...I'm currently missing part of the tip of my middle finger. I sliced it off while chopping green onions for a coworkers burger. Though I wouldn't really call that a cooking mistake. I don't really remember my mistakes - I mostly just remember what to do based on all the things that didn't work. Before being a cabinetmaker I worked in restaurants for 15 years - you send out a lot of mistakes those first 5 years: raw food, uncooked food, foreign objects in food ... the wrong food.
Well...that only really affected me as a person, and sending out the wrong food affected the customer, the company, me and the server who had to deal with it. ;)
I'll give you TWO cooking mistakes, one from my father and one from me.
Father fell asleep cooking pasta. Despite the pot billowing out a column of smoke, the smoke detector going off, and the temperature of the room going up 10 degrees... he snoozed soundly. 12oz of spaghetti noodles turned into a pot shaped black mass that continued to smoke even when I took it to the outside trashcan.
Now for my mistake. Working as a cook at Long John Silvers. Opening with the assistant manager that...well... we'll say had a reputation for bad decisions. You're supposed to turn on the vats except for the right-most one first. This lets the oil melt again and show you if you need to add to the vats to get the correct level. Well, she turned on all four. Once everything melted, we see we need to add a cube of oil (Long John's oil is 50lb solid cubes wrapped in blue plastic and stuck in a cardboard box).
Problem is...that cube needs to be put into a vat already sitting at 400F. I'd done it in the past with no issue, so I didn't think anything about it when she asked me to put a cube in (it's technically the manager's job to do that, but she was busy with other things at the time and again, I'd done before). Grab the cube, rip the cardboard open, set the block on the front lip of the vat, peel the plastic back, gently tip the cube over while using the bag as a handle, flip it on it's top, and skin the plastic off... right? Well, normally, yes... but not this time. Start to tip it over and the plastic ripped. Fifty pound cube drops into 400F oil and splashes up a wall of oil right in front of my face. Both arms covered from wrist to elbow.
I'm so glad I actually wasn't wearing those protective sleeves at the time. With the amount of oil that hit me, it would have actually soaked in and trapped it next to my skin while trying to peel them off. Still... 2nd degree burns over that much area hurts like hell. Worked my full shift despite the burns. Frequently running cold water over your arms and using your lunch to soak your arms in a bucket of ice water does wonders. Managed to walk away without scars as well. What I dealt with for $5.70 an hour...
That there's a workplace violation right there. The fact that the manager didn't send you off to the hospital right away should have gotten her fired and you serious money in compensation.
Yes and no. I chose to continue working my shift because I knew it was unlikely they'd be able to call in one of the other cooks to fill in for me. Though I could have very likely gotten compensation simply because I was harmed doing something against procedure under manager request. Oil level and adding oil are supposed to only be done by the managers.
To be honest, I might be an idiot, but I didn't care that much. Damage was done, assistant manager that I'd known for years already felt like shit... I didn't feel the need to take it further for personal gain.
Sorry, but I don't really enjoy the name Snapzite, I think Snapper would work better. Anyways, back to the topic at hand.
I have to say, I have had multiple microwavable accidents, but I imagine those would be kind of boring, so I'll tell you my sister's tale. One time, while making food for a school project, she accidentally let her pot full of boiling food become too "dehydrated", and, well, let's say the pot stopped being a pot, and became a part of the stove.
I once misread in a chocolate chip cookie recipe 1/4 cup butter to 1 and 1/4 cup butter. They melted into little pools of butter. My sister named them popcorn cookies because they smelled and tasted exactly like buttery popcorn. In fact, wasn't that bad of a mistake, 8/10 would bake again.
In 8th grade home ec. we learned how to make home made granola bars. They tasted pretty good in class, and my mom eats a lot of them, so that year for Mother's Day I decided to make her some. Woke up early all excited to cook something she'd enjoy, but when I went to mix the ingredients we were missing nutmeg, and since I didn't really cook, I substituted whatever. Whatever happened to be paprika. A lot of paprika.
