Anyone can screw up while cooking. You forget the salt. You forget to turn it down to a simmer. You don’t read the recipe all the way through, and then you suddenly need a gratin dish or something. It’s okay, no big. That’s on you, you’re an idiot, you move on with your day.
But sometimes, the recipe did you wrong. The recipe did you wrong like a man in a Loretta Lynn song. That happened to me the night before last, and I’m still mad.
This recipe is bullshit.
Look, I’ve made chicken thighs before, this is not my first time at the chicken thighs rodeo. Sear ‘em and finish them in the oven, got it. But I’d just made two perfect dishes from said website, and I thought, eh, I’ll do it their way, see how it works.
I’ll tell you how it works: you will destroy the chicken. Then you’ll be so annoyed you’ll just leave your cast iron in the oven, open all the windows in the house, and eat a box of crackers with a thing of pâté left over from a party for dinner (that part is actually great.)
I don’t even know which thing is responsible for the badness of the recipe. Everything? Olive oil is not really designed to be used at high heat, medium-high heat at twelve minutes is a really long time for chicken thighs, thirteen minutes at 475 degrees is nonsense following what came before, and when I opened the oven to attempt to FLIP these little spitty charcoal briquets that used to be chicken thighs, they were completely glued to the pan and it was a grease storm.
So that’s not on you, is what I’m saying. That’s a recipe being wrong. It would now make me feel better to hear about the recipes which have steered you wrong in the past. Or, if it’s you, those are fun too. When Mallory came for Thanksgiving last year, we had eighty great meals and then I only took out ONE of the two bags of gross things inside the turkey, and I am still filled with shame.
Okay, what are your worst moments as a cook? I’ll be cleaning my oven.
Tags: bad recipes, cooking disasters, food, it’s not your fault, recipes
I followed a series of bad recipes whose goal was to get me to recreate the tasty crusty effects of a commercial steam-injected bread oven right in my own home. There was a lot of weird bread, a lot of ice cubes in hot ovens and strange coverings. Then there came the day that I shattered a tempered glass pan by preheating the oven with the pan inside and then pouring cold water in. This did create a lot of steam, but also shards of glass everywhere. That was more my fault than the recipe’s fault, but it made me content to make home-style sandwich bread and leave the crusty baguettes to the professionals.
My husband uses a method that involves putting a tray filled with stones and metal chains in the bottom of the oven before and during the baking of the bread. He then sprays it with a SuperSoaker to create the steam. It works, too.
SUPERSOAKER. That is so much more badass than my piddly little spritzer. I’m changing my methods immediately.
a BREAD SAUNA
If you like a boule, go the Dutch oven route–it traps the steam from the bread and you get a nice crust. I’m also a fan of the oblong clay La Cloche, though I’m still perfecting how to get the bread to release more easily.
And if you’re a pizza person at all, the Baking Steel is the shiiiiiiiiiit. I did a loaf of sourdough on it last night (with a cast iron pan and added hot water for steam) and it turned out pretty great.
The Dutch Oven route is definitely the way to go! I had never made a loaf of bread in my life and once I got a dutch oven, I had to try the famous New York Times No Knead Bread. It was STUPID easy and the crust was crispy and perfect. I felt like a wizard.
http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-noknead-brea…
That is because you ARE a wizard. Yeast is magic!
I highly recommend checking out Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day for people who loved the No-Knead Bread and want to cautiously poke around more in the magical realm of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It’s all about holding doughs overnight (or longer) in the fridge, which helps you fit it into your schedule more easily than “typical” bread baking.
Thanks to Reinhart, I have in my kitchen currently: whole wheat and oat sandwich bread, ciabatta, sourdough batard, sourdough biscuits, and sourdough waffles (biscuits and waffles aren’t his, but I gotta do something with that leftover sourdough starter).
(Careful, it’s, um, addictive.)
I totally made the almost no knead bread – which is usually pretty good – on waxed paper instead of parchment paper. You throw waxed paper into an oven at 500 degrees, and there is suddenly a surprising amount of tiny waxed paper ash floating around your oven/kitchen. Fair warning.
Also the bread from Laurel’s kitchen with all whole wheat flour! Not a disaster in terms of clean up, but completely inedible after it’s no longer hot out of the oven.
I cracked the glass door on my oven doing this 🙁 🙁
There was a recipe for ‘thai-spiced’ salad I tried once that managed, somehow, to be both bland and sour. The proportions of ingredients were all wrong.
In trying to save it, I managed to make it even worse.
We went out for chips.
Three words: Tofu. Lentil. Pie.
I just made the D: face in real life.
AHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOO
yeah, I would eat this, but even I know that it’s an acquired taste, not for everyone.
Actually, chickpea-lentil pie sounds like it would be pretty good.
ALRIGHT ALREADY with the chickpeas.
just kidding never stop
Now I love tofu, and I love lentils, and I love pie, but those 3 things should never be together.
Oh it is fine as long as you add cubed sweet potato and follow the British method of spicing everything to the extent that you can hardly taste the colonialism.
I was actually betrayed by that exact same recipe. It did lead to the discovery that I actually have two smoke detectors. One is wedged in a lil corner of my pantry, which is ultimately useful information.
The inside of my oven is…unspeakable. I mean, the pan will live, because cast iron is magic, but I honestly think I have to take the racks out, move my family and cat to Boise, and set the oven to nuke itself from orbit.
