Amateur home chefs: what dish have you made once but will *never* do again?

Cafe Society
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Continuing the discussion from Amateur home chefs: what dish have you never attempted, that you want to try soon?:

Reading the thread, I realized I have more-or-less actually cooked everything that I wanted to try for myself once, or twice, but my mind kept coming up with dishes that I have made, and in fact enjoyed but vowed never to do again due to the sheer work involved. Here’s a place to share your same stories, or even ones where you did something once and hated the result to the point you wrote it off!

Two big ones for me. The first a qualified success but no, and the second a complete success but still a never again.

The qualified success: Chinese soup dumplings.

God, I love these things, even some of the cheaper versions you get at places like Trader Joes. The bite of dough, the spurt of hop soup, the tiny bit of meat! It’s a flavor explosion, especially if you set up a few simple sauces or oils for dipping (good ponzu and a simple sesame oil chili sauce by my choice). So, after a lot of research, I decided to make my own.

It took DAYS of on and off effort. Making the dough, making the reduced sauces, making some lovely char sui to add just a touch of meatiness… The results were incredibly tasty, but about 70-80% of the dumplings failed the steaming step and lost most of the stock to the steamer. And while they were really good, they absolutely didn’t justify the endless fidgety work. I’ll just have to find a place that does them well locally (still looking) and pay someone to do it!

The complete success: from scratch homemade sausage

I made a roasted hatch, cilantro, garlic and pork batch, plus a mango habanero chipotle batch, probably about 24 sausages in all, maybe 6ish pounds in all. I did “cheat” by using collagen casings rather than natural ones, but otherwise I chopped and chilled the meat and additional fat, all the fruits and seasonings, ground it with a meat grind attachment on my Kitchenaid (endless efforts to keep everything cold), let it rest a few moments, and then swapped to the stuffing attachment for another burst of work, followed by careful twisting, portioning, and what felt like another half a day of cleaning all the equipment, kitchen and sink.

They were very good - do NOT get me wrong, juicy, flavorful, with the heat and herby flavors perfectly tuned to my preference. But the sheer amount of work involved outweighs doing it again. I mean, I get get sausages 70-80% as good by just going to Whole Foods on a whim (much less a dedicated specialty shop) without the immense effort and pre-planning. And even without the cost of the specialty equipment I purchased to do it, the savings were not dramatic - economy of scale and all that.

Enough about me, what dishes will YOU never make again?!

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Never again will make Korean naenmyeong cold noodles. The timing is just impossible to get right. Cook it 20 seconds too little and it’s too hard to chew; cook it 20 seconds too long and the whole thing is almost dissolved-goo.

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Back in the early 80s when I was a rabid self-taught home cook, I subscribed to Bon Appétit magazine and faithfully made many of the recipes contained in its issues. I learned a lot.

Once there was a European torte. It was beautiful, composed of 3 hazelnut meringue disks, a couple different cream fillings and a booze-infused raspberry sauce topping along with fresh raspberries throughout. It took 3 days to make all the components. It had to be assembled only shortly before presentation because the cream would moisten the crisp hazelnut disks and in a day or so, it would become soggy.

No argument it was different, dramatic and tasty.

I’ve never made it again.

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Madhur Jaffrey’s chicken biriyani. I actually made it twice, but i doubt I’ll make it again. It was super. Vastly tastier than any biriyani I’ve ever purchased. A complete success. And it was a full day of work. Just not worth it.

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Hmm…interesting inverted premise from my post. I’ve been thinking on what I could contribute, because I know there’ve been several over the years, but not too much is coming to mind right now.

Let’s see…I tried making Madhur Jaffrey’s chicken biryani recipe last year. The results were good, it was tasty and all, but for the amount of work vs. the payoff it’s definitely not something that I’m making again very soon, if at all.