I once attempted to make a Buche de Noel. A picture for the uninitiated.
See how it looks effortlessly rolled into a beautiful log shape? Well, I didn't realize that it's crucial to roll the sponge cake while it's still warm. So I let it completely cool down to room temperature, while going about making the ganache and baking little meringue mushrooms to put on top of the cake. When it was time to roll the cake, of course it wasn't still flexible, so it immediately just snapped into layers... and I ended up with a makeshift 4 layer sponge cake. I still frosted and decorated it and it tasted pretty good, a little dry though.
I almost set my house on fire while boiling water for ramen.
I turned on the wrong burner. I don't remember exactly what was on it, but it was essentially a plastic container with oil in it. So up went a column of flame and instead of doing something about it, I was so baffled at WHY it would be happening that I just kind of... looked at it. My father put it out before the firemen got there so all they did was set up some big fans to blow the smoke out of the house.
I set my outdoor grill on fire two weeks ago. I wanted to grill some burgers and thought bacon would be a nice addition. Between the high heat and the bacon grease, the grill caught on fire <20 mins into the process. I turned off the burners and thought that if I also closed the lid, the fire would die down because of lack of oxygen. It didn't. I ran inside, grabbed my oven gloves and turned off the gas. By that time there were flames coming out from the holes in the bottom part of the grill.
Thankfully, the fire died soon after that, leaving me with charred burgers and bacon. Mmmm.... next time I'll stick to what I do best -- cooking.
I have a really big thing for caramel. It's like my favorite taste. Earlyish in my cooking phase I decided I was going to learn how to make caramel. I started with that one Gordon Ramsay video where he makes caramel banana pancakes and gradually moved outward. I came up with caramel chicken after that; just cooked some breast tenders and then tossed them in caramel. It was amazing, but I was disappointed to find out that other people on the internet had also made this miraculous discovery and I wasn't going to be on TV after all.
But this thread isn't about amazing dishes we've stumbled upon. It's about mistakes, and I made a big one a couple days later.
I was petsitting at my parents' place a couple years ago and I decided I'd make them some salted caramels as a thank you gift for them paying me and letting me eat all their food while they were on vacation. And also I wanted some caramels, so hey, double batch.
I knew vaguely what I was doing, so I started assembling the ingredients. Butter, sugar, whipping cream, salt, more butter, more sugar... It was all going great until I noticed I didn't have a candy thermometer. No problem, I figured, I'd just eye it and add the cream when it looked ready, and then do the same for the butter. Turns out it's a lot harder to eye 365° F than I thought. With prior experience, I know I ended up heating the sugar way too much before I added the cream, so when it was all said and done and all my ingredients were together, I had a lump of blazing hot sugar liquid rapidly becoming a four-inch-thick rock attached to my parents' best saucepan.
It took me most of an hour to get my mess cleaned up. But hey, lessons were learned. I bought a candy thermometer and my next batch of salted caramels were absolutely delicious.
I once left sausages on the BBQ overnight after a heavy night of drinking. I woke up the next day with my propane all gone and the sausages were black charcoals the size of cigarettes.
I once tried to microwave dry rice. For some reason on this day I forgot that you need to put water in the bowl with the minute rice. I put the bowl in the microwave and went upstairs to my computer until I noticed my house was full of smoke and the microwave was on fire.
I wasn't cooking per se, but when I was.. 8 (or maybe 10) I was trying to cut an apple for myself, and the only clean one I could find was a chef's knife. Being the wise pre-teenager that I was this seemed to be perfectly sufficient for my needs. One slice through apple and (the side of) my finger later I'm dropping the knife and yelping in pain. I still have the 6 stitched scar to show how not to do things.
