What is the best way to remove or alleviate the sour, briny taste of canned bamboo shoots? I've tried soaking in cold water for several hours (changed water every hour). I've added salt one time, but found it to be too salty and still sour after cooking. This can't be the natural taste of bamboo because I've tried fresh ones before.
Sour tasting bamboo
brining
Related Solutions
If you are going to do anything, do it when you are ready to put the pickles in the fridge again, not when canning - acid keeps the canned pickles safe.
So - leave them really sour as canned. When ready to eat a jar, open, dump the brine, add water (whether or not you salt it is up to you and the salt level in the pickles - I'd try plain water) - put it in the fridge. You might want to let that soak for a day or two, and you might want to dump it again and replace it again, depending on how things taste at that point.
In my opinion it can't be done without cheating. A fully brined turkey will always make overly salty drippings, and a maple brined turkey will produce overly sweet/salty drippings. Some cooks have successfully made gravy with brined turkey drippings (see Can you make pan gravy if the turkey was brined?), but I suspect that those turkeys were under brined.
A solution is to buy inexpensive turkey parts. Necks, wings, backs and giblets (if you like them) are all good for this. Don't brine them, just roast them in a another pan at the same time you roast the brined turkey. Use those drippings for your gravy. You can cook those parts way past the temperature that you cook the brined turkey to give you more drippings and yummy brown bits for gravy. The meat can then be shredded to add to your dressing or gravy if you like.
Little by little you can add some of the drippings from the brined turkey to the drippings from the miscellaneous parts, tasting after each addition. Carefully adding some of the brined drippings to the plain drippings could result in a spectacular gravy.
Best Answer
I don't think it's really achievable with most of the canned product I've seen. The best I've accomplished is to slightly mask the flavor using tricks like adding sugar to the dish, which only works for certain categories of foods (clay pot braises, etc.)
I've found better-quality water-packed plastic sealed pouches that are only slightly acidic, but these can be quite expensive ($3-5 for what is probably only 1/3-1/2 lb), and my nearby Japanese market has ones which are only slightly briny in their produce section. My acquaintance who supplies mushrooms and some other produce and herbs to restaurants advised to buy frozen bamboo shoots for best results, although they are somewhat hard to find in consumer-sized packages; he caters mostly to the restaurant trade.