Cooking disasters!
 

The funniest thing happened when my older sister came back home to live for a lil while. She tryed cooking chicken in the oven, shes not a real whiz in the kitchen and it turns out she didnt cook it all the way and got food poisoning so she was up all night in the bathroom. :lol: At the time it wasnt as funny. So anyone have any good disaster stories? Please share :)

Only thing I can think of is when my former girlfriend and I tried to make Baked Alaska.

My intuition told me that putting ice cream in the frigging oven was just asking for trouble; as usual it was right.

Ok I dont know if this is like funny or whatever but one time I had the idea to make a hotdog cake.. yeah Umm so I got like a pack of hot dogs and some cake mix and I made up the mix and all that then stuck hot dogs in the top of it and in the end the hot dogs were all burned and I think something caught on fire..

I made Christmas turkey one year for the whole family. The element burnt so I went to the neighbors to put it in their oven, but they wern't home. We ended up hacking the bird up and BBQing the pieces. It was a disaster that turned put to be the fodder of many jokes over the years.

I tried making guacamole one time and failed miserably. Obviously there is an art to making good guacamole.

Hot dog cake? Like pigs in the blanket?

My sister was doing a recipe that my mom does, which is basically cooking flank steak in tomato sauce slowly in the oven - comes out super soft and flavourful.

Well, she thought that tomato paste and tomato sauce are the same thing. It tasted horrible!

One night I was starvin and my cupboards were pretty bare. A box of mac'n'cheese was one of the few things in there.
So yeah, I start cookin up the pasta before lookin in the fridge. Turns out that I was outta milk. Only thing in there was vanilla soy milk.
Yep, I used the soy milk.
I was so hungry I stomached half the bowl before deciding that continuing to ingest this stuff could prove harmful to my health. I live to this day to warn others not to make this terrible mistake.
*weep*

I just remembered another one. A friend and I did a fifth of SoCo (each) one night. The following morning we were still drunk as hell and in need of food to soak up the excess alcohol. We tried to make stir fry, but somehow it ended up involving a little bit of everything in the fridge, including half a jar of spaghetti sauce. Needless to say, when the hangover kicked in shortly thereafter it tasted exactly the same coming back up.

Oh, and that same day I drove from Harrisburg PA to DC and back. Driving on 2 major beltways each way while viciously hung over is not something I want to go through again.

Pretty much everything my roommate cooks. Tonight it was burnt rice a roni. Good thing I make my own food :)

Friend was cooking scones and he put WAY to much butter in them, the butter melted out and dripped onto the flame in the over and the house filled with smoke, it was awful cause the smoke alarm is like 12 feet off the ground and we could not get it to stop...

I spent nearly $70 on a fore four rib standing roast, which was supposed to be trimmed, tied and aged. Everything was fine, except for the aging part. I got it home, and it smelled a bit off. I thought to myself "Never had an aged roast before. Maybe this is normal." So I prepped it and popped it in the oven. Same procedure as the last one I did, except that one wasn't aged. That one came out perfectly, New Year's Eve, and fed a couple dozen people. This one... This one came out like I would imagine a cow would taste if it was shot with 12 gauge and left in a field to marinate, in the sun, for about four weeks, unbled, and then butchered and left on my table. It smelled funny, and I couldn't even put a piece of it near my mouth without wanting to gag. The worst meal I ever made, bar none.

Once while staying at a friends house, his mom made something in the crock pot that he called "puke in a pot", of course he didn't tell me until later. I could barely stomach the dinner, and it came back up later.

Friend was making spagetti sauce for the first time. Recipie called for 2 cloves of garlic. She thought that sounded like a lot, so she just used one... full head of garlic.

cooking disasters?

most anything I would try beyond basic stuff. Good hardware techie but terribly inexperienced with preparing food. Recently started cooking my own eggs and can not do poached (what I really want) properly yet, everything is an omelette or scrambled.