You could just cook those chicken thighs again and it would be the same thing…
It’s the only way to be sure!
I can never tell if the recipe is wrong or if physics just doesnt apply to my oven.
Lets go with the recipe being wrong.
Im thinking its all a conspiracy to make you almost think you can cook but never quite get there.
One time my boyfriend was cooking, and keep complaining that the couscous wasn’t done. I was like, “It seriously only takes five minutes, off heat! So simple.” So I open the pot and he had been cooking about two cups of sesame seeds in simmering water for 20 minutes. I laughed so hard. (As an aside, I do not want to paint him as an incompetant-man-in-the-kitchen, he does most of the cooking in our apartment)
But also I hate Bon Apetite recipes, they make the simplest things so complicated for no reason!
Once, instead of coating my pieces of chicken for stir-fry in sesame seeds, I accidentally used quinoa.
… how’d that turn out?
I think we actually went through and tried to pick out as much of it as possible…but there were definitely some crunchy bites.
My dad once boiled a pot of popcorn kernels for an hour thinking it was rice. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.
Only very marginally related, but this is also how my dad once brushed his teeth with Clearasil.
And how my mom brushed her teeth last week with prescription acne meds.
That was also how I discovered that Benedryl tastes terrible.
This is the funniest thing about cooking I have ever read.
Epic fails at cooking are kind of my jam. I have 2 stories, both of which will probably out me, but whatever, they’re worth sharing. I never cooked much growing up. I baked (and I mean, I can bake some seriously awesome deliciousness), but I didn’t cook.
So…fast-forward to grad school, and me trying to impress a Cute Boy who liked to cook for me. I wanted to return the favor, you know? So, I thought I would start simple – grilled cheeses. How hard can it be to make a grilled cheese? So, I got a frying pan out, a block of cheese, some bacon, some butter, and went to town. I fried the bacon, buttered the bread, and proceeded to try to cobble together a grilled cheese by cooking the damn thing in the bacon grease. It was…an interesting and disgusting sandwich. Cute Boy laughed and was highly amused at my failure. I was ashamed…but not deterred!!!
A few weeks later, I thought maybe I would do better if I tried a real dinner (because when you’ve failed at sandwich making, why not kick things up a notch?). I wanted to try pork chops, and I had seen a recipe that used rosemary and whatnot and sounded really amazing and easy. I did not write down, print, or in any way attempt to follow the recipe. The result (I honestly have no idea what I did) was rosemary-crusted pork. Solid pork bricks completely covered in rosemary. Although hesitant at first, Cute Boy was astonishingly polite, and tried to eat his. He could barely cut into it, but he managed to get a bite in his mouth, tried to chew and swallow, then said, “So where do you want to go for dinner?”
Cute Boy is now Mr. Cube.
I was honestly hoping this would end with a “Reader, I married him”!
This is a pretty good recipe, but it totally fails to mention that the tenderloin should be room-temperature-ish when you start.
Otherwise you will end up gchatting your friend who knows how to cook (Hi, Jasmine!) going “IT’S STILL BLOODY AND I DID ALL THE COOKING BITS. HELP! HELP!”
(Also that bit where you stick garlic slivers into the raw meat? Way more annoying/difficult/gross than they let on.)
Once my dad tried this allegedly Persian dish from a New York Times recipe that involved rice, beets, lamb, and some kind of greens. It was a bizarre combination of sweet and gritty and the lamb became unpleasantly chewy. I believe my sister and I made peanut butter sandwiches instead.
Recipe peeve: I often come across ones that will say something like, “Cook onions until caramelized, 10 minutes”……. that is not a thing that happens. Onions do not caramelize in 10 minutes.
My most embarrassing cooking moment was when I went to pre-heat the oven, forgetting that there was a pizza box still in there from the previous night. That fire extinguisher dust is really hard to clean out of an oven…
I have done that. And I admit with less shame than I should that I have, um, eaten the pizza.
Where DOES that come from, the caramelizing thing? It takes FOREVER. And then if you turn away for five seconds the onions turn into pure carbon.
I get unreasonably and brattily annoyed when I order something from a restaurant with ‘caramelized onions” and instead they’ve just been cooked around in a pan of oil for maybe 10 minutes. There should be some sort of awareness campaign.
I get so cross when a recipe refers to caramelizing onions in 5 or 10 minutes. I also view it as a warning to avoid that recipe and never buy any cookbook that person writes, because a cook who will lie about caramelizing onions is not to be trusted.
Related: Layers of Deceit: Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?
This EXACT recipe did me wrong just six months ago! I had read a great review of it on a dinner blog, but it smoked up my basement apartment to no end and the chicken was destroyed. It’s really satisfying to hear that it’s not me, it’s the recipe.
Me too! I knew I had used the same recipe even before clicking the link. My smoke detector went off 4 times, freaked the dog out, smoked up the house and the chicken wasn’t even good.
I made it and it also filled my ENTIRE apartment with smoke. It was also extremely delicious. I’m not a particularly accomplished cook and I was scrambling to follow the exact timing, but it came out great. Maybe it’s an oven temperature issue?
