What cooking or baking mistakes have you made?

[wnylib]

My most embarrassing mistake was when I was 11 years old.

My father's family was going to my widower grandfather's house to celebrate his birthday. Everybody was bringing a dish to pass. While my parents were out shopping, I baked a cake (box mix). But then I discovered that we were out of powdered sugar for the frosting. I had never made any kind of frosting without it, so I found a recipe in my mother's cook book for boiled frosting, using granulated sugar.
.
I decided to take a shortcut. I boiled the water and stirred it into the granulated sugar, which dissolved. So I figured that's all I needed to do. Grandpa liked peanut butter frosting, so I added some to the sugar and water mix. It looked ok when I spread it onto the cake. Covered it with foil.

When we got there I proudly announced that I had made a cake and uncovered it in front of aunts, uncles, and cousins. The sugar had crystallized again because it had not been boiled. The cake was covered with granulated sugar and peanut butter. I was horrified.

My grandfather thanked me and said not to worry. We could still eat it the cake after scraping off the top.

[spooky3]

1. The first time I made guacamole

I didn’t know what a clove of garlic was. I thought it was the entire bulb.

[wnylib]

6. OMG. Did you use the whole bulb?

[spooky3]

10. Yes

[wnylib]

11. Ugh.

[ProfessorGAC]

29. And, The Problem Was...?

Yeah, I use a lot of garlic in my cooking.

[spooky3]

51. I guarantee you are not a "supertaster"!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster

[ProfessorGAC]

52. Yeah, Probably Not

But, I'm a fan of bitter & can easily taste thise.
I must be in that middle 50%.
Back in the 80s, on a fragrance synthesis project, that division had people that were similar to supertasters, but for smells.
They could detect very low levels & the could discern very small differences in similar fragrances. There was one woman who could tell the difference in odor between a white lilac & a color version. Me, no way.
Might be something similar to that taste sensitivity

[spooky3]

59. Interesting! Nt

[wnylib]

60. I am a supertaster. Discovered that in a college biology class.

After telling us about supertasters, the professor did a test on all of us with a strip of paper that was treated with a bitter substance. We sat with our tongues hanging out while he walked around placing a strip on them.

The instant that the strip touched my tongue, I pulled it off and ran from the room to rinse my mouth at a drinking fountain in the hall. That did not work so I went to a vending machine and got some gum to chew.

When I returned to the classroom, he said, "Well, I guess we have one in the class."

[spooky3]

61. I ordered one of those test strips and had a similar reaction.

I can barely choke down kale salads and hate sparkling water, licorice, beer, and most of the other stuff on the list.

[wnylib]

63. Yup. After that test, I had an explanation for why there are some foods and drimks

that I just can't tolerate. Coffee, beer, liver, kale, among others.

[electric_blue68]

68. Wow! I was listening to an NPR piece years back on the bus, and were saying something abiut dyeing your tounge (in a

Last edited Mon Jan 6, 2025, 08:28 AM - Edit history (1)

class?), and students looking at other's tongues. The supertaster had a lot more taste buds. The difference could be seen!

ETA: just looked up supertasters and they had a photo of someone's tongue sticking out with the blue dye! 😀👍

[NameAlreadyTaken]

47. My sister made spaghetti with an entire bulb of garlic

They had to move all the clothes out of the house for a few hours. I was just a baby when this happened so I don't remember it and only know it as a family story.

[spooky3]

49. Haha! I'm sure it wasn't funny when it happened, though.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who screwed up!

[drmeow]

2. after it had been in the oven

for what felt like 5 minutes but was probably only a minute or two, I discovered I'd forgotten to add the eggs to a Texas Sheet Cake. Opened the oven, added them, and they turned out fine!

[wnylib]

7. Clever fix.

[drmeow]

25. Just goes to show you

that sometimes the specific order in a recipe isn't critical. It is quite possible the cake would have been better had I done it right but you'd have to know to be able to tell.

[FullySupportDems]

55. Adding chocolate chips last is pretty important tho

Or you get smashed chip cookies. They weren't bad, just chocolate cookies instead of chocolate chip. It was funny.

[3catwoman3]

3. My mom and I once substituted blueberry yoghurt for sour cream...

...in a cake recipe. The cake looked gray. Tasted OK, though.

[wnylib]

8. I use plain yogurt instead of sour cream whenever I can.

Works well on baked (or nuked) potatoes, and as a substitute for putting a dollop of sour cream in black bean soup. I also discovered that I can make icing for pumpkin bread by mixing a small amount of plain yogurt with powdered sugar. It takes time for it to set, though. I put it in the fridge until it sets enough to cut into the bread.