When I was still at the house my little sister (10) was hungry and not wanting to cook I told her to stick some chicken fingers in the microwave. I said, "Follow the insructions on the box, ok?" and so she runs off to cook it. A few minutes later I smell smoke. I rush to see whats up. It turns out she stuck them in the microwave, on high, for 11 mins.

Needless to say mom was pissed :p

Another time my cousins and I were staying up late one Friday the 13th (way back when). It was around 11pm and we were hungry so we cut on the fireplace, took out some wire hangers and decided we were gonna cook some hotdogs. We let the outside get nice and burnt (ok, so it was an accident) and when we bit into them it was cold as hell. So them my cousin tries to cook some cheese toast. Sticks it in the bottom part of the oven and forgets about it. A little while later we smell the smoke. Burnt cheese looks funny, even funnier on top of burnt bread. Pitch black.

making a sauce with cornstarch.... didn't stir it in slowly enough... wound up with a lump of general tso's chicken.

Believe it or not, I've actually burned spagetti.
It was a social meet and greet for my fraternity, and we ran out and had to make more spagetti quickly. I just threw some spagetti in a pot of water without boiling the water first. Needless to say, it stuck to the bottom of the pot and had a very nice smokey flavor when it was all said and done. But not in a good way.

Oh yeah, I'm a much better cook now.

I once tried making sushi with my mom. Most of the rolls, as ugly as they were, still tasted good (rice is easy enough and everything else is raw). But we also tried to make Tamago, which is basically a wad of rice with a piece of scrambled egg on top. The problem is, there is a very specific way to cook the eggs, and we apparently didn't come close. Our creation was brown, runny, and well, didn't even smell right (the eggs themselves were not rotten or anything to begin with.) We brought shame upon our family.

haha thats hilarious

Any attempt at me cooking is a disaster...sigh.

Many, many pans of scorched rice because I forgot to check the stove and the water all boiled away. Until I got the rice cooker.

Back in college, we four guys who lived in an apartment decided to make a big dinner and have some women over; beef stroganoff over rice, or something like that. One guy, Dave, volunteered to cook the rice, because he "knew all about it". We were serving eight people, and he figured eight cups of rice would do the job. So he adds eight cups of _uncooked_ rice to the pot. Next thing I know, the rice is poking up a foot over the edge of the pot and spilling out over the stovetop and Dave is frantically trying to stuff twelve quarts of rice into a six-quart pot.

Dave is now a senior manager at Microsoft. Figures, doesn't it?

this is easier than trying to explain poached eggs

here

Mayonaise is NOT a good substitute for sour cream. EVER!

My mama has some great cooking diaster stories from when she first set up housekeeping. Like cooking a turkey with the bag of organs still in the cavity. Or baking a ham with the plastic wrap still covering it...

I don't know if you could call it a disaster unless you where on the recieving end. My stepfather would tell us kids he would make breakfast for us; Eggs Minnesota Style, everything in the fridge was fair game. After our first encounter; the mere mention of our stepfathers culinary expertise would bring about the weeping, wailing, and knashing of teeth to us, the poor victims.

once, i threw pepper flakes onto hot oil. people upstairs were coughing. i was involuntarily crying.

My father decided he was going to grind his own crushed peppers for pizza.

He put the dried peppers in the blender and hit go. WITHOUT the top. Tear gas through the whole house. We had to go outside for about a hour till the air cleared.

your misery = my :lol:

My sister-in-law was making brownies and the box called for oil. She found an oil bottle under the stove - turns out it wasn't oil - it was soap

And then there's the time my brother put french fries (the frozen kind) in the toaster oven and they started on fire. Glad I wasn't home for that one - I would have been blamed somehow

my brother microwaved a bowl of ramen, forgetting the water....

ruined my favorite bowl too!

Disasters in the Kitchen: What's your best cooking disaster story?
 

