Cooking can be an incredibly rewarding experience… most of the time. Whether you’re just starting out, perpetually stuck at the level of a beginner (hi!) or you’re a gastronomic veteran with your own TV show (“It’s fudgin’ RAW!”), nobody’s truly immune from making mistakes in the kitchen.
The size of those mistakes, however, can vary quite a bit. On one side of the kitchen scale, you have silly blunders that you tell your friends whenever you have them over for dinner—they make for a lighthearted story. On the other side, you’ve got Fails with a capital ‘F’ that are so big, recounting the tale of how you messed up is akin to a horror story.
We’ve collected a bunch of tasty posts from a thread on r/Cooking where people opened up about the dishes that they cooked “so amazingly wrong” that they still cringe to this very day. Scroll down, upvote the tales that really got you salivating, and if you’re feeling up to it, tell us about your own cooking fails in the comments.
Meanwhile, be sure to scroll down for Bored Panda’s chat with talented pie artist Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin about how to embrace failure in the kitchen, and the biggest fail that she’s ever personally experienced!
#1
My wife made something called Porcupine Balls. She rolled up ground beef with dry rice and baked them. The rice didn’t cook.
Image credits: heirtoruin
#2
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.
Image credits: KiriDomo
#3
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
#4
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
Image credits: Economy-Cut-7355
#5
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.
#6
My cousin and I once served lemonade to our extended family by mixing water with yellow paint
Image credits: shireengrune
#7
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
Image credits: apothekari
#8
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.
Image credits: AtomicBreweries
#9
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.
Image credits: calamanga
#10
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.
Image credits: Intelligent-Stick986
#11
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.
Image credits: snerdie
#12
I made mulled wine this Christmas and somehow added cumin instead of cardamom. It tasted like barf.
Image credits: beastofwordin
#13
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.
Image credits: frozenfountain
#14
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.
#15
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
Image credits: DIY_dino
#16
I made cookies with refrigerator baking soda. That was 15+ years ago and I still haven’t lived it down
Image credits: googleybear
#17
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.
Image credits: joemondo
#18
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.
Image credits: dogsandyarn
#19
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.
Image credits: momonomino
#20
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
Image credits: Bonstantine
#21
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.
Image credits: gentlemancorpse42
#22
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.
#23
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.
Image credits: Significant-Newt19
#24
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.
Image credits: aquielisunari
#25
Was feeling ambitious and going for a chicken ballotine. Got chicken brick.
Image credits: zytz
#26
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.
Image credits: dekogeko
#27
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”
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Image credits: bloodandsunshine
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