Every chana masala recipe on the internet is incorrect and additionally written by people who are not aware that “1 tsp” of spice in “4c” water plus “1 can diced tomatoes” is not actually spiced anything, it is Thin Tomato Stew With Chickpeas.
http://frugalbites.com/crock-pot-indian-food-chan… << this is the one I am thinking of.
Accurate measures for the above:
– cook on High for 6 hours or it won’t reduce, add the chickpeas at the start, chickpeas are marginally less-awful lentils and can stand to be boiled to death as they have no taste at all otherwise. Like tofu. Often served at the same potluck.
– Add 2 heaping tablespoons garam masala, and skip the cumin-tumeric-cayenne-coriander bullshit and add a tablespoon of hot curry powder instead. Fine you can keep your coriander. Fine.
– You need to chop up a bunch of garlic and a lump of ginger and add them as well.
– Instead of thinking of it as “chana masala, foreign food” think of it as “spiced chickpeas in vegetarian gravy” and you will end up with something limitlessly more delicious, as well as an accurate consistency target in the sauce.
I also call general BS on anything that requires cayenne pepper in ganache icing. That’s right up there with restaurants that try to convince you offal is a delicacy and not a homonym for “awful.”
Speaking of cleaning ovens, the house I lived in post-college had an AWESOME oven from the early ’50s, the kind that you have to light with a lighter & has a separate broiler. I once cooked mac & cheese in it and it bubbled over, and I hadn’t put anything underneath to prevent a mess, so I had to scrub completely cooked-on cheese sauce out of the oven. It was so tough until I realized that the bottom of the oven came out! You could bring it out to clean it! Genius!
Otherwise, I have had tons of lackluster meals, but I would say all of them were when I *wasn’t* following a recipe, shame on me.
Weird, I used that *exact* same recipe for chicken thighs a few weeks ago, and it was perfect! Probably my worst dish was a cabbage noodle soup recipe I tried. It wasn’t the recipe’s fault, though; it called for green cabbage, but I had a head of red cabbage that needed to be used, so I figured what’s the difference? Flavor-wise, really no difference, and the soup tasted fine. Visually, it was unacceptable—because the recipe called for milk, the soup ended up a weird pale lavender color, sort of like the milk left over from a bowl of Froot Loops. And with the addition of noodles and caraway seeds? It was too ugly to eat.
See also: purple carrots in soup. Fancy farmers’ market fail.
In my own experience burning overflowed cake batter, it came up in one beautiful piece. So I instagrammed it, naturally: http://instagram.com/p/LaXpxIokCL/#
It looks like either a beautiful magma formation or dog shit. I kind of can’t decide which, but it is a great photo!
See, I love making fall soups with purple carrots, because to me lavender-coloured soup is just the coolest thing ever. I have a weak spot for weird vegetables.
Me. too. I once made a veggie soup with red cabbage, purple carrots, purple potatoes, purple cauliflower, and some other non-purple things. I loved every moment of purpleness.
Mine was much less lavender-colored than it was deep dark purple with green leek bits. Imagine a cauldron of witches’ brew.
I saw a recipe for balsamic pork roast in the crock pot on pinterest sometime last year and decided to make it. It was The Most Disgusting Thing I’ve ever made. Even my boyfriend, who will eat anything, took one bite and said “hell no”.
I also made a cheese tortellini soup with a recipe I (again) found on pinterest. It was the second Most Disgusting Thing I’ve ever made.
Lesson: no more recipes from Pinterest.
Ugh, I trying to restrain myself from launching into a rant about cooking “inspiration” pins on Pinterest. I don’t follow many people, but when I log in the board is FLOODED with beautiful photographs of artistically arranged food. And I am like, have you made it? Has ANYONE actually made it? Do we have evidence that it works?
I have two recipe boards: one private board for things I want to try, and one public board for things I have tried, and liked! It is called “tried it, liked it” so that no one is confused.
Good idea! I’ve seen many others repin the balsamic pot roast (but not from me! I took that pin down the day after I made it), and I want to comment “DON’T DO IT”… but there must be people out there that enjoyed it, otherwise, why would there even be a recipe?
I have had about an 80% success rate with pinterest recipes I’ve tried, but I also tend to only make really easy-sounding ones. Smitten Kitchen takes pretty photographs and writes things well, but I haven’t even heard of half the shit she typically recommends you do (do WHAT to the onions? With WHAT device?), so there’s not way I’m even going to attempt it.
I like Smitten Kitchen’s level of detail though, particularly in reading through the comments where she responds to individual issues. That said, I think it mostly works in the baking sense–I have never been let down by any of her baked goods, as long as I actually pay attention to the recipe. (i.e. don’t forget the eggs in cookies…because ew).
But I have had much less success w/ her savory stuff. I halved (so, my fault?) her fried chicken recipe and it was the saltiest, worst thing I have ever made. I thought I would OD on sodium from just the one bite I had.
Yes, totally agree. Her baked stuff looks amazing, but I’m not much of a baker (I can make chocolate chip cookies and Jolie’s crack brownies like a champ, but that’s about where my abilities end), so those are just food porn to me, but I’m glad they are accessible to people who can bake.
But yeah, her savory/entree stuff tends to either baffle me in just reading through the ingredients/steps, or seem straightforward enough but WAY too time-consuming for a weeknight. As in, IF I can actually understand all of the things I am supposed to do, it is clear to me that it will take me 6 hours to actually get this dish on the table.