I was cutting slices of cheese for a sandwich tonight. Using my chef's knife I had the blade facing towards me as I was doing it. I realize how stupid it is to cut something that requires pressure with the blade facing you and how most people probably don't cut cheese with a very large very sharp knife. I realized this as I was doing it. I even said to myself "Hey, you know what self, this knife is surely going to slip and hurt you in some uncomfortable way, you should probably stop." Then I thought, if this was a cooking show you'd have to tell the audience that they shouldn't try this at home and you'd have to show them the proper way to cut cheese. Then I thought, you're such a good cook you could do a cooking show one day. Then I thought, wow this tuna melt's (I was making a tuna melt) it's gonna be so good. Then the knife slipped and the blade went flying into my finger.

Luckily my finger bone stopped the knife from lopping off my entire digit. I looked down and for a brief second even though there wasn't any blood at first I had the distinct feeling that this could not be good thing.

As the blood began to flow I ran to the bathroom, keeping my other hand cupped underneath the wound so as not to make a mess, and proceded to wrap my finger in as much medical tape I could find. And, after a few attempts, I even got the tape to stick despite the copious amount of blood.

So, after all was said and done and I was sitting in front of the T.V. eating my tuna melt (I did finish making it) trying to get a good grip on the sandwich with my overly bandaged finger, I suddenly got the idea for this thread.

So here it is. My worst kitchen disaster story (the previous anecdote was only an aperitif):

I was sauteeing a steak one night for just myself (maybe it was a chicken breast, I don't remember) in a heavy bottomed (important to know since it holds heat very well) sautee pan (even more important to know since water evaporates in a sautee pan much more quickly than say in a frying pan) over my gas stove (important! there's fire involved in this here story). Being a novice at pan sauces, which is a sauce made in a pan that you've just cooked meat or fish in, I decided that tonight was the night that I was going to make a pan sauce to end all pan sauces. "The best pan sauce in all the world!" I declared as I sauteed my steak over very high heat (another important point to remember).

So, at this point, the steak was nearly done and I went to get the red wine to deglaze the pan with (deglazing: pouring liquid into a pan you have just cooked a meat in, after you've removed the fat, in order to loosen the charred bits that are stuck to the bottom).

Aw, but then it hit me. I didn't have any red wine. "No pan sauce for you!" I thought, saddened by this tragic realization. I was sulking back to the stove when I felt a strong force pull me towards my freezer. I opened it up and a light bulb went on.....inside the freezer. "Of coures! I have Vodka. Not just vodka, Russian Vodka." Russian vodka from Russia. I can use Vodka. Yeay!

Perfect. How could I go wrong? I quickly whipped out the vodka bottle and poured out a full one half cup in my Emsa measuring beaker (don't ask me why I choose to use 1/2 cup, you might as well ask me why I cut my finger). I then removed the steak from the pan and turned on my stove's exhaust fan (which turned out to be the smartest thing I did) due to the cloud of smoke around my stove. I poured the scalding hot fat out of the pan and set the pan back on the flame.

And the stage was set.

And there I was. Vodka in hand.

And this is the point where I DEGLAZE AN EXTREMELY HOT SAUTEE PAN SITTING ON AN OPEN FLAME WITH A 1/2 CUP OF VODKA.

And this is the point where I realize why I've heard about people deglazing a pan with wine (13% alcohol by volume) but not hard liquor (my vodka: 40% alcohol by volume).

So I poured the vodka in all at once. There was an instant nuclear mushroom cloud of steam. Now I could have immediately turned of the burner or, I don't know, poured water into the pan, or simply run away. But, instead, I quickly jerked the pan off the flame and that's when I heard it

BOOM

I felt an intense heat and I jumped back. And in front of me I saw a billowing inferno. It wasn't flames. It wasn't a wall of fire. It was like a fire ball you see in movies when something explodes. Except it wasn't in a movie. It was in my kitchen. On top of my stove. Working its way up the duck hunting scene painted on the tiles on my wall.

Quickly thinking of the best way to deal with the situation I ran and grabbed my fire retardent blanket to muffle it, then fast as lighting filled up a bucket of water, then hit the speed dial on my phone for the fire department in case this got out of hand.