But, yogurt does not work in dishes that require cooking, like in a sauce. It curdles. It does work well in a dough that will be baked.

[Ocelot II]

4. I make a lot of cooking mistakes, but they usually aren't fatal

and the result is mostly edible if not optimum. My favorite cooking mistake was one made by my ex, who liked to cook and was usually pretty good at it. However, one day I came home from work and found a plate of delicious-looking muffins on the dining room table, and on top of the muffins was a piece of paper with a drawing of a skull and crossbones. Ex was upstairs playing the piano, so I went up and enquired as to the cryptic sign on the muffins. He explained that he'd followed the recipe to the letter, except that he used baking soda where it called for baking powder. Since baking soda is much stronger than baking powder the resulting muffins were weirdly salty and basically inedible. This was how he learned that they are not interchangeable.

[rsdsharp]

9. That sounds familiar. I made cornbread and misread the recipe.

I used baking soda instead of baking powder. It turned out about 1 inch high, and bitter. That was 45 years ago, and my wife won’t let me forget it.

[yellowdogintexas]

41. Soda is essential if your cornbread (or biscuits for that matter) is made with buttermilk

My preference. Baking powder doesn't work the same with buttermilk at all.

I am from Kentucky and you will find the use of buttermilk is a very common baking ingredient in the Southern states. (also no sugar, or at least only a tiny amount)

When I lived in Boston buttermilk was difficult to find

The best cakes are made with buttermilk: German Chocolate, Red Velvet, Italian Cream. When I am deciding on a recipe to bake, if it has buttermilk in it I will pick that one. If it has whipped egg whites folded in at the end, even better.

[rsdsharp]

45. It wasn't.

[JoseBalow]

16. I have no idea what either of those things do

What is the difference between them?

[Kali]

17. they serve similar functions but are different chemicals

you really don't want to mix them up or sub one for the other, although there are recipes that use both.

https://www.foodandwine.com/cooking-techniques/baking-soda-baking-powder-difference

[JoseBalow]

19. Oh, I thought they were completely different.

That article explains it perfectly. Thank you!

[Ocelot II]

21. They are both leavening agents but their chemistry is different.

Baking soda is just sodium bicarbonate, and it's much stronger than baking powder, which is a mixture of baking soda, cream of tartar, and sometimes cornstarch. Which ingredient you should use depends on the chemistry of your recipe, that is, how acidic the rest of the recipe is. Here's more info: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/baking-powder-vs-baking-soda/

[JoseBalow]

22. Thanks for the info, I've always wondered about that

I've only ever used the open box of baking soda to keep my fridge smelling fresh. I had a friend once who used to sprinkle one or the other (I'm not sure which) into their shoes, I assume for that same reason.

[ProfessorGAC]

30. Same Molecule

Last edited Sat Jan 4, 2025, 08:40 PM - Edit history (1)

Both have sodium bicarbonate in then (NaHCO3).
But, baking powder is only 30% bicarbonate. Bakibg soda is effectively 100% bicarbonate.
Baking powder has around 25% cream of tartar (Potassium Bititarate - KC4H5O6).
This compound stabilizes the protein of egg whites, forming a lattice that traps air. Helps make things fluffy, helps meringue stay stiff.
The rest in baking powder is edible filler, like cornstarch, which absorbs ambient moisture & minimizes clumping.
See what 43 years as a chemist does to a person?

[dem4decades]

32. I'm so impressed.

[JoseBalow]

33. I've always considered baking to be a form of applied chemistry

I just don't understand all the science behind it.

Do you do much baking? I bet you make good cookies!

[ProfessorGAC]

36. I Do Not

I do a lot of experimenting with my cooking. There's not a lot of room to improvise in baking, because ratios are so critical.
I don't follow recipes, and with baking I'd have to.
I have pretty good instincts for flavor, so I get away with my experiments in davory cooking.
Baking & dessert, not so much.
Though I do make a wicked salted caramel sauce. Wonderful over roasted carrots.

[yellowdogintexas]

42. it is helpful with litter box odor as well nt

[FirstLight]

5. That's so sweet! I can't think of anything except my mom dad had a joke about burning the bread...

They called it "Newlywed Bread"

Apparently it was a running gag between them. My mom would usually quickly toast frendh bread under the broiler at the end of cooking... My Dad would come into the kitchen and they'd get to kissing and she'd forget about the bread until they smelled it burning

So as a kid, there'd be times when my mom would get distracted from the bread by us kids, or the dog, or my dad ... and they'd roll with laughter about the "Newlywed Bread"

They passed in 2022 & 2023...god I miss them....

