Recently on the r/cooking subreddit, one very brave home cook got vulnerable with us, posting: “I just accidentally poured Worcestershire sauce all over my leftover bulgogi instead of soy sauce. Help me feel better by telling me your latest kitchen fuck ups.” Fellow cooks empathized so hard and shared plenty of hilarious tales of culinary mishap. Here were some of the most relatable — and most unfortunate – stories of people really, really, really fumbling the culinary bag.
1.
“Added cumin to my cake batter instead of cinnamon.”
2.
“Added hartshorn (old school ammonia leavening) to a cake instead of baking powder. In thin gingerbread cookies, the ammonia evaporates; in a thick cake, it doesn’t. Caused the entire family gathering to start vomiting simultaneously.”
3.
“I used to drink beer while I cooked. I absentmindedly took a long pull on a bottle of vegetable oil. I don’t drink in the kitchen anymore.”
4.
“My mum’s ex was once making us spaghetti bolognese, and he accidentally used a cake spice blend instead of a savoury spice blend. It wasn’t terrible, we still ate it, but he was beating himself up over it all night.”
5.
“Powdered mustard in the scones instead of powdered ginger. I couldn’t eat it, the dog wouldn’t eat it, not even the squirrels in my backyard would eat it.”
6.
“I was making gravy for Thanksgiving. Kept adding corn starch, and it wouldn’t thicken. I finally tasted it… I was adding powdered sugar.”
7.
“I once ruined a six-hour tortellini soup by using expired corn starch. ‘It’s not thickening and it’s… gritty? What the hell?’ I checked the starch I used that had been tucked away in the back of the cabinet. It was two years out of date.”
8.
“The recipe called for three dried chillies. I somehow read this as a third cup of dried chillies. Momentarily, I thought that was a large amount, but I’d had a couple of beers and love spicy things, so I dutifully prepared them. I love spicy things. I did not love this meal.”
9.
“Not my latest, but probably my best: capers and green peppercorns come in very similar bottles and look a lot alike. They do not, however, taste alike. It took me a minute to figure out why my salmon was so peppery.”
10.
“Yesterday morning, I sliced up my last banana over a bowl of cereal and then soaked the whole thing in… chicken broth. The container was exactly the same shape and size as our almond milk container!”
11.
“Bulk bottles of soy sauce and pancake syrup were very similar looking. Tried soy sauce waffles; -2/10, do not recommend.”
12.
“I was still half asleep, trying to make scrambled eggs for breakfast. I’ve been on a real boiled egg kick lately. I cracked two eggs, one right after the other, over the trash can instead of into the bowl, in anticipation of peeling them like a boiled egg, and that’s how I wasted two whole f***ing raw eggs in this egg economy.”
13.
“Not me, but a friend, who cooked stock all day, then strained it at the sink, without a vessel underneath the strainer. Bye stock.”
14.
“One time, I filtered homemade shrimp stock into a container in the sink, and then immediately washed my hands over the container. The stock got a bit too soapy to use in the gumbo.”
15.
“Garlic powder instead of ginger powder in my oatmeal because my husband rearranged the spice cabinet without telling me, and I was used to grabbing from the same spot every morning. I didn’t want to waste a whole bowl of oatmeal, so I ate it anyway. Bleh.”
16.
“Once I baked a cake, made the frosting using flour instead of icing sugar… the cake was successfully ruined.”
17.
“I added a cup of salt instead of a cup of sugar to a gallon of tea without realizing it and served it to guests. I thought I would never recover from the experience.”
18.
“My worst cooking fail: Christmas Eve with my family and my best friend’s family. We splurged on a prime rib when we did not have much money to spare. I kept checking the temp, and it just wasn’t going up! That was the day the oven died. Hours later, I finally figured out the oven wasn’t working. I pivoted to trying to cook it on a grill. I had to be close to 10–11 p.m. before it reached a reasonable temperature…”
20.
“I’m a chef; however, in my younger years, I burnt not one, but two pots of boiling water.”
21.
“In a cooking fervour, I reached for the olive oil to add to the pan of sweet potatoes. It was a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. The potatoes still turned out pretty good, to be honest.”
22.
“I was cooking a three-bone prime rib roast and couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long to get up to temp. I accidentally set the probe to Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. Ruined.”
23.
“Son microwaved some hot dogs in foil yesterday.”
24.
“One time making granola, I accidentally added salt instead of sugar, and to ‘counteract’ it, I added… pepper??”
25.
“I’ve added salt to my brownie batter, thinking it was sugar. That first bite was hella confusing!”
26.
“Tossed an entire bowl of strawberries in salt instead of sugar. Didn’t know until I tasted one. Nearly fell over from the salt bomb.”
27.
“I added to my smoothie what I thought were frozen blueberries. Turned out to be frozen black olives. It was not good.”
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