To work as promised, the potato must suck in salt but not flavor. Like in the myth, a potato will absorb salt until the salt level inside the starchy tuber matches the salt level in the soup. Remove the potato, and you remove some of the salt .
One answer is, you may have heard that a piece of raw potato can “soak up” the excess salt, but that is just not true. Potatoes are incapable of selectively absorbing just one ingredient .
Do potatoes pull salt out of water?
Well, potatoes don’t pull salt out of anything . They do absorb water, though—and if that water happens to be salty, they’ll absorb salty water. But they’re not absorbing salt in particular. Potatoes are amazing, but they’re not capable of reverse osmosis. It’s more like using a sponge to soak up a spill.
Can potatoes remove sodium chloride from food?
Unfortunately, once that sodium chloride hits your food, it’s very difficult to remove (especially if you’re making a sauce, soup, or any other mostly-liquid meal). You may have heard that a piece of raw potato can “ soak up” the excess salt, but that is just not true. Potatoes are incapable of performing reverse osmosis.
This is what my research found. remove the potato, and you remove some of the salt . If you want to remove half the salt, you’d need to drop in potatoes equal in volume to the entire batch of stew! But the biggest problem is diffusion, or lack thereof. Qualitatively, a potato will capture salt. But, quantitatively, the amount removed is a drop in the ocean.
Do potatoes absorb reverse osmosis?
Potatoes are amazing, but they’re not capable of reverse osmosis. It’s more like using a sponge to soak up a spill. So in theory, if you added enough potatoes to absorb all the water in your super-salty sauce , then removed the potatoes and added more water, you’d end up with a sauce that wasn’t too salty.
Should you add a potato to over-salted soup?
We’ve all heard about the magical “just add a potato” solution to fixing an over-salted soup or sauce. The theory is that if you add a potato to a salty soup and simmer it, the potato comes out salty . If there’s salt in the potato, it stands to reason that you’ve removed some of the salt from the soup.