What to Do If the Soup Has Become Too Spicy?

If you accidentally turned out the soup too spicy while cooking, you can try to save the dish by adding certain ingredients. Foods that reduce spiciness include cream, milk, or water.

In a clear soup, water will help neutralize the spiciness of too much pepper, mustard, ginger, or chili. Alternatively, you can add vegetable broth, white wine, or red wine so that you don’t water down all the other spices and deprive the soup of its taste. In this way, the soup can be stretched and the spiciness neutralized. For cream soups, gradually add cream, milk, sour cream, crème fraîche, or yogurt until they take the heat out of the soup. Such milk-based ingredients generally help to take some of the intensity and spiciness out of chili recipes or other hot or spicy dishes. This works not only during cooking, but also later on the plate if a family member or guest finds a dish too spicy.

Soup too spicy – what to do?

Another defusing trick that also works if there is too much salt in the soup: Put a peeled, raw potato in the pot. This absorbs the salt or a hot substance such as pepper or chili like a sponge – and can thus defuse the soup. If you have used too much chili in your soup, you can provide culinary first aid by adding cooking oil. You use the fact that the ingredient responsible for the spiciness in the chili, capsaicin, is fat-soluble. If you stir in oil, this absorbs some of the sharpness. If you stop stirring, the oil will pool to the top where you can skim it off and use it to take any excess spiciness out of the soup.