35 People Share Their Worst Cooking Mistakes

Sometimes experimenting doesn't go as planned.

Damjan

• Published in Interesting
• September 10, 2022

We all like food, right? Eating is a very enjoyable experience, and you don't need any training, knowledge, or experience to do it.

However, food preparation requires them. Nobody is entirely immune from making mistakes in the kitchen, regardless of how experienced they are, whether they are always stuck at the beginning level or have their own TV program.

Mistakes are a natural part of life. And cooking is no different than working elsewhere.

Accepting your mistakes is an important part of learning from them, even if you don't feel like it at the time. But the extent of those errors might vary considerably.

You have humorous stories about dumb mistakes you've made that you can tell guests when you have them over for dinner on one side of the kitchen scale. On the other hand, there are failures with a capital "F" that is so significant that telling the story of how you stunk is comparable to a horror story.

We've gathered a few delectable postings from a discussion on r/Cooking where individuals shared stories of the meals they "so amazingly wrong" prepared that they still shudder to this day. Take a look, you will probably learn something:

Someone asked:

1. Stir fry noodles

While making stir fry noodles I somehow forgot that water exists and kept adding soy sauce when the liquid in the pan had evaporated. It had my wife googling "how much salt can kill you?"

2. Porcupine Balls

My wife made something called Porcupine Balls. She rolled up ground beef with dry rice and baked them. The rice didn't cook.

3. Chocolate chip cookies

First time I tried to make chocolate chip cookies. To this day I still don't know what the hell I did wrong but they came out the size of dinner plates and were just as hard.

My kids decided it would be fun to throw them like frisbees and ended up breaking the front window....

Those inedible, harder than rock cookies cost us about $500 in the end lol

4. Dough problems

When I first lived by myself I was really craving pierogies and the s**tty grocery store walking distance from my house didn't have Mrs. T's. Decided I would make them from scratch instead with 0 knowledge of how to make any type of dough or assemble anything resembling a dumpling.

Spent hours making these little lumps of sadness only to watch them all promptly fall apart in the water. Tried to eat the super thick dough and weird boiled filling anyways and it was unfathomingly bad.

I also found out a week later that the grocery store did have Mrs. T's and I was just looking in the wrong section.

Luckily now I am pretty good at baking, making various doughs, and make my own pasta and dumplings regularly so it was a nice teaching moment. Still haven't tried pierogies again so maybe I will have to give it a go now that I actually know what the f**k I'm doing.

5. Grilling

First time grilling as a new wife. I bought horrible steaks (eye of round) because I had no clue.

I put them on a hot charcoal grill and burned them to old boot leather. Needless to say no amount of A-1 could hide that.

But he ate it and even went back for seconds to spare my feelings. They were terrible and I’ve never bought eye of round again.

I will say I make a mean steak now. On both gas and charcoal grills and cast iron skillets.

I’ve overheard my husband telling his buddies I make the best steak in town. He doesn’t know I’ve heard him and it’s so sweet.

I still remember his face on that first grill attempt though. He was miserable throughout that meal but did everything he could to lie to my face and tell me it was terrific.

builtbybama_rolltide

6. Rice pudding

Box of white rice had a recipe for rice pudding on the side. This was before I knew about egg tempering and the directions assumed you knew about it.

Just cracked the eggs right into the pot and stirred. It was the texture of disappointment.

7. Bolognese

First time I cooked bolognese. Said to use 3 cloves garlic. I thought a bulb was a clove. Took me hours to cut it all up. U can imagine how garlicky it was lol

8. Mac and cheese

My husband and I once made homemade Mac and cheese - but used condensed milk instead of evaporated milk. Canned milk is all the same, right?? Yeah, no.

9. Lemonade

My cousin and I once served lemonade to our extended family by mixing water with yellow paint

10. Trotter soup

I did that thing that people joke about. I spent about 4 hours making trotter soup (aka bone broth aka paya soup) and then decided to get fancy and strain out the meat and bones.

So I strained all my soup into the sink and exactly when I was done, I realized I had strained the soup into the sink instead of a container.

nomnommish

11. Red Velvet Cake

Red Velvet cake… the Yanks use a different name for something than we do in the UK… so this thing I made was so bad it got thrown out for the birds… a week later us was still outside and intact.

Even the birds thought it was s**t.

anon

12. Pasta salad

Cooking while high.

Usually turn out really delicious stuff.

Was making Pasta Salad and got the big idea to add BANANAS...

It was one of the very worst things I have ever done.

This was over a decade ago and my family who were served this atrocity still bring it up.LOL

13. Czech sourdough

A few years ago I lived with a guy from the Czech Republic. One day he starts making traditional Czech sourdough which has caraway seeds in it.

He spends a few days making a starter and then quite suddenly the house starts to smell strongly of curry. I come home that evening to the guy looking very dejected telling me he had messed up his bread and had to throw it away.

