Have you ever tried a recipe that turned out to go horribly wrong, or maybe the end product, despite being good, just wasn’t worth the effort? What was that recipe, and what about it made you say “NEVER AGAIN”?
I ask this as I am actively trying to remove the stench of onions from my Instapot lid’s silicone ring after making French Onion Soup in it (so far steaming it with white vinegar on the steam setting, soaking the ring in a water/baking soda bath overnight, and baking it at 250 degrees F for 20 minutes have all done nothing, so I ordered a new one, I give up). And I realized that cutting all the onions and waiting hours for them to caramelize and now this damn smell issue just isn’t worth it. Plus I still have frozen soup in the freezer because I can only eat French Onion soup so many days in a row.
NEVER AGAIN.
I set out tonight to make a delicious chicken paprika kind of stewish thing I’ve done before. As is my usual habit I took the jar of paprika from the cupboard and sprinkled a generous amount in the pan. Tasted after half an hour and fuck me, it was HOT.
It was cayenne pepper, not paprika.
My stomach actually hurts a bit.
Paprikash?
Yes, kind of, though I don’t follow a recipe. It’s what veg I have kicking around, flavoured with garlic, paprika and Hungarian sweet red pepper paste. Sometimes a bit of chicken or chorizo.
This is brutal
Oh spicy.
The spice so nice you feel it twice!
There is also “hot paprika,” which was quite a surprise for everyone at the table.
That time I made banana bread but with salt instead of sugar. Accidentally, of course.
It looked sad and squishy, I tried a bit anyway. It was odd, my tongue detected something amiss, but the bad taste arrived a second or two after my brain started “reacting”, like warning lights were flashing but I didn’t know why.
And then the taste of bananabrine arrived and my face locked up in a rictus grimace.i couldn’t control my mouth so I had to scrape it out with my hand.
Truly awful.
Hahaha bananabrine, great description
You give a great visual on this.
FYI, the trick to making caramelized onions is boiling the onions. After you cut up your onions and add them to your pan, add a small amount of water, enough that the water will cook out after a few minutes. The water will steam the onions and cook them more quickly, which will them make them faster and easier to caramelize.
Here’s a video to demonstrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovqhzil3wJw
This trick works well to make mushrooms more flavorful and all sorts of other foods!
You can also cheat by adding some sodium bicarbonate.
oo, I didn’t know this trick, thanks!
Doesn’t taste quite like real caramelize onions, but it’s close enough for when you’re rushing
The flavor is not as rich, and too much baking soda will make them slimy.
It’s a good ‘I really want Crêpes but it’s already 7pm’ thing.
haha, good to know - thanks!
Instead of water you can add a bit of beer to cook the onions. You don’t taste the beer at the end but it brings a bit more flavors at the end.
yesss! and any broth really could work here in substitute for more flavor, but beer and onions is a bomb combo, especially with brats
Wine also. White is more subtle, red will give it a sort of balsamic vinegar type aftertaste.
I found a recipe for Boston Beans that sounded interesting. It involved stewing kidney beans with tomatoes, brown sugar and bacon bits.
At the end of it I realised I’d made baked beans, exactly like you’d get in a can. It tasted okay, but 45 minutes of effort when I could open a can and heat the contents in five minutes for the same result?
Done well they will be the best baked beans you will ever have… but they are still baked beans. They can only be so good.
Try adding a 3/4 cup of a Baja Chipotle bbq sauce, ancho powder, white pepper, 4 strips chopped bacon, and various other fiery powders n spices
I just think theres a definite ceiling on how good baked beans can be before it stops being baked beans.
True. Southern people would call what I just described a variation on Chili Beans
Pumpkin pie using fresh pie pumpkins. It’s not that hard, but it takes more time and means washing more dishes, and no one that I know of can tell the difference vs. a pie made using canned 100% pumpkin.
I think it depends on the squash you use. Sure, buying a cheap pie pumpkin or butternut squash at the store might not taste that much better, but a home-grown squash or good local squash can far exceed the flavor of canned pumpkin. As usual, a lot of cooking is about using fresh, good quality ingredients.
I hear what you’re saying, but I also hear, “no, just do even more work!” Haha. As it is, baking a single pie is already more expensive than a single store bought pie, and the people I’m pawning my leftovers off to don’t seem to know the difference.
