to fix your extra spicy food! | The Times of India (2024)

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Ever faced a situation where you were looking forward to eating your favourite dish only to realise that you made it much spicier than you intended? Cooking is an art that can only be perfected with practice. The best of cooks also, once in a while, miscalculate the quantity of ingredients to add in the dish. If there is a lack of some taste, you can always correct it with some other ingredients. But, excess of anything be it salt or spice can often become a tricky situation. Though there are people who are tolerant of excess spice or even love their food to be on the spicy side of taste scale, there is a limit to how much spice one can endure. Putting more spice than needed is an unintentional mistake that happens commonly in everyday cooking. Maybe you put the spice powder twice unknowingly, or the chilli was too spicy and you used it in a larger quantity, no matter what went wrong the taste of the dish suffers, and the mood with which you eat is also bound to get spoiled. If you do face such a situation, do not worry! There is no problem a little kitchen hack can’t solve. Before wasting the cooked food, read the list given here to know what you can do to tone down the levels of spice and balance the taste of food. Add these 6 ingredients in your dish to reduce the spice quotient and relish your food just as you imagined it.

Adding dairy can help reduce the amount of spice in food and also provide a cooling effect. You should add milk, curd or even cream to the dish to adjust the spice levels. Apart from adding in the dish, you should drink milk rather than water to reduce the effect of hot spicy food.

This might seem like a simple trick but it works wonders! If you have prepared a soup, stew or curry that accidentally tastes extra spicy, just add a little water to fix it. You can also increase the number of other ingredients, like, noodles or pasta in a pasta dish, or adding more vegetables in the main dish. Vegetables like onions, carrots and beans can be used to balance the flavours in the dish.

Secretly sneak in some peanut butter into a dish to tone down the spice and you would not even taste the peanut butter while eating the dish. Alternatively, you can also use almond butter for the same. The taste of these butter mellows down the flavours and neutralises the spice.

By acid, we mean acidic substances like vinegar, citrus or even ketchup. Just a teaspoon or two of these substances can work a great way to rescue you from the horror of extra spicy food.

Just like acid, a few squeezes of lemon juice also helps in reducing the spiciness of the food. The tanginess from the lemon juices works with the extra spice to obtain a perfect balance of taste and flavours.

All spicy meals follow a sweet craving. So instead of resorting to a sweet bite after a spicy meal, add the sweet in your food to avoid the extra spice. You can add sugar, honey or jaggery in your food to give it a sweeter flavour, but be mindful of the quantity, you don’t want to have your main dish as dessert. Not just sugar and sugar substitutes, you can add natural sweeteners like onions and tomatoes that are sweet in taste and help in balancing the flavours.

Apart from these tips and tricks, you can also employ other methods to eat your spicy food and avoid it going to waste. Eating the food cold allows the flavours to settle and reduces the spice levels naturally. You can also serve the spicy dish along with a bland or a more nuanced dish to make a meal with balanced flavours.