Restaurant Secrets - Fixing Too-Acidic Dishes - as part of the food and kitchen series by GeoBeats.

I am going to show you a tip on how a restaurant saves a dish that is too vinegary. The complement to vinegar or the balance to vinegar is sugar. So whenever a dish becomes too vinegary we will add a little bit of sugar. In fact, oftentimes most recipes will include both sugar and vinegar in the same recipe, to balance it out. So if you were to make a soup or a sauce, or even put too much vinegar on a steak, if you add a little bit of sugar it will balance it out and would not overwhelm your palate.

If you add too much lime or lemon juice, which is acidic just like vinegar so it has the same properties, you would do the same thing and add sugar to balance it out. Let us say for example you were making a guacamole and you just added way too much lime and you did not have any more avocados to balance it out. Just put a little bit of sugar on top and it will totally correct itself and actually probably make for a better guacamole than even you had before.