Oh yeah, don’t know if it quite counts as a ‘dish’ in itself but i tried fermenting my own sauerkraut a few years ago. Someone at work was telling me it was super easy and the results were great. So I weighed down shredded cabbage to keep it submerged in salted water for several weeks, carefully skimming the scum off the top of the water at regular intervals, and making sure the cabbage stayed submerged and the water topped up. The result was the cabbage barely fermented. It basically stayed wet salted cabbage. Not sure where I went wrong, but after that I decided “eh, store-bought kraut is just fine with me”.

ETA: what a fine Ninja‘ing job, @puzzlegal ! Bravo! :laughing:

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we made it every xmas for a few years but homemade salt water taffy…the endless pulling and the burns on my hands … the hours of wrapping and if you didn’t eat it it just became rocks if I want it I find a candy store around town

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Yes, rather than hijacking your thread with my feelings, I did the spin off as we are often encouraged to do.

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A cake from scratch. Cake mix is sooooo much better. Mind you, I make the frosting from scratch.

From scratch baked Mac & Cheese- okay, that was worth it, and I might do it again, but only for something special. Not for the work potluck. :crazy_face:

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Isn’t that the one where she says something about one of the components being praying that you did everything right?

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We have a family recipe for something called “gobs”. For those not familiar with them, they’re a sort of cake-ish chocolate sandwich cookie, filled with buttercream frosting. They’re delicious, and whenever I visit a relative who has them, I’m very grateful.

They’re also a ton of work, and make a huge mess. I might make them again, eventually, but not for a long time.

I’ll also happily take part in a team to make pierogis, but I’ll never make them all by myself again. If nobody volunteers to help out, sorry, folks, we’ll be serving factory-made pierogis at the church fish fries.

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I feel you. I just made a bunch of vareniki (Ukranian version of pierogi) for a potluck couple-three months ago and remember thinking to myself, “I think I’ve done this for the last time.”

Honestly, it wasn’t even that hard, just time consuming over a few days. But they don’t travel all that well and the result – after travel – wasn’t worth the effort.

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I was thinking about the one time I tried to make my own baklava – except it wasn’t just me, I remember both my mom (who was visiting for the week) and my wife having to help with the assembly. All that separating of the phyllo dough and layering it with the filling and brushing on the butter, over and over and over… It was way too much effort, and I wound up taking most of it to work and giving it away because there was no way I could eat that much baklava. I’ll just stick with ordering it for dessert when we go to the Greek restaurant.

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Huh. Maybe you need a better recipe? I make cake from scratch a couple of times a year, and it’s not a lot harder than using a mix, and tastes way better.

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Gotta agree. There are some really easy, from-scratch dandy recipes out there.

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I don’t think so? I don’t think any of the steps was tricky. It’s just that there are a lot of them, and a lot of waiting as well as a lot of active time, and it just adds up to a lot of work. I’ll have to check my cookbook, now.

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We make both of these on the regular, but it is always a family event, an excuse to get together.

They are both delicious, but I would never do either one solo.

ETA: City chicken is another one.

mmm

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I sadly don’t have my book anymore to check, but one of her biryani recipes had a very humorous forward about how much trouble the dish is to make.

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Many years ago, I made traditional Cantonese-style mooncakes for the Chinese Harvest Moon Festival.

Never again.

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My mom wanted to make this when I was a kid, and of course I was recruited to help. She never did it again, for the same reasons.

For me, macarons. Made them with a friend. They’re good the day you make them, next day all the crispness disappears. If I ever move to Arizona I might try it again … eh, nah.

Also, sushi, though I didn’t try it at home, but at a hands-on class run by a local Japanese chef. Note that he made the rice and brought the fish. I don’t particularly like rice so I am pretty slapdash when it comes doing it at home (I bought a rice cooker years ago so I measure, dump and let the machine do the rest). His instruction on making good rice for sushi turned me off from ever trying to do it at home, plus of course it takes a lot of practice to make a nice looking roll.

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Tamales. It is time consuming to make the masa dough with lard, make the filling, put them together, then steam. We’ve done it a couple times and had fantastic results, but not sure we’ll do it again.