While some people may be better cooks than others, we all have had our fair share of cooking blunders. These people share the dumbest mistakes they've made while cooking that ultimately led to a complete disaster.
We’ve all been there, right? Maybe you forgot to add eggs to your cookies, or left the burner on without having it lit– or perhaps caused a small fire inside of the oven. Or maybe it was just me that did all of those things? Either way, these mistakes are mostly relatable and almost all hilarious.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
I thought the juice that came in a bottle of olives was the same thing as olive oil. I learned that it cannot be used to lubricate a frying pan for cooking a quesadilla. Source
The pasta from hell.
I actually tried straining boiling pasta by putting my hand on the edge of the pot and dumping the pasta against my hand. Source
There is such a thing as too much coffee.
I was making a coffee flavored cheesecake. The recipe called for seven tablespoons of coffee. I added seven tablespoons of (instant) coffee grounds. The caffeine was strong with this one. Source
That was definitely not pepper.
I used what I thought was pepper when making a soup at my parents house. Turned out it was sand my mom had brought back from the Oregon Coast the week before. Source
“DON’T!”
My girlfriend and I had cooked salmon in a glass dish in the oven. After taking the cooked salmon to a serving plate I put the glass dish in the sink. She shouted “Don’t!” the same time I turned on cold water on the glass to cool it down and it exploded.Source
It’s not my fault mom.
I was 12. My mom was a great cook, but refused to ever do it unless she was hungry, so I learned to cook at a young age. On this particular day I was making French fries. Cut up the potatoes, put the oil on the stove got a phone call. Forgot about it. Next thing I know, I see bright yellow gleaming from the kitchen. I frantically search for baking soda or a fire extinguisher to no avail. Mom is screaming. As I’m looking for a lid to put on it, she wets a towel and throws it on top of it, sending oil all over the place, basically setting the kitchen on fire. I grab the pan and throw it out the back door catching the yard on fire. Proceed to beat out the remaining flames around the kitchen. A shouting match ensues, and the end result is I’m not allowed to cook anymore. Nothing changes though, and I go back to cooking. Kitchen cabinets still have burn marks to this day.
Tldr: cook for your children or they’ll burn down your house. Source
That is definitely not what it means.
My aunt asks my cousin to make muffins. Later she walks into the kitchen to find my cousin swirling her fingers in the batter. Apparently my cousin was confused by the instruction to “mix by hand.” Source
They are NOT the same!
In home economics class in 7th grade we had to make banana bread in small groups. Well you know how paper handouts in school would be photocopies of photocopies of photocopies and were barely coherent or intelligible? Our group thought the recipe called for 1 CUP of salt rather than the tablespoon or whatever it was supposed to be. The bread didn’t rise at all and was a salty ugly brick. So naturally, one of the more oblivious kids in my group took it with him and offered it to the mean vice principal… Needless to say she hated it, but she thought we were trying to poison her. So we got pulled out of our next classes to be yelled at… Haha weird experience. Source
And I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.
I chopped onions wrong until I was 30. For some reason after I cut the onion in half I would always chop it with the flat side up and the curved side down. This meant it didn’t sit stably on the counter so it took me forever to unevenly chop an onion (and risk cutting myself if it slipped while I was trying to hold it steady).
I’ve cut hundreds of onions this way. I swear I’m not a dumb guy, I just never really thought about it at all and eventually it just became a habit.
One day I was at my brothers’ for dinner and I offered to help him prep. After a while he looks at me struggling and just says “why don’t you turn it over?” And I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. Source
INSTANT. REGRET.
My roommate and I had both just moved into our new place, and were going to celebrate with a really kickass chicken and pasta dinner. We decided to start up the chicken while we were having a conversation in the kitchen. Start off by melting butter in a saucepan, but it starts to burn while we were busy talking. We realized it was starting to get burnt, so we both start flailing to grab the chicken, and discover it’s still in the freezer. I hastily grab a piece of chicken and fling it onto the sizzling saucepan. INSTANT. REGRET.