Just something stupid, it was once of my first times ever cooking something on the stove, I must of been like 9 or 10. There was a packet of soy sauce stuck to the bottom of the pot, and it started a fire almost instantly when I turned the burner on. I didn't know what to do so I just started screaming for my mom but if she wasn't close by it would not have been good. Since then I check the underside of pots and pans every single time I cook.
I haven't had any memorable mistakes in my own kitchen but when I first started working as a line cook I sent out a wrap that had a plastic twist tie buried in it. I still get crap for that sometimes
I have done several, mistakes, but one that sticks was adding one measure of water instead of two for a measure of rice... I don't think i need to explain to you what happened next...
But yeah nothing big happened in the last few years.
I've actually got off pretty easy,for the most part...But not today. Today was a different sort of day.
So here is a little back story..I like to make yogurt and have a quaint little yogurt maker. I've also started making kefer,which is a fermented milk drink,which taste rather like a cross between sour cream and butter milk.
I had two jars in the fridge, one with a cheese cloth over it, the other with a screw on lid.
I bet you know where this is going..
My master plan..To make a huge container of kefier. I heated up the milk,grabbed the container,dumped it in,covered the pan with a tea towel..I come back several hours later and decide to taste it. It has thickened up nicely,but it does not taste like kefir..
Then I look at the jar,which says:"Yogurt starter,don't eat me!" So I have accidentally made half a gallon (1.89 L) of yogurt!
Join the Discussion
...I'm currently missing part of the tip of my middle finger. I sliced it off while chopping green onions for a coworkers burger. Though I wouldn't really call that a cooking mistake. I don't really remember my mistakes - I mostly just remember what to do based on all the things that didn't work. Before being a cabinetmaker I worked in restaurants for 15 years - you send out a lot of mistakes those first 5 years: raw food, uncooked food, foreign objects in food ... the wrong food.
I'd put missing the tip of my finger ahead of sending out the wrong food.
Well...that only really affected me as a person, and sending out the wrong food affected the customer, the company, me and the server who had to deal with it. ;)
I'll give you TWO cooking mistakes, one from my father and one from me.
Father fell asleep cooking pasta. Despite the pot billowing out a column of smoke, the smoke detector going off, and the temperature of the room going up 10 degrees... he snoozed soundly. 12oz of spaghetti noodles turned into a pot shaped black mass that continued to smoke even when I took it to the outside trashcan.
Now for my mistake. Working as a cook at Long John Silvers. Opening with the assistant manager that...well... we'll say had a reputation for bad decisions. You're supposed to turn on the vats except for the right-most one first. This lets the oil melt again and show you if you need to add to the vats to get the correct level. Well, she turned on all four. Once everything melted, we see we need to add a cube of oil (Long John's oil is 50lb solid cubes wrapped in blue plastic and stuck in a cardboard box).
Problem is...that cube needs to be put into a vat already sitting at 400F. I'd done it in the past with no issue, so I didn't think anything about it when she asked me to put a cube in (it's technically the manager's job to do that, but she was busy with other things at the time and again, I'd done before). Grab the cube, rip the cardboard open, set the block on the front lip of the vat, peel the plastic back, gently tip the cube over while using the bag as a handle, flip it on it's top, and skin the plastic off... right? Well, normally, yes... but not this time. Start to tip it over and the plastic ripped. Fifty pound cube drops into 400F oil and splashes up a wall of oil right in front of my face. Both arms covered from wrist to elbow.
I'm so glad I actually wasn't wearing those protective sleeves at the time. With the amount of oil that hit me, it would have actually soaked in and trapped it next to my skin while trying to peel them off. Still... 2nd degree burns over that much area hurts like hell. Worked my full shift despite the burns. Frequently running cold water over your arms and using your lunch to soak your arms in a bucket of ice water does wonders. Managed to walk away without scars as well. What I dealt with for $5.70 an hour...
That there's a workplace violation right there. The fact that the manager didn't send you off to the hospital right away should have gotten her fired and you serious money in compensation.