I do a cheese tortellini soup (from a “Cook Yourself Thin!” or otherwise demeaningly-titled cookbook)… and it’s totally delicious.
Chicken broth & halved cherry tomatoes (bring to a boil together with salt & pepper), add tortellini & cook, add spinach for the last 30 seconds, sprinkle cheese over top, serve. Easy peasy.
Oh man, one time I made these chamomile cupcakes for Mother’s Day because I wanted to use a new cookbook said mother had gotten me for Christmas, and they had the texture of banana bread, which was mostly fine, but the frosting recipe recommended topping them with sprinkled chamomile straight from the tea bag…which is a great way to give any cupcake a nice, dusty finish. They tasted the way attics smell.
While making a sauce, I grabbed a carton of vanilla rice milk thinking it was chicken broth and poured in a cup or two. I thought it looked cloudier than usual, but was stirring two things at once and helping with homework and just generally distracted, and it didn’t occur to me what I’d done until I took a bite of generously-sauced chicken and wondered why it tasted like hand lotion.
Oh! I have another one! My daughter was doing a science fair project testing different types of flour to see which one made the best gluten-free cupcake. We tried a batch with rice flour (surprisingly good) and potato flour (meh) but subbing almond flour in this particular recipe caused some sort of chemical reaction, and about halfway through the cooking time we noticed smoke coming out of the oven.
It was bad. It was real bad. The batter had completely run over the pan and all over the oven and had adhered itself to the oven floor. My only real regret is not taking a picture–with that, we (I mean, she) might have won the science fair!
I’ve had a couple of catastrophic fails that I can remember- one was a buffalo chicken Crock-Pot soup that just did. not. work., another was a kale and potato casserole that ended up with soupy sauce and crunchy-raw potatoes- but most of those can /probably/ be traced to my screwing around with the recipe (subbing different ingredients, mostly). The worst one I can remember recently was this http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spic…. I carefully ushered it through the microwave expecting great things, and then I took a bite. Sweet Christ, it was awful. What a waste of good leeks.
I don’t understand microwave recipes that take longer than 3 minutes. In 15 minutes I could saute some leeks and mushrooms in butter and they would be delicious!
necessary exception for steaming artichokes in the microwave which saves at least half an hour and a pot to clean. Best single-girl food for a week night, I submit to you.
I found a recipe for cooking an entire chicken in a slow cooker that REALLY did not go well for me. I had to cover the chicken with lemon slices, which somehow turned into the bitterest flavor in the world–not even recognizably lemon because my tongue was so busy rioting in my mouth. But, more importantly, the chicken texture did NOT work. It became, I guess, TOO slow cooked. When I picked up the chicken wing, the bones all fell apart from each other and the chicken never even left the bottom of the pan. It basically turned into bitter chicken mush.
PS I still ate ALL of it obviously.
Oh man! The first time I made chicken-in-a-crock-pot I cut a lemon in half and stuck it inside… so far so good. But lemons, when left inside a chicken inside a crockpot for many hours, tend to get mushy. When I reached in with tongs to pull the lemon out at the end it all went schlorp and fell into the chicken/juices, which meant the whole thing tasted very lemony and quite bitter.
I also ate all of it, and my later efforts (eschewing lemons) have turned out much better. I like putting it in the over to crisp the skin up a little before serving it.
That makes sense! I made a slow cooker chicken stew once with lentils and vegetables where the chicken came out PERFECTLY, and I’ve been trying to recapture since–but I’m learning that the timing is really delicate. It is really disgusting to sift through your meal looking for soggy bone fragments. The oven trick sounds grand.
A baked bar made with quinoa and dark chocolate. I don’t want to link to the recipe, but I baked and baked and baked it and it never really set (kind of disturbing because it had egg in it). Tried a piece and the texture….. clumpy and slimy at the same time.
There’s been loads others, my track record with cooking is 3-4 recipes with good results, then a week of failures. Seriously, a whole week of nothing will come out right. Also known as a week of eating toast.
My biggest problem is when a recipe says to cook, say, chicken at a high temperature, like the recipe you linked to. If the smoke point of the meat’s fat (or the olive oil) is LOWER than the temp they want you to cook the dish at, then what the fuck are they thinking?
Okay, I looked, and the smoke point for chicken fat is around 375. That’s pretty low. So when Cooks Illustrated tells me to roast a chicken at 450 or whatever, I don’t. I do it a lower and slower, and it turns out perfectly if I’v brined the chicken.
If I’m making a whole bird, I’ve done the amazing Thomas Keller super-nuke, and it’s come out great. Like, it’s smoky, but the chicken is perf.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/My-F…
Cosign. The Thomas Keller super nuke chicken is so good.
As long as I’ve brined the bird, I wind up not smoking out the joint.
Usually.
I’m not going to lie. That recipe, that’s bad? That’s my go-to chicken recipe and it works like a charm. Sorry.
Okay, I want you to go through it really slowly with me, and if there were any variations, or anything, really, because we’ve got two other people who had it ruin their meals on the thread, and I want to know what’s going on. Did it really not spit like a motherfucker at the posted temps? I’m at 5000 ft, if it’s an elevation issue I can adjust. (I already adjusted, because it was already black and grease-throwing after ten minutes in the oven.)