Sizzling liquid-butter sprays all over the kitchen. My roommate and I were both right next to the saucepan, so we both get sprayed by tons of the burning liquid-butter. I immediately dive to the ground and roll behind the counter to shield myself, but my roommate had nowhere to go, and just stood there and took the full force of it. A mix of yelps and laughter emit from the both of us as we try to comprehend what just happened. We made the realization that we were supposed to thaw the chicken, then cook it, not try to cook a frozen chicken.
Although we had tons of minor burns all over our forearms and face, we were mostly unscathed from the wrath of the chicken. We made a pact not to cook anything serious for a couple weeks since we’re clearly incapable of being adults. It’s been about two weeks since that happened, I think we’ll be due for round two pretty soon here.
TLDR: Thaw your chicken, kids. Source
Ew, gross.
One Friday morning, I was relaxedly frying eggs when I decided to add some orange essence. Orange essence. To fried eggs. What the hell, younger me.
I pour some into the cap of the bottle and pour that into the pan. The liquid proceeds to ignite midair, climbing into the lid and jumping into the bottle. At the same time the pan catches fire. I put the bottle and lid down and put the pan fire out.
Then I realize that my hand is on fire. My whole hand. And my shirt. I hit my shirt and brush the fire off my hand, unbeknownst to me that I’m ripping off about three layers of skin while I do this.
Then I realize the food essence bottle is still on fire. I blow that out, get some I’ve for the burn and eat some charred, orangey eggs.
Being a teenager, I decide to go out with friends and just walk around with an ice pack on my hand. Only that night, on the Sabbath (when I can’t use electricity or drive, being Jewish) do I decide to go into ER. I walk there with my mum, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt while walking past all the Synagogue goers I know, who are dressed in suits.
By this time, the middle and first fingers on my right hand are pretty much one big green blister. We get there and they question me about five times about how it happened, without my mom in the room (assumedly checking for child abuse, of which there was none) before they actually treat me.
It hurt like a bitch but it was definitely an interesting experience and now, a few years later, I can’t even tell that it happened, and I have a decent story.
TL;DR Shit got lit, had a hot situation on my hands. Source
Looked a bit dirty but clean enough.
I made a risotto tonight and needed a 1/4 cup of wine. I grabbed the half cup measurer off the counter. Looked a bit dirty but clean enough. Poured the wine in. Realized it was the scoop for the puppy food ????
The risotto was delicious. Source
The oven locked itself.
I made chicken souvlaki skewers once and popped them in the oven. For some reason my mom decided to set the oven temp higher but she accidentally hit “self clean”. The oven locked itself and the chicken was toast. Source
It wasn’t …. inedible
I tried making BBQ chicken wings rolled in rice krispy treats once I ran out of milk lol. I mean it wasn’t …. inedible .. Source
I thought maybe I just had a less powerful oven.
Mine was when I was making cookies as a teenager. I was converting everything from an American recipe from Imperial to metric. The recipe said ‘set your oven to 350 degrees’ – so clearly I set my oven to the highest setting possible. My dumb ass was wondering why my oven only went to 240, but I thought maybe I just had a less powerful oven… so clearly my solution was to set the timer for a little extra time to let my cookies cook properly.
Came back to the oven pouring out black smoke and crispy black hockey pucks for cookies.
If anyone is wondering, yes, you can burn silicone mats to a crisp. Source
What is life?!
The first time I cooked for my now wife, we legitimately had to call poison control. Her sister had bleached her hair that day, part of that process used a basting brush; her sister set that brush in the kitchen sink.
I, cooking up some salmon, decided that was the perfect brush for spreading whatever herb/butter situation I whipped up. It wasn’t until after dinner that she discovered ‘my’ blunder, and she ended up actually getting sick, though it could have been an unrelated illness.
