My wife has a bit of an aversion to very acidic foods. I was wondering if there was any relatively simple cooking method for “buffering” an acidic product (like a marinara sauce) to make it not so acidic and therfore more palatable to her.
Your wife would do better with cream sauces. If you look at the ingredients in most heart burn medication you’ll notice that they all have high calcium content and several dairy derivatives. These substances combat the acidity of fellow ingredients in food. Or you could try my mother’s solution; my father had the same problem, just throw in a teaspoon of sugar.
Sugar’s good, if her adversion is to the taste. A little sugar’s always good in tomato based sauces imo. If it’s her tummy, there are antacids you take before eating which work pretty good.
Peace,
mangeorge
Don’t know what it is that you’re eating, but you have a couple of choices:
Add oil or some other fat to balance out the acidity. Just about any good vegetable/salad oil will do.
You could also add a pinch of baking soda. It neutralizess acid. I’d use this in a dish that had some salt in it.
Also, stay away from reduced or nonfat sauces like mayonnaise or tartar sauce. They reduce the fat by cutting the oil and this makes the vinegar become too strong. If you are prone to heartburn, it’s better to just use regular mayo, etc, Use less of it if calories are a concern.
Hmmm… I can’t remember where I just read this, but chili peppers are alkaline in nature, i.e., the oppposite of acid. I remember this, because one of the cited treatments for having bitten off more than you can chew, so to speak, was to eat a tomato, whose acidic content would counteract the bases in the chili!
Of course, this now begs the question, why does picante food cause heartburn? Does the stomach produce MORE acid to combat the base which causes the after-effect heartburn?
Some non-acidic or low-acidic foods: potatoes (adding a potato to oversalted dishes also neutralizes the salt), bread, noodles, rice, diary products.
In the marinara sauce scenario, I would think that simply using less sauce and more pasta and eating bread or drinking milk with the meal would work.
Come to think of it, red pepper flakes do seem to offset the acid taste somewhat. That, and sugar. 
Since you said “palatable to her”, and that means “agreeable to the taste”, you only need to mask the flavor a little.
She probably would, over time, aquire a taste for the acid. Just as people do for hot (spicy) foods. I did.
So, drachillix, where’d ya go?
Peace,
mangeorge
I’m actually allergic to citric acid, so I learned early on how to combat the acid in tomato sauce. Add a whole (but peeled) carrot when you start cooking the sauce. The carrot will absorb a lot of the acid, so you need only to take it out just before you serve the sauce.
Good suggestion, any sweet vegetable will combat the acidity. Hence my previous suggestion of sugar. In some tomato sauce recipes carrots called for, sliced, diced or shredded. Try it.