I was going to say the same thing! I make this exact recipe all the time, and the chicken turns out absolutely perfectly. After the first time I made it, my husband and daughter begged me to never make chicken any other way. I use a smaller skillet than what it looks like is in the picture–the chicken is completely crowded into mine, but other than that…I don’t know what could have gone wrong here.
Maybe it’s the skillet. I mean, I don’t think I’ll re-attempt, but maybe a smaller skillet.
Now I have to go try that bullshit recipe. It’s not easy being oppositional.
It was supposed to be a blueberry custard pie. My mother neglected to buy the milk I needed, so all we had was her lactose free stuff. The custard was very thin, but I figured it would set up in the oven. It didn’t. It was a milky soup with blueberries inside a pie crust.
Not the recipe’s fault, but it was still traumatic and outside of my control.
Followed a recipe for a thai curry thing that said to add whole limes to a puree for the sauce. Pretty sure they intended lime juice because if you puree a whole lime everything just tastes like pith. Ruined.
EVERYONE has done that thing with the turkey bags, Nicole! Literally do not feel at all bad (PS WANT TO HANG OUT TOMORROW??)!
Hm, I dunno. Maybe for the next SEVEN DAYS? I bought like four packages of bacon. We have other provisions too.
One thing I will say about that recipe is that I would bet that the outcome might depend on the sizeof your skillet (lol) and of the thighs. If the skillet is smaller and the thighs are crowded together, they might cook more slowly/evenly, whereas if you have smaller pieces of chicken and a bigger skillet, they might spatter and burn like crazy. Is that pseudoscience? Maybe..
I’m gonna be on this thread all day looking for answers, you can get as pseudo-science as you wanna.
I have heard this described as the pork chop theory, but usually it is used in a metaphorical way to mean something else.
http://virginiawillis.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/he…
So I was going to run with the pseudoscience angle and find some article on chicken moisture content, but then I discovered some ACTUAL SCIENCE at “Poultry Science: Excellence in Science Publishing,” which is an actual scientific journal that I did not just make up (they’ve been publishing since 1908!).
The pseudo connection to this recipe question is that the way your chicken was processed can affect the moisture content, which presumably plays a role in how quickly your chicken turns into charcoal.
All of my cooking fails happen when I try to substitute the dairy with non-dairy, and then it is super runny but I eat it anyway. Oh, except that one time when I made pumpkin maca and cheese with soy milk, it was gross. It had like, the consistency of glue. And the taste of glue!
My most recent fail was a lima bean recipe that seemed incredibly simple (and involved bacon and butter, so what could possibly go wrong?) I didn’t have time to soak dried lima beans overnight, so I used the “quick method” recommended by the cookbook, which means bringing them to boil and letting them sit for an hour before cooking. The recipe then called for using some of the bean cooking water to make a sauce, but somehow this process made the whole dish inedibly bitter. Still don’t know if it was not soaking them overnight, or using the bean water, or both, but ugh. I never thought lima beans could be bitter. The texture is off-putting enough without that. I’m still stubbornly experimenting with this stupid bag of dried lima beans I bought, though. I cannot let the lima beans break me.
In the early days of baking, I tried to make nutella frosting for a friend’s birthday cake.
To this day, I do not understand what went so wrong. I could not get it to thicken for the life of me. I think part of it was, in addition to the frosting, I tried to stick sliced strawberries between the two layers of the cake, and things just kept sliding all over the place. It also refused to thicken when chilled, which makes no sense.
I was 2 hrs late to said friend’s birthday party, I named the cake Disaster Cake, and we still ate it and it was delicious, but there was a lot of time spent covered in Nutella and cursing while doing so.
That does sound delicious. The good thing about cake is even if it’s ugly, just dump it into a bowl and it will still be wonderful.
I can make a mean Indian chicken curry. But i saw this recipe that claimed it could be done in 15 min so I thought maybe they knew super pro-tips. Now when making a good chicken curry, it is important to get a little browning going on your tender chicken bits after you have added your spices. THEN you add liquids, ie broth, yogurt, blood, whatevs. This recipes said to add the spices AND add the liquids to the raw chicken at medium high heat? And just kinda swirl it around? PS THIS WAS A FOOD NETWORK RECIPE. Result: C’est disastre. It was essentially boiled chicken lumps in a strange, bland broth mixture that was also strangely too tumeric-y. AND IT TOOK TWICE THE AMOUNT OF TIME THAT IT NORMALLY TAKES. I just kept apologizing to my husband, who would probably just consume pounds of unseasoned ground beef if he was a bachelor. But the pain was more about how this dish ended up being a sinister doppelganger of what could have been.
My family’s worst recipe story: some kind of watery barley soup that my dad made, which 1) he was so angry about he made us all sit at the table and eat it anyway and 2) was so terrible that no family meal included barley for YEARS afterward.
We had that with my dad’s coq au vin, which must have had over half a bottle of wine in and tasted of nothing else. We were six and seven, and went to bed immediately after dinner.
There was a very traumatic sorrel soup incident at my house when I was a child. I tried to run away. I was unswayed by promises of pork chops afterwards. I was still forced to eat it. I will never forget.
One time my friend tried to make the chocolate cake from the Julia child’s cookbook and each time it came out like a cookie until she finally realized that she was using the wrong sized pan.