You see, the Czech word for caraway seeds is “Kmin” and this guy had added quite a lot of Cumin to his bread thinking they were the same thing.

14. Lemonade with salt

When I was 4 or 5 I wanted to make lemonade, so I put lemon juice in water and added some white powder to it like my grandma would. It didn’t taste the same, so I added more white powder, still no. I persisted tho.

After a while my dad entered and told me I was using salt.

15. Fried chicken

Early 20s. I had cooked some but I was not an experienced cook.

Tried to make fried chicken. No instructions or recipe just winged it. Crispy rare chicken. Looked good on the outside, salmonella on the inside.

16. Cookie disaster

The recent one that springs to mind was my snickerdoodle cookie disaster. Apparently butter can be TOO warm for baking, leading to cookies turning into pancakes of greasy melted butter.

They were disgusting and inedible. Everything went into the trash.

After some research I discovered the bit about butter being too warm, so the next time I tried snickerdoodles, I kept the butter quite cool.

They turned out perfectly. The more you know…and knowing is half the battle.

17. Mulled wine

I made mulled wine this Christmas and somehow added cumin instead of cardamom. It tasted like barf.

18. Margarine instead of butter

From 18-22ish I didn't realize what a massive difference there was between butter and margarine. I used margarine to cook and bake everything and when I discovered "real" butter my life changed forever.

DrMooseknuckleX

19. Vanilla yogurt instead of plain yogurt

Not me - but my sister made an Indian dish (can’t remember what exactly it was) and used vanilla yogurt rather than plain yogurt. It was awful

20. Frozen pizza

I managed to gloriously screw up heating a frozen pizza once. I'm not quite sure how the thermodynamics of this worked, but the edges were stuck to the tray and the middle had risen far enough for the cheese to glue itself to shelf above it.

I had to take the whole thing out and prise it off on the counter, scarcely avoiding burning my arms in the process. The worst part was that this wasn't long after I absolutely nailed making a souffle for the first time.

21. Meringues

Meringues, specifically coffee flavoured. I cooked them directly onto an aluminum baking tray, some sort of chemical reaction occurred and they went a sort of khaki green colour.

They came out looking like a cow [poop]

22. Cookies with refrigerator baking soda

I made cookies with refrigerator baking soda. That was 15+ years ago and I still haven’t lived it down

23. Lemongrass curry

Not mine, but my husband's.

He's actually a fantastic cook and was a professional for several years. But before that, in our early days together, he tried to make a lemongrass curry, but didn't have lemongrass.

So he threw in some lemongrass tea or something, and when we ate it there were these little lemongrass needles that just stuck in our gums.

24. Pumpkin pasta

I have two from when I very first moved out and started to cook for myself and my then boyfriend/now husband.

1) pumpkin pasta - I had the most delicious pumpkin ravioli in Italy one time and wanted to replicate it. But hand making ravioli seemed like an impossible feat. So I mixed up a can of pumpkin in rotini instead. It was mushy and disgusting and I gagged on the first bite.

But my husband powered through no matter how many times I said I wouldn't feel bad if he didn't eat it lol.

2) hamburger helper - I didn't have any regular milk so I used vanilla almond milk thinking the spices and such would cover up the vanilla. It did not.

It was disgusting. Husband couldn't even fake it through that one haha.

25. Chef Boyardee pizza

I was 11, my parents were in the hospital having my sister. My dad's friend was staying with me.

I wanted a Chef Boyardee pizza (those were mine and my mom's comfort food back then). I had made them before, but always with my mom's help, so I didn't realize it was supposed to make TWO pizzas.

By the time the dough was baked through, all the toppings were incinerated. We ended up just ordering pizza.

26. Box mac and cheese

The first time I made box Mac and cheese I was trying to boil the water faster so I had the burner turned as high as it could go.

Went a little too high and hit a sweet spot where the light was on to signal the stove was working, but somehow was registered to the off position so no heat was coming out. After being extremely impatient that it wasn’t boiling yet I decided the water was probably hot enough and poured the noodles in.

Then I realized the stove wasn’t actually on so I turned it on for real to heat up the water. When the water finally hit a boil I was so excited I drained the pasta right away, forgetting it needed to actually cook in the hot water.

Happy to say I have come a really long way from that mistake

27. Vegetarian chili

For me it was vegetarian chili. I've been cooking for as long as I can remember so I rarely duff out so badly that what I make is inedible (it's certainly not always great, just rarely a complete disaster).

But I grew up in a meat heavy household and mostly knew veggie dishes as sides. When I met my now fiancee she was vegetarian and told me she missed her dad's chili.

So I was like, I can make chili with a blindfold on, vegetarian chili just means skip the meat. But I totally underestimated how much depth of flavor I traditionally got from the meat and how the fat balanced out the seasoning and it was tasting pretty flat, so I started trying to amp up the flavor...

