How to Save Overly Salty Tapenade

Question

I made a tapenade with the following ingredients: kalamata olives, capers, anchovy, garlic, thyme, lemon, olive oil. Although I rinsed the olives and capers (as per the recipe) the result is pretty salty. It's not inedible but would be a lot better if there was something to counter the saltiness even if it doesn't end up tasting like a traditional tapenade. I just want it to be eaten! Any suggestions what I can add?

Answer 1

Ideas:

1. Veer into pesto. You could add walnuts or pine nuts and basil pesto style. This would be a good pasta sauce. I would eat it right now.

2. Stretch it out with chopped spinach or arugala.

3. Thin it with cheese. A dip with your tapenade and feta cheese or a mild blue cheese 50/50 would be dynamite. Or just with plain yogurt, which is very unsalty.

4. Top a pizza with it.

Answer 2

My 2 Euro-Cents worth:

1. Easy - Serve it with something un- or under-salted. Parsley or spinach are great at this sort of thing. You're not eating it with a spoon, so you can add some greens to your sandwich.
2. Medium Effort - Puree some fresh parsley and mix it in. Parsley is famously good at soaking up salt. Note that this will not only change the flavour of your tapenade, but will also significantly shorten how long it can be kept.
3. High touch - Get some more olives, drain them and soak in fresh cold water for a few hours. This will leach the salt out of them slowly. Then chop/puree the olives and mix into the tapenade to balance it out.

Answer 3

I just added more olive oil to my batch of too salty tapenade. I improved straight away!

Answer 4

A bit of a late answer, but adding it in case others have the same question.

Roast a sweet red pepper in the oven or gas stove, mash it and add it to the tapenade. It will make the taste much smoother and take away the salty bite.

Since you mentioned using kalamata olives, in Greece, most tapenade recipes (including those of the big commercial brands) contain red pepper, usually roasted Florina peppers.

Answer 5

we've been taste-trained to accept balsamic in lots of places where sweetness isn't the norm

it's possible that mixing in just enough (2 parts grocery store balsamic vinegar to 1 part white vinegar) to tone down the salt without it tasting noticeably sweeter would do the trick, but be careful because sweet tapenade isn't tapenade any more

if it's on something oily or acidic, just using less tapenade per serving might do the trick without making any changes to the tapenade

Answer 6

According to the chefs of Bon Appetite magazine, the following are steps you can potentially take when you over-salt your food, in general:

• Add acid (e.g. vinegar, lemon juice)
• Make more of the food to dilute it with
• Add greens
• Add fat to coat the taste buds
• Add sugar (if it makes sense in the dish, which it might not in this particular case)
• Under season other elements of the meal