Food Disasters!

[figmentPez]

My sister pointed me to the April Fools Day post on the King Arthur Flour baking blog where they posted their failed recipes from the past year. It's pretty funny, but here are some of the best pics:

An attempt to put a carmelized sugar top on pistachio pudding covering a failed cake

A roll left in the oven for about 6 hours

Over-risen dough for pull-apart rolls

Spaghetti squash explodes in the microwave

More disasters at the link.


I think the worst cooking accident I've ever had was on a boy scout camping trip when I was about 11 years old. We were making pancakes for breakfast, using those shake & pour containers. The pan was heating with oil in it, but the batter took too long to shake up, and pan went up in flames. The fire licked the tarp over the cooking area and the pan was completely black by the time we got it put out. I think us scouts spent the rest of the weekend taking turns with a brillo pad trying to get the pan clean again.


What's your worst cooking disaster?

 

[Hylian]

One time I was cooking some fries in the over and me and my brother decided to play a quick game on teh 360 while they were cooking. Well fast forward about an hour later and I made a comment my eyes where watering and he said his was too. Than it donned on us that we had forgotten about the fries oven. We rushed over to the oven and saw a whole pan full of burnt to a crisp fries. They were completely burnt through. Luckily we had a layer of tin foil down on the pan so clean up was still a breeze.

 

[drawn_inward]

Not too long ago (less than 2 weeks back) I burnt the shit out of some lentils and rice. Lentils and rice soak up so much water, and take a long-ass time to cook (I need to get a pressure cooker). It was late and I was hungry, so I set the flame to MAX and started boiling the rice and lentils separately. I would add water every 10 min. After about 40 minutes of this, I came back to lentils that had been converted to charcoal and had slimey rice. Ugh. I ordered a pizza. Cleaning the lentil pan was a pain.

 

[Cajungal]

^I've done almost exactly that. :laugh:

One time I forgot to put salt in my bread dough. It was awful.

 

[drawn_inward]

Oh, I thought of one from my grandmother. She was a terrible cook; just awful. She tried to make frozen custard and didn't temper the eggs, and so we got to have scrambled egg, vanilla frozen custard. Yum. We didn't know what the chunks were at first. We were like, "Is there tapioca in this?" Ugh.

 

[Cajungal]

Auuuuuuugh, that's awful.

One time my mom tried to make french toast with skim milk, egg whites, and double fiber bread cooked in margarine. OH and Splenda with cinnamon instead of sugar. Aaaaaand sugarless syrup. It tasted terrible, even the pieces that were not burned.

 

[Hylian]

Auuuuuuugh, that's awful.

One time my mom tried to make french toast with skim milk, egg whites, and double fiber bread cooked in margarine. OH and Splenda with cinnamon instead of sugar. Aaaaaand sugarless syrup. It tasted terrible, even the pieces that were not burned.

.

 

[Cajungal]

Hahaaa yes. That's how mom was from about 1998-2006. It was a bland time.

 

[drawn_inward]

Auuuuuuugh, that's awful.

One time my mom tried to make french toast with skim milk, egg whites, and double fiber bread cooked in margarine. OH and Splenda with cinnamon instead of sugar. Aaaaaand sugarless syrup. It tasted terrible, even the pieces that were not burned.

I would rather not eat sweet stuff if I have to eat sugar-substitutes. They never taste right. My best friend's mom didn't give her kids sugar. So, I've had my share of buckwheat pancakes and sugar-free syrup. Yuck.

And, yeah, margarine is just plain wrong.

 

[phil]

This one is from my mom.

So about, 15 years ago or so my mom saw a recipe for the infamous "Soup Nazi soup" in a magazine. Now, at the time my mom had been on a "one dish meal" kick trying all these different casseroles and things that most of us ended up not exactly enjoying all that much. Well, this is kind of at the height of her disappointment from those experiments and also when she's in a real shitty mood to start with and also it's....that time. So before we even sit down to eat my dad takes me and my brother aside and tells us that no matter what, we loved this meal.

So we sit down to eat this soup, which has an amount of curry in it, as directed by the recipe from the magazine. The magazine which had a misprint, which replaced X number of TEASPOONS of curry with X number of TABLESPOONS of curry.

For my family, if a salsa has a red label on it we avoid it like the plague. Normal jalapenos that most people chomp down without even thinking about it is our upper limit. We never bought a bag of spicy Cheetos in our collective lives. We don't do spicy food, is what I'm getting at. We sit down to eat a soup that has like 6 tablespoons of curry in it, and because my mom is in such a bad mood none of us can react or even do anything but try to drink whatever we had to drink in order to put out the flames.

So my dad and brother can't even finish a bowl, while I try to carry the team and finish my bowl and even ask for more. Finally my mom has some after watching us and declared it a disaster. I still think that it would have been ok if it wasn't just so freaking spicy.

 

[Wasabi Poptart]

The first chicken I ever roasted came out looking beautiful. It was so dry, though,that I'm surprised it didn't turn to dust on our plates.

 

[North_Ranger]

I rarely have kitchen mishaps, mostly because the recipies I use are fairly straightforward. But there's too occasions from Ireland...

#1) I was cooking a quick pizza I had bought from the corner store. Suddenly there's a loud bang and the stove goes dead. I pull out the pizza, it's covered with sharp shards of glass. Apparently something caused the lightbulb in the oven to explode. Needless to say, there was no pizza for me that night.

#2) The international students were having a bakesale, so I decided to make something traditional and Finnish: pannukakku (basically a huge, oven-cooked pancake). I got something wrong in the recipe I got from mom, though: the mix was too fluid, and it took forever to cook. Or rather, the top took forever to cook. The bottom was all nice and crispy while the topside was still a bit... rubbery. Luckily nobody minded and they still paid €1 a slice, poor buggers.

 

[phil]

The first time I made cheesecake was pretty bad. I didn't blend it when I should have so it was really runny except for some lumps in it.