I’d like to point out- who the frick puts chemical brushes in a kitchen sink? Shouldn’t that be a bathroom job or something? I’ll just put this toilet bowl brush next to the kitchen sink too, we can use it for cleaning out the baby bottles- perfect!
Edit- I guess one important detail is that it was in a dish drying rack. So I assumed it was clean. It was late and I thought my story was getting long, I just went with it. Source
No bread. Ever again.
One day I decided to bake bread… no real reason to it. Just because.
To my surprise, when I threw the bread in the oven, it started rising almost immediately. This is when I started having doubts about my measuring of ingredients.
I went to check again how much I was supposed to put in, and found I had put in 10X the baking powder what the recipe said.
Glancing back, I could see the bread still visibly rising straight up like a gigantic mushroom almost touching the grill above it. At this point i was getting pretty worried and decided to pull the bread out. BUT I COULDN’T FIND THE DAMN MITTS!
Now I am panicking. The bread and grill above it had become one at this point, BUT IT WAS STILL RISING. I turned off the stove and hoped to god that this thing would slow its ascent soon.
Unfortunately for me, instead of turning off the stove like i had intended, in my panic I turned it on to broil! All I could see inside was that the bread had begun to slowly descend from the top finally and was feeling more secure about the situation.
Just as I am thinking things are looking alright, I noticed that BROIL WAS STILL ON. An instant later the bread took on the form of a burning marshmallow on steroids.
I somehow managed to think to turn off the broiler and grab a salad bowl in a pretty calm fashion considering how mangled my nerves were at this point.
I went to the sink to fill the bowl with water to throw on the inferno that was now my stove to find that water out of the sink is EXCRUCIATINGLY slow to fill things.
A good 30 seconds later I had just barely enough water to do the deed so I opened the stove to throw the water in to find it had already burned itself out…
TLDR: Bread is now only acquired at the bakery in my household. Source
So that was fun.
Blew up hard boiled eggs. Put them on the stove, forgot them. Water boiled off. And apparently if you leave them too long without the water, they eventually explode. So that was fun.
Ironically I bake like a wizard and make it look easy. But I cook like a mentally deficient newt trying to do brain surgery. Source
Oops.
I once made chicken stock, simmered chicken and vegetables for a couple hours. Then I went to strain out the bones and old overcooked vegetables to discard them, and poured the broth down the drain.
I didn’t put a pot to catch the broth under the colander. Easily the dumbest thing I’ve ever done while cooking. Source
I thought the world had ended.
I was in high school trying to make dinner for my first ever “serious” girlfriend. My parents were out of town and she was staying over which was the most intimate thing I’d ever experienced and was trying to be romantic and whatnot.
The fanciest food I could think of then was chicken Parmesan. Somehow I ended up with the sauce in a large glass/pyrex dish cooking on high on top of a stove burner. It proceeded to explode, like really blow up, and send Pyrex glass and burning hot sauce all over both of us and the white walls of the kitchen. I was shocked because I thought the world had ended for a split second, and she proceeded to cut her bare feet on the ground. Most of the rest of the evening was spent cleaning sauce from the most remote corners of the kitchen. Source
It was an obscene amount of yogurt.
the worst mistake i ever made was i didn’t taste my ingredients. my mother brought home a 10 pound bag of unlabeled yogurt. it was an obscene amount of yogurt in clear plastic with nothing that indicated what it was. since it was so much i decided the best way to use it was to marinate some beef. cut up the meat, let it sit in our yogurt marinade, and waited for a full day. vanilla yogurt. that’s what it was. what i had created was monstrous vanilla flavored fucking beef. it was the most disgusting thing i had ever tried in my life, and i desperately did everything i could to salvage the meat. but alas, the vanilla flavor had completely permeated the meat to it’s very core. i spiced it heavily in a curry trying to overpower that vanilla flavor because it was just so much meat i had marinated, and i didn’t want to waste it. nothing. nothing could possibly make that pile of vanilla flavored shame edible. on the upside, it was incredibly tender. Source