My friend of course being none other than Mallory Ortberg.
Hi Maddie! It’s Linda!
I used to be super into baking as a young teen for some reason and I extra super loved making cookies! Once did the classic “swapped salt for sugar” in sugar cookies and made what we ended up calling “PlayDoh Cookies”. They were fucking disgusting but my sisters ate them because it was better than eating ACTUAL PlayDoh, which…was not unusual in my house if I’m being honest. Me, I was more into eating paste but to each their own.
I always bring the same thing to Thanksgiving (knishes – like Jewish dumplings). I make them with my sister. One year we screwed them up so bad we sent a press release to our family in advance, with a Q&A on how bad they were and what to expect.
The one and only time I’ve been camping, on a college orientation trip, we got lost one night and arrived at our camping site long after the sun went down. Everyone was tired and grumpy, so the troop leaders quickly whipped up a meal of instant macaroni and cheese by flashlight. As we were eating, we all noticed that the mac and cheese seemed…tangier than usual. But whatever, we were hungry and unbelievably tired.
The next morning, in the harsh light of day, we discovered that the “instant cheese” had in fact been instant lemonade mix.
I went on a college kayak-camping trip. The island we were going to didn’t have a supply of fresh water, so we all brought our own. As expected, there was one guy who brought like 2L of water. He had been planning on making Kraft Dinner, but decided that rather than waste his fresh water by salting and cooking pasta in it, he’d just use sea water. We ended up sharing our food (and water) with him when it turned out inedibly salty.
“The next morning, in the harsh light of day, we discovered that the “instant cheese” had in fact been instant lemonade mix.”
ohgodDYING.
I didn’t use the recipe, but I once saw a recipe correction that said they had erred in listing 1/4 cup of nutmeg instead of 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg. They helpfully noted that 1/4 cup of nutmeg is enough to serve as a hallucinogen.
hahaha, plus, wouldn’t that cost like $25???
I once halved a recipe for pesto biscuits, but I forgot to halve the baking powder and salt. They were salty, inedible, green bricks. I tried to eat one, but three bites in I just couldn’t do it.
Gluten free pizza crusts. I’ve made several, and they all stomped on my pathetic dreams of enjoying pizza again. It’s just… not pizza. My life during this period was like the black-and-white parts of an infomercial.
However, I have discovered that my gluten sensitivity is not set off by Einkorn flour, so I am no longer resigned to a pizza-free lifestyle! Now my life is one giant color-saturated party, complete with Mariachi band and a dog walking on its hind legs for some reason! Thanks, Einkorn Flour! [FREEZE FRAME THUMBS-UP]
“My life during this period was like the black-and-white parts of an infomercial.” Love this!! Hah!
Oh! My husband once wanted to make a cake. He is a pretty good cook, but operates a ‘baking is bullshit’ principle, trained into him by his mother. ‘It’s too much work for the reward! Just buy it!’.
So, he has never made a cake. I have made many cakes. He waits till I am out, so I cannot help him make his cake.
I have no idea what he did. Not one clue. I think he used plain flour instead of self-raising, and not enough of it. He also put about one tablespoon of cocoa powder in because he thought it would be enough, havbing tasted it and found it very strong.
It was a brown frisbee. You could have used it to plug drafty gaps in the door. We tried eating it, but… it was just vaugely sweet.
we threw it out.
(I baked a cake that weekend to show him how)
One time my ex boyfriend tried to make me vegetarian stir fry with soft tofu and I laughed at him. (We still ate it though, because we were like 19 and broke, it just looked like vomit).
There was a recipe for falafel in Real Simple sometime in the early 2000s (I was in high school) that was horrrrible. I remember being really excited about it. I was maybe 16 and I was like “Man, I am cultured. I am making falafel in my own kitchen like a grown up. Fuck you suburban neighbors with your porkchops and mediocrity.” But they came out waaaay too salty and undercooked. It was probably something I did but they live on in memory as the worst thing I’ve ever made. I can still smell their horrible smell. *shudder*
I have two kinds of cooking disasters: the complete clusterfuck recipes that just Do. Not. Work. (and usually ring some distant alarm in the back of my head as I’m reading them, but for some reason I attempt them anyhow) and the reliable back-pocket standards that I’ve made a hundred times… and then the hundred-and-first time, I become inattentive or careless or just plain stupid and things go off the rails.
In the first category, there’s a prominent and beloved blogger whose recipes gather raves, but her baking recipes often ring alarm bells for me, and indeed every time I’ve tried one of her baking recipes, it’s been a fine mess. The last — and I do mean “the last” — time I baked something from her recipe, I salvaged it and ended up with a new favorite cookie recipe. I still can’t figure out why her baking recipes fail so consistently for me when other people report great success, but there it is: for whatever reason, I can’t use her baking recipes.
The second, more mundane kind of failure is less predictable and much more frustrating, because it’s entirely the result of casual inattention. There’s one particular recipe (for a one-layer cake, which I often make as coffee cake with fruit or nuts or streusel) that I manage to ruin about 25% of the time, usually by leaving out the sugar. Last time, though, I left out the baking powder, which resulted in a weirdly rubbery and pliant circle of dough, almost like an extra-thick disc of rubber vomit from the gag shop.
