Making Bland Food More Flavorful

Just spend some time online looking at what herbs and spices work well with the foods you are cooking and have some fun experimenting in the kitchen. It is amazing how much difference this can make to a meal.

_inHisGrace wrote: »

For crab or most seafood restaurants use old bay. Not sure what's in it.

I'm not sure if you are using powered onion and garlic but if you use fresh or even roasted as mentioned above, it is way more flavorful.

If you go to Target, there's an Archer Farms brand seasoning called "French Bistro", it's really amazing on fish.

I have a lot of herbs, spices, etc. but for a quick jolt of flavor we love the Mrs. Dash Herb & Garlic spice mix. We also have a mess of Penzey's salt-free herb/spice mixes.

You don't need to eat "bland" food to be low sodium. There's no reason to cut out chili peppers, for example. Lemon juice and zest, lime juice and zest, grated fresh ginger, ... there are a gazillion no-sodium options.

I just wanted to say that while it is true that going away from highly processed foods will tend to make you notice salt more, so you crave slightly less salty foods...that's just salt (and sugar, usually). But there aren't really any other flavors you are going to run into that you will suddenly crave less once you eat more homemade foods.

The homemade foods will STILL taste bland as all get out until you start adding some zing. (this said after I had a diet of less than ten foods for months, due to doctor recommendations - tried some of the 'amazing' foods that my healthy friends loved, and they were STILL horribly bland).

So, this is what I've found.

First - you will typically need to add a lot more of the 'flavoring' ingredients to really get a good flavor. Much more than you'd think you would need, typically. More onions, more garlic, more herbs, and so on. And more than a lot of recipes ask for - bland tasting recipes seriously seem to be REALLY common, sigh.

Second - if you have not yet, go check out Indian grocery stores. You can get HUGE amounts of spices there for good prices. Because in Indian cooking, you actually make very flavorful food with a lot of spices, so the recipes use a lot more of them. I would actually recommend checking out some Indian recipes, if you are interested, even if you don't like indian food - they tend to have good advice for how to bring out the most from your spices.

And on that note, Asian recipes tend to have good advice for how to cook veggies and retain more of the flavor, so they are good for that type of information.

Third - herb gardens are a life saver. Fresh herbs are great, but you have to use such large amounts to get a good flavor (if you aren't using flavored seasoning packets any more), that the price starts rising pretty quickly. herb garden helps with that a lot.

I'm a big fan of salt free Farmer's Dust. A small amount of oil or butter can also help liven things up.

McCormick Gourmet Spice Blends are amazing! There's a huge selection. You just have to shop around to find them.
Here's a link to the page on their company website to find out more.

https://mccormick.com/gourmet/spices-and-flavors#blends

Also there is a low sodium version of Old Bay out there for seafood lovers!
You should be able to find a link on the bottom of the McCormick page to Old Bay, might help you find that version (?)

I have a lot of franks red hot. I put that *kitten* on everything. I know it has a lot of sodium, but I drink a lot of water to counter balance it and am not too worried about sodium myself. It saves me a lot of calories I would otherwise consume with other sauces.

slowbubblecar wrote: »

I have a lot of franks red hot. I put that *kitten* on everything. I know it has a lot of sodium, but I drink a lot of water to counter balance it and am not too worried about sodium myself. It saves me a lot of calories I would otherwise consume with other sauces.

Health concerns anyone's doctor addresses are going to trump this, but if you do low carb or keto diets you need to be sure you replenish electrolytes. One of those is sodium!

I think magnesium might be another to reduce the chances of muscle cramps, but look this stuff up if it applies to your diet.

First, there's no need to go to extremes with low sodium unless a doctor has instructed you to. To maximize the effect of a small amount, add salt when serving, not when cooking, so that it is not absorbed in the cooking process.

Make sure foods like soups and stews have a sour component. When people say food is bland, they often mean that it lacks the depth given by sourness. Lemon and lime juice, various kinds of vinegars, buttermilk, all of these add sourness.

Get to know your herbs and spices. Someone above suggested Indian grocery stores and this is great advice - their spices are much cheaper and stronger than American grocery store spices. I also use a lot of fresh ginger - ginger, garlic, and red pepper is a combination which works with all kinds of food. Someone mentioned fennel seed - a little fennel and just a touch of cinnamon is an interesting variation on tomato based sauces.

In the case of the bland crab soup, I'm not sure what I would have done - maybe sort of a Louisiana profile since you already had garlic and onion? Black pepper, red pepper, celery.