[mitch96]

12. When I was a kid my Mom told me to get the rice pudding and put the cinnamon on top....

I put paprika on by mistake.. Hey they are both red...yes?
Later in life I made banana bread, which I have made many times before. After ½ hr the toothpick still came out wet... turns out I had the oven on BROIL not bake... uff
And so it goes...
m

[dem4decades]

34. I did a pork roast once, called for paprika, i used cayenne pepper. It wasn't edible.

[MiKenMi33]

37. I did similar to this.

Always read labels. Cinnamon and chili powder are the same color. I had already put a fair amount of cinnamon in my chili before realizing it. I tried to fix it by adding extra chili powder. It was inedible.

[yellowdogintexas]

43. Cincinatti? Now I want a big plate of 5 way nt

[wnylib]

65. I did exactly the same thing once. It was awful.

[wnylib]

13. A former coworker told me that she did not understand

how microwave ovens worked when she first got one several years ago. She thought that they were like toaster ovens.

So she put a potato in hers and set it for 1 hour to bake. Destroyed both the potato and the oven.

[NameAlreadyTaken]

48. My nephew set popcorn for 35 minutes

[wnylib]

64. Oh my.

[rickford66]

14. No baking mistakes.

I eat every chocolate chip cookie baked by others.

[Vinca]

15. I made one yesterday. I make keto crackers out of cheddar cheese, sunflower seeds, water and some

Cajun seasoning. I squish them into flat circles on parchment paper and cook in the oven on a baking sheet at 325 for 20 minutes. I then taken them out and off the parchment paper and put them on a rack. Then . . . normally . . . I put them back in the turned off oven until they crisp up a bit more. Guess who forgot to turn off the oven. They were a lovely shade of black.

[wnylib]

18. Oh no. But thanks for the idea. I might try it.

How much cheese in proportion to the seeds? Is there anything else that you mix with them? 20 minutes sounds like a long time for cheese.

[Vinca]

20. 1 1/2 cups sunflower seeds, same amount of shredded cheddar, 1/4 c. water, whatever seasoning you want.

I usually grind the dry ingredients up in the food processor first, then add the water. About a T. per cracker smooshed into a thin circle. Make sure to use parchment paper. 325 for 20 minutes.

[wnylib]

31. Thanks. I'll try it.

[no_hypocrisy]

23. I cooked spaghetti without stirring it.

At all. One big clump.

[viva la]

26. Mine was chicken pot pie.

I made it for a friend who was sick. I thought the "gravy" was too thin, so I added more flour. And then more.
Then I put the pie crust on top, and baked it, and took it to the friend. She was very gracious, but eventually confessed it was as thick as plaster!

[sorcrow]

27. The first time I made gravy

The first time I made gravy someone asked, "Was it lumpy?"

Well, if you want to be technical, there was only one lump....

Regards,
Sorghum Crow

[Jilly_in_VA]

53. The first time I made gravy

I just mixed the pan drippings and flour. That was it. Boyfriend ate it without complaining so maybe he didn't know different either. But the roast duck was really good. I'd basted it with orange juice concentrate and melted butter, so the pan drippings were flavorful anyway.

[A HERETIC I AM]

28. Used the wrong cut of meat for a Beef Wellington.

Beef Wellington should be made from the Chateaubriand cut from the beef tenderloin, the same muscle you get Filet Mignon from.

I didn't use that one. I don't recall exactly what cut I used, but it was tough as shoe leather and I served it to my mom and a couple of her lovely little old lady friends.

The presentation looked great with the puff pastry and all, but the meat was a huge disaster.

[Kali]

35. LOL most of them

undercooked meats and baked goods, burnt stuff, overspiced (usually chiles involved), bread rocks (didn't rise), too salty, made WAY too much of something, forgot key ingredients, pretty much all the mistakes. never set the house on fire but came close with overflowing grease during a deep fry.

[wnylib]

38. Speaking of cooking fires

One night I was up late watching a movie when I heard the fire alarm go off at the apartment next to mine. I went over and knocked on the door in case the tenant was asleep.

The apartment doors open onto the kitchens in my building. He let me in and I saw small flames in a frying pan on the stove. He had a pitcher ready to fill with water. I stopped him. Fire in a frying pan most likely meant grease. I grabbed the lid and put it on the pan, turned off the burner, and used a pot holder to drag the pan off the burner. Then I flipped on the stove hood fan.

He had come home hungry after a night out drinking and tried to fry some shrimp in oil. He dozed off in a kitchen chair until the alarm woke him.