Or at least, I should have done something like that...

Instead, I stood there and mumbled to myself "HLOY FUCKING SHIT." That's right, I was so dumbstruck I mispronounced holy.

So it was a good thing the exhaust fan suddenly kicked in. The fireball suddenly disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, having been sucked up through the exhaust and shot out into the fresh air in front of my house in the form of a thick cloud of black smoke.

Seeing that the danger had passed I snapped to and did a quick check to make sure everthing was in tact. And with the exception of the singed hair on my arms, the vague smell of singed hair, and the tiny flames dancing themselves to death at the mouth of the exhaust fan, everything was.

Even the base of the pan sauce had survived. Say what you will about kitchen explosions, in the end, that was some good deglazing that happened there (of course, I kid, you really shouldn't try this at home). So I got back to finishing what I had started out to do. 'Cause, honestly, even though it had just been surrounded by fire, the steak was getting awful cool.

After all was said and done I sat down to enjoy the steak with pan sauce I had finished making. And, you know, it was pretty darn good.



So please post your worst kitchen disaster story. And don't think it has to involve injury. It's whatever you consider to be a disaster. Because hey, out of great pain comes great stories.

not mine but my sisters...


she made choc chip cookies and instead of 1 teaspoon of salt she add 1 tablespoon


they were horrible

One day I came home from work at about 1am and wanted to make some hardboiled eggs for breakfast the next morning. I turned on the stove, poured some water into a pot, and dropped about 7 eggs in to boil. I sat down on the couch to watch some TV while waiting for the eggs to cook, and slipped off into dream land. I woke up to the smoke detector going off and eggs splattered all over the kitchen.

I didn't even know eggs could explode.

I'll just have to say... you win. Wow.

Too many to list!

Recently tho, I had made ~75 Creme Brulee for dinner later that night, and they were chilling nicely in the reach-in when some jerkoff decides to swing the door open with a fury, and the whole sheetpan came crashing down onto him. Not a direct disaster for me, but I did have to re-make all that were lost, and I wasnt a happy camper.

Also quite recently, I had made several cheesecakes at the spur of the moment, and totally forgot to put a crust on them. It was an eventful night for the night shift, as they had to quickly come up with some sort of crust and a reason why the hell there was no crust as the customers questioned them. Hah.

Cutting my finger on the meat slicer and watching as my finger fountained blood was a highlight of my days as an AM prep. Also prepping tomatoes for a salad and slicing the shit out of my thumb, but being too busy to go get stiches so i gauzed and duct taped it shut, covored the whole mess with a finger condom and went back to work.

Kitchens are so fun!

That meat slicer image is disturbing. So at what point would you you not go back to work? When you slice your entire finger off? That always interested me. I've know guys who worked as line cooks and they'd talk about the most horific cuts they got. But I never heard any of them say that they didn't finish out the night.

It really wasnt an option. The sous chef said, 'well you can goto the doctor, but i really dont think that they will give stiches on that part of your thumb' so I just took a 10 minute breather to attempt to stop teh bleeding, then wrapped it up best I could and kept working. Prolly shoulda went to the doc, her excuse was just a ploy to keep me from filling out a workers comp form I bet.. bah.

My wife burned a pie once. When I say burned I mean with big flames comming off the top.

let's see where should i start.
i am at culinary school now so.

i have been told stories and seen the aftermath of a girl sticking her thumb index and middle finger in a fry-o-later. she went to the hospital on that one but went back to class the next day.

i cut the tip of my pinky off was sent to the hospital only for them to tape it up.

i lit toast on fire once.

i friend of mine slipped carring a 5 gallon bucket of marinara coating himself. then went and grabbed another bucket because it nedded to be taken care of and slip coatin himself in another 5 gallons of marinara.

i saw 6 gallons of fryer oil (hot) spilt a on a friends havd and then the floor. that took like 16 pounds of salt and three garbage bags worth of linen to soak up.