Yes and no. I chose to continue working my shift because I knew it was unlikely they'd be able to call in one of the other cooks to fill in for me. Though I could have very likely gotten compensation simply because I was harmed doing something against procedure under manager request. Oil level and adding oil are supposed to only be done by the managers.
To be honest, I might be an idiot, but I didn't care that much. Damage was done, assistant manager that I'd known for years already felt like shit... I didn't feel the need to take it further for personal gain.
I don't understand the significance of the fourth vat? How does not turning it on help with the situation?
You've got a cold vat to set the cube into, rather than running the risk of splashing up to temperature oil
Sorry, but I don't really enjoy the name Snapzite, I think Snapper would work better. Anyways, back to the topic at hand.
I have to say, I have had multiple microwavable accidents, but I imagine those would be kind of boring, so I'll tell you my sister's tale. One time, while making food for a school project, she accidentally let her pot full of boiling food become too "dehydrated", and, well, let's say the pot stopped being a pot, and became a part of the stove.
I'd rather not be a fish, thank you.
:(
There, there.
We still love you.
Yay!
I once misread in a chocolate chip cookie recipe 1/4 cup butter to 1 and 1/4 cup butter. They melted into little pools of butter. My sister named them popcorn cookies because they smelled and tasted exactly like buttery popcorn. In fact, wasn't that bad of a mistake, 8/10 would bake again.
In 8th grade home ec. we learned how to make home made granola bars. They tasted pretty good in class, and my mom eats a lot of them, so that year for Mother's Day I decided to make her some. Woke up early all excited to cook something she'd enjoy, but when I went to mix the ingredients we were missing nutmeg, and since I didn't really cook, I substituted whatever. Whatever happened to be paprika. A lot of paprika.
They tasted awful.
I tried to boil eggs in the microwave.
There's nothing wrong with that. You just have to poke a pinhole in the shell.
I did not do that.
Got a nice, eggy explosion though. And broke the microwave.
I once attempted to make a Buche de Noel. A picture for the uninitiated.
See how it looks effortlessly rolled into a beautiful log shape? Well, I didn't realize that it's crucial to roll the sponge cake while it's still warm. So I let it completely cool down to room temperature, while going about making the ganache and baking little meringue mushrooms to put on top of the cake. When it was time to roll the cake, of course it wasn't still flexible, so it immediately just snapped into layers... and I ended up with a makeshift 4 layer sponge cake. I still frosted and decorated it and it tasted pretty good, a little dry though.
I almost set my house on fire while boiling water for ramen.
I turned on the wrong burner. I don't remember exactly what was on it, but it was essentially a plastic container with oil in it. So up went a column of flame and instead of doing something about it, I was so baffled at WHY it would be happening that I just kind of... looked at it. My father put it out before the firemen got there so all they did was set up some big fans to blow the smoke out of the house.
I set my outdoor grill on fire two weeks ago. I wanted to grill some burgers and thought bacon would be a nice addition. Between the high heat and the bacon grease, the grill caught on fire <20 mins into the process. I turned off the burners and thought that if I also closed the lid, the fire would die down because of lack of oxygen. It didn't. I ran inside, grabbed my oven gloves and turned off the gas. By that time there were flames coming out from the holes in the bottom part of the grill.
Thankfully, the fire died soon after that, leaving me with charred burgers and bacon. Mmmm.... next time I'll stick to what I do best -- cooking.
I have a really big thing for caramel. It's like my favorite taste. Earlyish in my cooking phase I decided I was going to learn how to make caramel. I started with that one Gordon Ramsay video where he makes caramel banana pancakes and gradually moved outward. I came up with caramel chicken after that; just cooked some breast tenders and then tossed them in caramel. It was amazing, but I was disappointed to find out that other people on the internet had also made this miraculous discovery and I wasn't going to be on TV after all.
But this thread isn't about amazing dishes we've stumbled upon. It's about mistakes, and I made a big one a couple days later.