I mean if I had a dollar for every failed recipe I’d have a few dollars but none specifically are coming to mind right now.
One time my dad did try to puree cooked rice, though, which was awful. Props for thinking creatively, though!
Did you put it in the oven skin side down? I think it might work better skin side up, because that is pretty long time to be essentially frying chicken skin at that high of a heat. I don’t understand the recipe at all. I’m sure it would have been fine if you just cooked it less, but it seems unnecessarily complicated.
I like the Jacques Pepin way, where you just crisp the skin in a covered pan. You don’t add fat, because enough renders from the skin, and you don’t need to use an oven, because covering the pan steams the rest of the meat. The skin is nice and crispy because it fries the entire time.
I don’t think I’ve followed an exact recipe (that I didn’t write) in about a decade, so here’s what I’ve learned about substitutions through dumb, painful experience:
*Reduced-fat or non-dairy dairy products have thickeners in them that often go really weird when heated.
*Also, the lower the fat content, the more likely they’ll curdle in a delicious mushroom cream sauce.
*Farinata is a myth, like homemade naan.
*But mustard allergies are real.
*It’s very unkind to double-blind test people’s allergies, even if it /is/ technically Science.
*Tofu does not take up marinades. EVER.
*Just buy premade puff pastry. For chrissakes. What were you thinking.
Amen on the puff pastry – though it’s good to try once, so you know that spending six hours making something is not always better than buying it.
And the homemade naan. I’m thinking maybe if I had a pizza oven?
Don’t feel bad about the turkey incident; everyone does that at least once. When I was a kid, our neighbor was a new bride. She bought a turkey that said “ready to cook”, so she popped it right in the oven, wrapping and all. My own bad recipe experience was with a NYTimes baked bean recipe. It was so awful I didn’t know beans could taste that bad. I’m wary now of beans and vinegar.
My friend and I forgot FLOUR when making cookies as teenagers. Don’t ask me how. In case you’re curious, the cookie “dough” ran everywhere over the baking sheet as it heated up. At least we laughed ourselves silly.
I did the same thing the first time I ever baked by myself! I was maybe ten. I thought it was weird that a recipe yielding 24 cookies only made like 8 and then when I checked the oven everything had just turned into a buttery chocolate puddle. I had to save face before my mom got home so I scraped the cookie puddle back into the bowl and mixed in the flour and MORE chocolate chips. They turned out delicious! best cookies I’ve ever made.
About 10 years ago, my dad tried to follow a recipe for something called “Tropical Chicken” that involved using Coke (which seems questionable) and we didn’t have any so he used Pepsi. It tasted DISGUSTING – like chicken soaked in Pepsi, which is what it was – and then he tried to argue us into liking it, even though he wouldn’t eat a bite of it himself. “Well, you like chicken, and you like Pepsi, don’t you? So you should like this!”
I did this with orange juice fairly recently. There was some chicken recipe on Pinterest with a marinade of mustard, and maybe brown sugar, and orange juice… and I had like no food in the house at all except those ingredients so I was all excited… except it definitely just tasted like chicken dunked in orange juice. Which was weird.
This isn’t a recipe, but it is cooking. This was when I was a kid, shortly after my family bought our first microwave, and I didn’t completely understand how they worked. I decided I wanted a baked potato. I knew not to wrap it in foil, and I knew to poke holes in it. What I did not know was how long to cook it. I set it for 20 minutes or however long you cook them in a conventional oven. It didn’t take long for me to realize that that was wrong.
I thought I just sucked at cooking for several years. That’s before we figured out that the big eye on our electric range was broken – no matter how you set it, it always gunned for the highest heat possible. Food can burn, and burn it did. Eventually my mom’s messiness ended up covering that eye with bottles and the like and I resorted to using another eye, and was quite impressed with how well what I made turned out.
We probably should have figured it out when it would turn orange-red at low setting, but we were never a particularly observant family in any respect.
This is only sort of tangentially related but I love to read recipe reviews on allrecipes.com. “I used Crisco instead of butter and chicken instead of beef and I didn’t have any mushrooms, so I left those out but I added some olives and it was really gross! One star.”
I went to dinner at a friend’s house; we had creamed pork with enoki mushrooms. The pork was thinly-sliced and leathery and the mushrooms were very assertive. (I hate mushrooms) I gamely ate the food with all the requisite, “Mmmmm, so good!” noises, and later asked where my friend had found such an original recipe.
“Oh, it was supposed to be creamed salmon,” she replied. “But all I had was pork, and I threw the mushrooms in for extra flavour.”
No – don’t – just don’t ever do that. Don’t throw great indigestible hunks of ginger into your meatloaf just because you’re feeling extra-creative that day, unless you’re specifically interested in formulating the world’s hairiest meatloaf for aesthetic purposes alone. (Another friend pulled that trick, inspiring me to yell, “Learn to cook before you try to be a chef!”)
I feel very strongly about a few things, and bad-cooks-making-stuff-up just angers me.
I had a terrible fail last night trying to bake a cake! After walking to the store to get butter, I got home and realized that I had no baking powder. Then I ran back to the store to pick some up, only to realize that I grabbed baking soda when I got home. Finally got the baking powder and realized that I put in 2 tablespoons instead of 2 teaspoons when the kitchen started filling up with smoke. But I am trying again this weekend and will KILL IT.