On top of that, I live in a high rise in the middle of the city, so home-grown squash is impossible (I barely have space for a few window sill herbs), and anything “local” is going to be even more expensive. Just not worth it to me so I can have a few slices of pie.
yeah, that makes sense in your context - canned squash isn’t so bad, definitely not worth making from scratch.
I’m in a suburb where I have grown squash in my compost bin and gotten a harvest that lasted me a whole year, and that squash was some of the tastiest and had the most colorful of any squash I’ve had. The squash was also essentially free, a waste product, and in that context it seemed worth it (at least in some sense). However, it does take time and planning and a lot more work, and as you’re saying depending on who you’re baking for they may not appreciate it.
In college we actually had a huge debate about this, spanning half a decade and involving around 6 separate bakeoffs. I can conclusively say that I cannot tell the difference between whole pumpkin and canned pumpkin. That said, the pre-made canned filling is garbage. I can smell that difference from across the room. I can smell it from among four other pies. It’s like a completely different food product compared to homemade pumpkin custard.
For the store baked pies, it’s the same. The bad ones use the premixed stuff and taste like sadness, and the good ones taste like pumpkin pie. For me, the thicker the pie, the better it probably is, and what really sets good pies apart from each other is the crust.
Yeah, I would never use the canned pie filling, only canned whole pumpkin, although I haven’t done any side by side comparisons, and only have a slice or two per year lately, so I can’t say quite as confidently that I could identify the difference.
As I mentioned in another comment, I actually prefer a graham cracker crust for my pumpkin pie, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that anywhere other than my own kitchen. It can be a little tricky to get the filling fully cooked without burning the crust, but I’ve found that chilling the crust until just before baking helps a lot.
See, I hate crust, so I don’t really care about it. It’s all about how good the filling is.
Usually the thick pies aren’t that great to me, but mine comes out with a very light consistency so that’s probably why.
Most store bought pies suck though and none of them use cardamom, which is really the key to a great pumpkin pie.
I love making pumpkin pie from scratch, but fuck doing the crust from scratch. Last time I did that it was super doughy cuz I tried to reroll it out after it didn’t go into the pan right without chilling it beforehand.
Oh, I actually prefer a graham cracker crust for my pumpkin pie, and those are definitely easier than traditional crusts!
Angel Food Cake. It turned out fine, but it really wasn’t much better than the store bought kind. Plus it calls for about a million egg whites so I was left with a million egg yolks when it was all said and done.
You’re supposed to make an angel food cake and a pound cake using the two halves of a dozen eggs.
We buy egg whites in a carton. Much less hassle that way
What did you end up doing with all the egg yolks?
Fucking cauliflower vegan “wings” they were the nastiest, smelliest, mushiest pile of gross I have ever tasted.
I have a dog who is a rescue, she was severely neglected when we first got her as a foster and her file stated she had to eat her own feces in order to survive at the place she was rescued from. Well, those cauliflower wings I just told you about? She sniffed them and gagged!! That’s how bad they were.
cauliflower wings properly made are amazing, but you should definitely not follow a recipe that results in nasty mush 😆
Sounds like you fucked something up when making them. I’m not vegan but I’ve tried them and they’re ok when done properly. Not special, but okay and far from vile garbage.
Yeah, probably. Still, they smelled like zombie farts so I stir clear away from trying them again but to each their own.
Similarly, cauliflower steak. I followed some recipe that just turned it into a brick of balsamic vinegarette and, while I love both cauliflower and balsamic vinaigrette, this was not delicious nor did it taste like steak.
I tried to make cauliflower hummus once, it was fucking rank.
Orange chicken.
It was my comfort food while studying in the US. At Panda Express it was cheap, convenient, and delicious.
Then I tried making it. And… although I could make delicious-er, it was too much work. Then I forgot how much work it was, and made it again, and I swore, never again. I don’t have a proper kitchen or a fryer, and it took me about two hours of active work (if you’re serving 8 people). Most other food I make is max 20 minutes, and the rest is just time passing and heat doing its thing. Even dishes that take 8 hours to prepare, is usually still only 20-30 minutes of labour.
Without the right kitchen equipment. Never again.
I might make it again soon.
My kids love Trader Joe’s frozen orange chicken and it’s easy to make.
Pan fry the breaded chicken pieces while you thaw the sauce, then toss cooked chicken in the sauce.
Cleanup is a large frying pan and tongs.