I was petsitting at my parents' place a couple years ago and I decided I'd make them some salted caramels as a thank you gift for them paying me and letting me eat all their food while they were on vacation. And also I wanted some caramels, so hey, double batch.
I knew vaguely what I was doing, so I started assembling the ingredients. Butter, sugar, whipping cream, salt, more butter, more sugar... It was all going great until I noticed I didn't have a candy thermometer. No problem, I figured, I'd just eye it and add the cream when it looked ready, and then do the same for the butter. Turns out it's a lot harder to eye 365° F than I thought. With prior experience, I know I ended up heating the sugar way too much before I added the cream, so when it was all said and done and all my ingredients were together, I had a lump of blazing hot sugar liquid rapidly becoming a four-inch-thick rock attached to my parents' best saucepan.
It took me most of an hour to get my mess cleaned up. But hey, lessons were learned. I bought a candy thermometer and my next batch of salted caramels were absolutely delicious.
At first I was thinking what the heck are you doing?
but then I realised that I'm either blind or an idiot :P
I read caramel as camel .
Camel bacon pancakes and salted camels do not sound very good.
I dunno man, I'd try some camel bacon pancakes.
I added too much salt to my spaghetti ): it was the worst.
Once I managed to make a cloud of mace smoke
I was heating up an iron skillet to sear meat and though " oh it would be a wonderful idea to flavor the oil before I start cooking"
Then I got the bright Idea to use a rather strong hot sauce for a little kick.
Then I got the bright idea to add it to the hot pan before I added the oil.
The hot sauce vaporized and well everyone in the room had burning red eyes and couldn't breath.
I managed to accidentally weaponize hot sauce.
I once left sausages on the BBQ overnight after a heavy night of drinking. I woke up the next day with my propane all gone and the sausages were black charcoals the size of cigarettes.
I once tried to microwave dry rice. For some reason on this day I forgot that you need to put water in the bowl with the minute rice. I put the bowl in the microwave and went upstairs to my computer until I noticed my house was full of smoke and the microwave was on fire.
Usually forgetting stuff I'm cooking - waay too dangerous
I wasn't cooking per se, but when I was.. 8 (or maybe 10) I was trying to cut an apple for myself, and the only clean one I could find was a chef's knife. Being the wise pre-teenager that I was this seemed to be perfectly sufficient for my needs. One slice through apple and (the side of) my finger later I'm dropping the knife and yelping in pain. I still have the 6 stitched scar to show how not to do things.
Just something stupid, it was once of my first times ever cooking something on the stove, I must of been like 9 or 10. There was a packet of soy sauce stuck to the bottom of the pot, and it started a fire almost instantly when I turned the burner on. I didn't know what to do so I just started screaming for my mom but if she wasn't close by it would not have been good. Since then I check the underside of pots and pans every single time I cook.
I haven't had any memorable mistakes in my own kitchen but when I first started working as a line cook I sent out a wrap that had a plastic twist tie buried in it. I still get crap for that sometimes
I have done several, mistakes, but one that sticks was adding one measure of water instead of two for a measure of rice... I don't think i need to explain to you what happened next...
But yeah nothing big happened in the last few years.
I've actually got off pretty easy,for the most part...But not today. Today was a different sort of day.
So here is a little back story..I like to make yogurt and have a quaint little yogurt maker. I've also started making kefer,which is a fermented milk drink,which taste rather like a cross between sour cream and butter milk. I had two jars in the fridge, one with a cheese cloth over it, the other with a screw on lid. I bet you know where this is going..
My master plan..To make a huge container of kefier. I heated up the milk,grabbed the container,dumped it in,covered the pan with a tea towel..I come back several hours later and decide to taste it. It has thickened up nicely,but it does not taste like kefir.. Then I look at the jar,which says:"Yogurt starter,don't eat me!" So I have accidentally made half a gallon (1.89 L) of yogurt!