I made some pretty bad meatballs the other day when I got substitution happy. No milk and parm around? I’ll just use feta and plain yogurt. Blegh. At least that one was my fault, I’m still mad about the frosting recipe I followed that started out with a delicious meringue, and then directed you to add several sticks of butter, until it tasted of nothing else.
“until it tasted of nothing else.”
I fail to see the problem here. But then, my mom used to eat butter straight, so I come by it honestly.
I’m fascinated by bad recipes – I had one James Barber recipe for banana bread that worked out maybe 25% of the time. It took me about two years before I realized that the problem wasn’t me; the recipe was designed to produce horrible rubber-bread, and the few times I found success was when I strayed from the recipe as written.
Now I follow the Cooks Illustrated recipe and my banana bread is AWESOME.
I’m immediately suspicious of any recipe that tells you to use cast iron on high heat. That pan is going to get way too hot and it’s going to stay that way forever. When I set my cast iron skillet on to heat up, medium is about as high as I go for any task (and yeah, obviously that depends somewhat on your stove, but I maintain that high is invariably too high).
I actually have a Pinterest board specifically for recipes just like this: http://www.pinterest.com/threlkelded/never-again/
I tried to bake a cake in my rice cooker according to internet recipe. Ended up with a goopy battery mess and a broken rice cooker.
I have three! In high school I liked to bake, and tried a sugar cookie recipe that apparently had an error, because instead of the usual fluffy chewy sugar cookie they melted together into sheet of thin crispy cookie. Still tasted good though.
When I lived in Denver I had a couple of fails. I tried to make banana bread with my mother’s recipe, and ended up with loaves that were a bit crunchy on the outside and completely liquid on the inside. I was so sad, because I was homesick to begin with and failing at a familiar recipe made it worse.
That same year I tried to experiment with my crockpot. I meant to make a kind of savory pumpkin custard thing, but didn’t use nearly enough eggs for the amount of pumpkin puree and ended up having to throw it out. I also overcooked a pot of beans to the point of it becoming a bland sort of soup. I mean really bland, like negative numbers bland. It also went into the trash. I guess that’s four.
My poor mother is awful at baking. She can cook like nobodies business but she just cannot bake. I remember she tried to make us brownies and for SOME reason she decided that it needed about a cup more flour than the recipe said. When she took it out of the oven it was mushy and sunk in the middle and tasted like a gritty, bitter brick. Later she tried to make a round, 2 layer cake. She bought 2 boxes, which she mixed up and threw into one pan. (I really have no idea why she did that…) It came up to the top but she was convinced it wouldn’t bubble over. It did. Honestly we never really got the burnt cake mix from the bottom of our oven.
Ahhhh, this post and all the comments are making me unbecomingly jealous. My kitchen has been in remodel mode (read: gutted) since June and I would dearly love to be able to incinerate some chicken thighs right about now.
The closest I get to cooking is that I know how to make sandwiches on one of those square (I think it’s iron?) pans and I made french onion soup in a crock pot once though that was rather divine (I’m to scared to cook and all my roommates are hogging the fridge/pantry spaces) so none of these recipe fails are actually mine but I do know a few interesting ones from my mom and grandma.
My grandma’s favorite recipe fails to tell are both spaghetti related though fortunately not on the same night. The first was when she was newly married and had just moved in. After inviting some neighbors or other acquaintances over for dinner my grandma made spaghetti and meat-sauce. I should note now that until this point my grandma had only ever made spaghetti and meat-Balls. To this day I have never seen my grandmother handle the meat-sauce until it’s in its finished state, my mom or aunt always seem to make it. Back to the story. Having never made meat-sauce, or indeed anything involving ground beef other then meatloaf, she had no idea that ground beef required browning before being added to sauce. Thus, you end up with spaghetti sauce containing large chunks of, still perfectly edible, but disgustingly grey meat. My grandma doesn’t recall ever seeing them again either. Her second fail occurred when my mother was around 8 or 9. She decided that she wanted to try and make homemade bread rolls instead of buying them. She forgot something (I think it was the yeast but I can’t remember) but whatever she forgot resulted in what my mother still refers to as “personal bread-colored rocks”. That is to say, they were inedible. My grandfather tried bravely to say they were delicious but when she tried her own bread she asked him how he managed to take a bite without breaking his teeth.
My mother’s cooking fail was, again, as a newly wed. It was my mom’s turn to cook and she wanted to try a recipe for quiche that she got from some friend or relative. Whoever wrote the recipe down said to add canned milk. No one in my family uses canned milk, of any type, now or then. My mom recently threw out three cans of milk that had been sitting in our pantry since we moved in over 7 years ago (I don’t know how long we may or may not have had them before then). So she didn’t realize that there is a difference between condensed and evaporated milk. She she poured in the only canned milk she had in the house, a can of condensed milk. My dad, who at the time was the more accomplished chef, took one bite and replied with “It’s a little sweet don’t you think?” He quickly figured out her misstep and they ordered pizza instead.
I’ve been tricked by a great number of pasta sauce recipes that tell me to pour lemon juice into a cream sauce. It sounds delicious, and I love the combination of lemon and pasta, but every. single. time. it separates, and I’ve wasted $8 worth of hard cheese and half and half. One time I was so fed up I ate it anyway. Yuck.