have heard of people cauterizing cuts on flat tops then wraping and going back to work. this is not uncommon for those who are a true line-dog (linecook).
will post more as i remember them

Where are you going to school at chef001 ?

sadatx: good thread, and might i add, good use of humor.

setting: college dormitory with electric hot coils in place of gas burners. hungry college students wanting to make something quick to eat at 1am.

to make sure i was capable of caring for myself, my loving mother made flats of won ton for me to bring back to my dorm in the event i got hungry, i could make them. she showed me how. quite easy might i add. take a pot of water, add some oil to prevent won ton stickage, bring to a boil, place won tons in, 7 minutes and instant meal.

being the novice that i was, i filled the pot with too much water. poured in some oil and brought to a boil. then added the won tons, which made the oily water spill over onto the electric coils. now when this oily water hit the coils, it immediately caught fire. leaving a huge burn mark on the wall of the kitchen. it took us some time to put it out, but when we did, we were so pumped full of adrenaline that we decided to walk to in-n-out instead.

later that week, we wanted to make some steaks. some pan friend steaks. well, little did we know that you needed some sort of oil or spam to keep the steaks from burning on the pan. so there we were, the 3 of us, happily frying our steaks and complimenting each other on how good they smelled. and mind you, this was at around 12:30 am. the steaks began to burn badly, and smoke was everywhere. before we could open the hall doors for ventilation, the fire alarm went off. OMG! we took the pan off the stove and tried to cover the alarm. but there were 3 of us, and 6 alarms on the 3 floors.

the hall was evacuated and many angry college students were forced to stand out in the cold, even some girl who had been taking a shower. i think ever since that second event, we were no longer allowed in the kitchen

At the New England Culinary Institute

My older sister had a bake sale at school and she wanted to make cookies. Well, my mom was working nights at the time so she had my dad help out. They got the Toll House bag but for some reason decided not to follow the directions on the back. They call up Grandma for her recipe. My dad writes it down. They make the cookies.

The cookies come out of the oven in one huge sheet cookie. Very very flat. And impossible to cut. They could not figure out what had happened.

Next morning my mom sees the cookie sheet on the table and asks my dad what he did. "I called mom for her recipe!" He shows it to my mom. He wrote down "3 3/4 cups of sugar" instead of 3/4 cup of sugar. So the added 3 3/4 of sugar, white and brown..... Needless to say those were some sweet cookies!

I was kind of drunk and wanted something to help with my high-protein diet, so I made a cheese sauce, then added various spices, Worchestershire sauce, cottage cheese, a bunch of eggs, and a package of chopped ham (a very small step up from Spam). Then I poured the gloppy concoction over toast. I think it was the most vomit-like substance to ever be created. Add a splash of more W. sauce to make it tangier and it would be totally indistinguishable. Probably had a good 60+ grams of protein, though!

Trying to impress a new girlfriend, I decided to grill some shrimp on the grill. I put the shrimp on some tin foil and added lots of butter and garlic. The shrimp were sticking to the tin foil and when I pulled on one the tin foil tore and butter started dripping into the fire. The butter caught fire and the shrimp burned to a crisp. She just sat back and laughed while I was ready to throw the grill into the street. We ended up going out to eat. What a mess!

The stupidest disaster was last year's Midsummer Night's Eve parties at our place when I thought about making an oven pancake too late to go to the grocery across the street, it had already shut for the holiday evening. "Well", thought I. "I think this is enough flour anyhow I got left in the bag". Erm, I go check on it and turns out it wasn't enough so I acted like nothing and some people were kinda looking at me like "are you gonna give it to us? we saw you putting it in the oven.." Nobody actually mentioned it anyways so I gave people plain icecream.

ah, college days...
 

Two stories, one simliar to an earlier post:

1) My friends and I have been out drinking and carousing, and as we return to the dorm we realize that we are quite hungry. I decide that it's a mac and cheese kind of night, so I fire up the electric range in the dorm kitchen, add water, oil, and macaroni to an aluminum stock pot I have (from a camp cookery set - all I had available). Range on 'hi', pot on burner. Excellent, now all I have to do is wait for it to boil.