I should've just served the initial, mediocre version! By the time I threw in the towel I had a chili that was somehow simultaneously bland, acrid and inedibly spicy. And we love spicy food, it just tasted like chewing on cayenne powder. I don't even remember what I did to it, but it was a disaster.

And everyone in here is talking about how their significant others put on a good face and ate their awful meals... not mine. She took one bite, turned bright red, and told me it was awful lol. We both started laughing and said screw it and made a box of pasta instead.

Now I've learned some tricks and can make a mean vegetarian chili... but shes not strictly vegetarian anymore and will eat meat from local farms so I never make it anyways.

28. Mac and cheese again

I have a Macaroni and cheese cookbook. The definition of Mac and cheese for the purposes of this book is any combination of pasta with cheese.

Most of the recipes are fantastic. However, a very long time ago I tried one of the more interesting (and consequently expensive AF) recipes. It has a couple of Greek/Turkish cheeses that are a little hard to find and are quite pricey and then spices I don’t usually associate with Mac and cheese but hey I’m always down for a food adventure, right?

Pasta, garlic, olive oil, milk-so fat so good…cinnamon, cloves, oregano, V8, Kasseri cheese….this combination was awful.

OMG. Like legendarily bad. Neither me or my SO could finish it. So bad.

29. Fried rice

Fried rice, for years! I've never liked fried rice but my husband loves it.

So years ago I looked up a bunch of recipes. They all said that it's a good use for leftover stale/dry rice.

I took from that, and from the name of the dish, that the goal was to make the rice really crispy and crunchy. So I got in the habit of frying the rice in oil until it was firm and crunchy, then added eggs, etc.

I figured that was a better way of achieving the 'desired' outcome then stirring the rice into the egg. It was only after several years of this that I learned that the reason that leftover rice is recommended is because the dish brings it back to life by adding moisture.

Quite the opposite of what I was doing. Oops.

flouronmypjs

30. Dill pickle brine

My parents have a garden. I worked as a school teacher and had summers off, and my sisters first child was about to be born.

So my mom left town for a week, and I was happy to visit and help run the house/garden/handle food for them.

And I made. The most. Delicious dill pickle brine! We had so many cukes from the garden and my mom left me the ball canning jar book and gave me notes on anything she did differently. I was excited!

But my mom forgot one thing. For pickling cucumbers specifically, she used the pressure canner, but without the little weight on top. So, not knowing better, I had a little weight on there.

And that's how I ended up with 16 pints of dill baby pickle mush.

All of it. All of it was cooked to mush. I have not forgiven the pressure canner.

31. Coleslaw

It's bad enough when you screw up at home but when you screw up at work and the entire restaurant is aware, it gets a little bit more. The kitchen is, as any cook knows an extremely fast place to work in.

Beyond that a high volume restaurant doesn't have on Morton box of salt and the pepper shaker. They literally have bins full of sugar, salt and other things that we need to have on hand right away. Unfortunately when I was making coleslaw I mixed up the salt and the sugar.

I got it done quick, it looked good but I made the stupid mistake of not tasting my food before sending it out. 5 minutes later the server comes back and every table that received the coleslaw complained. I wonder why.

The funny part was that after that happened and my coleslaw was returned to the back of the house everybody had to taste it to see how salty it was including the manager and assistant manager. And to be clear, nobody was told to taste it but I don't know if it's true with all cooks but it was just this morbid curiosity to see how salty it really was and my goodness.

Everybody, including me spit it out. Embarrassing but a good lesson learned.

32. Chicken Ballotine

Was feeling ambitious and going for a chicken ballotine. Got chicken brick.

33. Green beans and mint

I had my parents over for our first Thanksgiving in my new apartment. One of my dishes was green beans... and mint. Just chopped up mint leaves mixed with the green beans.

To this day I have no idea what I was thinking. Wasn't like mint was all I had. I actively bought mint with the intent of adding them to the beans.

34. Pumpkin soup

One time I decided to make pumpkin soup, followed the recipe & did everything right. But I couldn't figure out why it tasted funny.

Turns out I I used pumpkin pie filling instead of pumpkin puree....the flavor was so wrong. The first cake I made for my boyfriend (now husband) was lemon as it's his favorite.

I was so busy making a good dinner...which turned out. I didn't realize my eggs were older & I used a cake mix.

Well something went wrong & it stuck to the pan, I tried decorating it hoping it would help. He ate it & said it was really good. Soon as he left I threw it out.

That was my worst baking flop ever!! Can't believe we actually ate it.

35. Raw pork sausage

I skipped the whole "cooking" part and served a raw pork sausage as charcuterie! To be slightly fair, it's packing was in another language and I thought "to be cooked" actually said "was cooked"

So, what do you think about these cooking mistakes? Well, cooking is an acquired skill. And you can learn it only by trial and error, no matter how good the recipe is.

So, don’t feel bad about making a mistake because it all leads to being a great cook. Well, in most cases…

Damjan