Still intoxicated, he kept thanking me for coming over to check on him. Said I was a "real neighbor" to be so concerned about him.

Him? I didn't say it, but I was as much or more concerned about ME and the rest of the building as about him. His apartment and mine had common walls! I had lived through a house fire when I was 14. Did not want a repeat.

[catbyte]

39. I had my own cake disaster when I was 9. I wanted to bake my dad a birthday cake. There's a really

delicious, easy chocolate cake called a "Wacky Cake" I made a few times with my mom, so I thought I knew what I was doing. I got everything mixed okay then I put it in the oven. It said to bake it for 35 minutes which is what I did. What I didn't do was preheat the oven and I think I put the oven at 250F instead of 350F because that sucker was raw when I took it out of the oven. I frosted it anyway because it told me to bake it for 35 minutes. Dad was nice about it, but he joked about that cake for decades, lol.

And then there was the time in college when I tried making my mom's "no fail" pie crust recipe. Well, I failed and got so frustrated that I wadded up the dough into a ball and threw it at the kitchen wall. When I called my mom to tell her how her "no fail" pie crust recipe went, she laughed until tears ran down her face.

I eventually got much better at baking, lol.

[Hotler]

40. Caution, kitchen mandolin slicers are fucking sharp. Always use the food holder.

[yellowdogintexas]

44. Volcano Pie. I was a fairly experience baker when I first got my own kitchen. Well I decided to make an Angel Pie

which was from a cookbook of recipes from an old landmark restaurant near My Old Kentucky Home

The crust was made with mirangue spread all over the inside of the pie plate, then baked. The filling was kind of a cold chocolate mousse.

So I whipped it all up and put the crust in the oven, and set it at 500 degrees. Smoke started coming out of the oven vent on my stove; when I opened the oven the pie crust was black and smoking. To this day I would swear in court that recipe had 500 as the temp for that pie. The correct temp is 200 and it's left in the oven for 45 minutes.

The pie has been called "volcano pie" since then, and I have never attempted to make it again.

[NameAlreadyTaken]

46. The first cake I baked

came out perfectly (2-layer cake from a boxed mix). I didn't know that you had to let the cake cool completely before frosting it. I carefully applied the frosting including in between the 2 layers. It looked beautiful. I left the kitchen and came back 15 minutes later to see the top half of the cake on the floor.

[haele]

50. 11 years old and asked to make the TV dinners while

Mom and dad were coming home from an appointment. Banquet dinners, 5 for a quarter...
I was to follow the instructions exactly as written - not my fault the back never really said to remove the tinfoil trays from the package.
I prepped everything per the back, then put them back in the box to bake. No fire, but we did have some pretty smoky tasting turkey dinner with apple cobbler that night.

[Lochloosa]

54. Cooking steaks and trying to tell my wife its chicken breast.

[Jeebo]

56. I almost burned my house down once.

It was about, oh, 25 or 30 years ago, I guess. Some oil or grease that had bubbled over or spilled from frying pans or pots of the several previous years had accumulated under one of the eyes of the stove. One day I was cooking something and had that eye turned all the way up to its highest setting. The eye was glowing red and then, suddenly, it was a blazing fire! Apparently that accumulated grease and oil underneath the eye had caught fire. I battled the blaze by trying to smother it with wet towels until, finally, I got it under control. By that time I was just about to call 911, but I had ruined a bunch of bathroom and kitchen towels. It was scary.

— Ron

[snowybirdie]

57. Was an,18

Year old newly wed. Bought a nice plump chicken for a Sunday dinner. Read my Betty Crocker cookbook and checked out the cooking time and temperature. Took it out of the oven and it was raw. Back in for more time and it was still raw. Lots of grease too. Finally realized I was trying to cook a duck! Never did eat the damn thing! Pizza instead.

[PikaBlue]

58. S sugar not salt

When I was six and a half, I wanted to bake a birthday cake for my father. Measurements were abbreviated and when I got down to "1 cup S", all I could think of was salt. The cake was logically inedible; however, a neighborhood boy stopped by and "helped" himself surreptitiously to a huge slice. Instant karma ensued. 😝

[Yavin4]

62. Uh...Turning on the stove instead of ordering out. n/t

[Kaleva]

66. My wife once forgot to put tuna in the tuna salad

[GoodRaisin]

67. I made an egg custard pie once and

accidentally put in a cup of salt instead of sugar. It baked okay. Yuck.

[Nittersing]

69. One Thanksgiving, my mom forgot the stuffing

"Great stuffing Mom!!!" became a catch phrase for our family... anytime we forgot something!