Hmm...

(did I mention that we had all been drinking? And that sitting in a flourescent-lit, nearly-silent kitchen is *boring* when you're drunk?)

...

"I think I'll nip over to my room and grab something to read while I wait.", I said to myself. Yes, that's it. To read.

(Did I further mention that this episode began well after bar closing time, and that I had been awake for something like 20 hours when the pot hit the burner?)

(and that I had been drinking?)

(can you see where this is going?)

The next morning comes along. I sit up, stretch. Memories of the night before come streaming back. The good times with friends. That pretty girl who smiled at me at the bar. The- OH HOLY SHIT THE MAC AND CHEESE!

I throw on some clothes and run upstairs to the kitchen, throwing the door wide and expecting to find a glowing-hot puddle of aluminum on the range, but there's nothing. I look around the room carefully. No pot. No scorch marks on the walls. Nothing. Was it all a dream? Suddenly, I am aware of another person in the kitchen, whom I recognize as one of the floor residents. He doesn't seem too happy.

"Looking for something, asshole?", he asks. Taken aback by his tone, I foolishly begin to nod before I realize the significance of his anger.

"It's out on the fire escape. You are never, ever to use this kitchen again."

I open the fire escape door. Immediately, even though I'm OUTSIDE, I am assailed by a bitter, ashen stench. There, in the corner of the platform, is my stock pot. The interior is filled with an oily black solid. Experimentally, I poke at it.

It is not macaroni.

It is, or appears to be, foamed, burnt aluminum. I turn to go inside, and the resident stops me.

"It took us three hours to air this place out this morning. That stays outside."

I carry my ruined pot down the fire escape steps and heave it into an outside waste container. In hindsight, I consider myself lucky to not have burned down the dorm.

Moral: If you have been drinking and it is late enough that you are hungry, do not use fire without a spotter. If the group of us had stayed together for a quick bite to eat, that never would have happened.

ah, college days (cont'd)...
 

Second story:

I am at a friend's off-campus house, helping to prepare dinner. The residents of said house are vegans, which means no meat, no eggs, no cheese, etc. So, as was *very* *often* the case, the main couse was tofu. Cooking this up was my responsibility. Recently I had had some tofu at a local restaurant that was fried golden brown on the outside and 'melted' inside - very tasty! I decided to pursue this effect myself.

I was also interested in making the tofu spicy, because I like spicy foods, and so did the other people who were going to eat. So, I diced a habanero pepper and threw it in the pan along with the oil, the plan being that the oils from the pepper would mix with the vegetable oil and soak into the tofu.

Unfortunately, what happened instead was that the habanero pieces burned in the heat, but *only* in the area where they were being pressed against the pan by the tofu. So, until I turned the tofu the fisrt time, everything seemed fine. In fact, for me, standing right next to the pan and therefore somewhat out of the main convection path of the smoke, it seemed like only a minor problem; like garlic or onion put in the oil a little too soon, the pepper had burned. Big deal! It would add a...charming, carmelized taste, right?

Well, that's not what the rest of the house thought. Not thirty seconds after I turned the tofu pieces, someone who had been studying in a room across the house from the kitchen came in, blinking rapidly and covering her mouth.

"What the FUCK are you DOING in here!?!", she asked.

I began to realize that perhaps something was amiss. The smoke from the peppers was *thin*, but it spread *quickly*, and for the people in other rooms of the house, it was like having a mist of habanero pepper sprayed in their faces!

We ended up having to not only abandon the meal, but put fans blowing out in the windows of the kitchen and seal it off from the rest of the house for about forty-five minutes, until the evil spirits had been dispersed.

I was frequently welcomed back to eat, and to cook, but I seem to recall a lot of washing and chopping and other, non-heat-related activities being assigned to me from then on. :D