Same thing with Kung Pao Chicken from Trader Joes. Tried to make it once from scratch, never again. Hours and hours of labor and specialized ingredients that you’ll only use for that one recipe taking up space in your pantry/fridge, versus buying the frozen bag that ends up tasting better, can be prepped in no time flat, and has exactly one pan to clean up in the end. Way better.
One time I made a Chinese restaurant favorite, mei cai kou rou.
It was very long and made a ton of dirty dishes.
It turned out not quite as good as restaurant quality, cost the same, and I learned it’s better left to someone with a prep cook and dishwasher.
I can never get Chinese food right. I’ve tried making my own fried rice and chicken lo mein and it’s always nasty
It’s usually because you didn’t use enough oil, likely you need at least twice what you put in.
Or a hot enough pan, which is super difficult if you don’t have a gas range. Electric often doesn’t get hot enough
I can turn out a decent mapo tofu. Basically make a spicy pork gravy and sautee tofu in it.
Puff pastry! The constant fear the butter getting too soft, the (seeming) hours of rolling then resting in the freezer, the failure of witnessing the butter melt out in the oven was just too much for me, especially when the pre made frozen stuff is quite good.
That said, I love a challenge and have been thinking of trying it again.
Yeah. I tried it once, just to see if I could do it. Now I know I can, I never need to do it again. I buy the frozen stuff.
Fried chicken, it was absolutely delicious but the prep work, frying and dish clean up was more than I’d like.
Some sort of marshmallow dessert that added condensed milk and sugar.
It caught on fire in the oven.
It tasted like eating pure sugar.
Threw it away after it cooled and it was also a bitch to clean off the pans. 0 stars.
Reminds me of the time I tried to make spun sugar for some decorations and I wrecked so many pans of sugar water by not getting the temperature right and yes, cleaning them was a royal pain in the ass. The sugar basically turned into a solid rock inside the pan every time, so I had to add water and reheat it on the stove to melt it down again just to get it out.
We followed a cake recipe once from some US food blog. We learned then that you should only use half or even one quarter of the sugar stated in recipes from Americans and even then it might be sickeningly sweet.
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If your teeth don’t hurt is it really cake?
My wife and I tried to make Pho one year for our anniversary. Went all out and got stuff from the Asian market to make it authentic and to the recipe I was recommended.
It was so bad, we just had to throw it out and order pizza. It sucks cuz I really like Pho, but it’s just not worth trying to do myself.
The good thing is the majority of Vietnamese restaurants are small family businesses that don’t charge a lot. So for me pho is an exclusively eat out option. I know any attempt I’d make would be shit and expensive.
I’ve got pretty close with my instant pot recipe, but its hours of work and I end up throwing away so much rotted veg because I don’t use it all. So yeah, way better to buy in from a local place.
Smoked brisket. I don’t have the proper smoker, but that didn’t stop me. I turned the thing and watched fuel and air and temperature every half hour for 12 hours. It was delicious. Never again.
I can get pretty much the same results just buying from the barbecue joint 3 miles away.
For me, brisket is more of an event than a meal. Usually I’ll make it when we have friends staying with us for the weekend, and it’s an excuse for us to have beers at 6am once the meat is in the smoker. We all take turns watching temps and fuel, and having the extra hands helps with wrapping and stuff.
Another option is smoked top sirloin roast aka picanha. It has a thick fat cap and lots of marbling into the meat. Traditionally, it’s cut into steaks and grilled on a skewer, but i also like to smoke it whole and sear off the fat cap at the end. Prep is fairly simple, remove some of the fat cap (down to about 1/2") score the rest almost to the meat, season the whole thing with salt and pepper, then in the smoker at 250F. I will then take the fat trimmings and cut them down into small pieces and put them in the smoker to render into tallow. After about an hour or when the meat is 130F, I’ll wrap in pink butcher paper using the tallow that I just rendered. From there, I just watch until it hits about 155F. At that point, you can let it rest and eat, but I like to throw it on a hot grill fat side down to get a good crispy sear on it. Slice it in thin strips like brisket, it melts in your mouth.
Oh, I’m Brazilian and I’m almost cursing at you and blessing you at the same time. I’ll have to try this.
Protip for grilling picanha: you’ll want the smallest piece you can find. They’re more tender. Not so relevant if you’re slow smoking.
Of course I’d find the Brazilian when I suggest improperly cooking a picanha :p
I’ve got an electric smoker so I can just set and forget. Only have to check in at the half way mark to apply the Texas crutch.
