Failed Culinary Experiments?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It seems there’s a lot of cooking types on these boards, and rather than pump you all for recipes - I’ve got too many I haven’t yet tried anyway - I thought it’d be fun to share our biggest mistakes! :slight_smile:

I’m in no way a professional chef or anything - just a person who loves to cook but rarely gets the chance. I’ve learned a lot in the past four years or so of being on my own, and this was one of the first.

How Not to Make Chai, or:
Never, Ever, Ever, EVER Do This

It is 1998, early winter. Two of my friends and I have been asked to babysit a house for someone going out of town. It’s five a.m. and we all desperately want Chai, but this was before Chai was trendy enough in our city to be sold at the 24-hour grocery stores. We decide it can’t be that hard to make, and that we’ll forge it from the ingredients in the house.

A quick survey reveals the following ingredients:

Earl Grey tea
French Vanilla coffee creamer
Cinnamon sticks
Allspice
Nutmeg

There is no milk in the house, and we all prefer our Chai to be made Latte and with vanilla flavouring - but not vanilla extract, we learned that when the coffeeshop forgot to put the vanilla syrup in and we tried to replace it! Blech! So we figure that French Vanilla coffee creamer will do just fine, adding both the milkiness and the vanilla flavouring that we desire.

Only one problem - we’re missing cloves. We’re all positive that there are cloves in Chai.

“Oh, hey, look,” says Justin. “They’ve got clove cigarettes!”

None of us were smokers, and all of us were convinced that clove cigarettes were made solely of cloves. Score!

We open a cigarette, muse a bit at the oddness of the contents, shrug, and dump it into the cheesecloth along with the crumbled cinnamon stick, allspice, and nutmeg, which then gets tied and unceremoniously dumped into the teapot with the water. Flavour the water, we think, and then add the earl grey, then mix it with equal parts of creamer! Perfect!

Wrong. Oh god were we wrong. More wrong than beetroot on burgers, more wrong than the wrongest thing in the history of wrongness.

It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted in my life. (Actually it was the second most disgusting thing - the first most disgusting thing was the chili-powdered oatmeal.) It was vile, vile, vile, viscous and somewhat slimy, like licking an ashtray containing a loogie someone spit into the tray after drinking a cup of cinnamon crap with cream and sugar. God, it was awful.

It put me off of Chai for like three months.

Please, Dopers. Never do this. Never cook with cigarettes. Having never smoked, I can only postulate, but my theory is that this is worse than sucking on the wrong end - like cigarettes, only liquid! UGH!

…

So, anyone else want to share? :smiley:

2

I suck at making soup.

I am normally a pretty good cook, and I didn’t just give up after the first failure. I have tried several times, with the same sucktacular results: Mushy noodles/macaroni/whatever pasta I tried, the meat is always tough and grey, the stock is thin, bland and blah. And I don’t know why. The recipes I used should have come out great.

It’s the Campbell’s life for me.

3

I tried making soup as well. I think I used the wrong flour (self-raising flour, maybe?) and I ended up making some sort of lumpy thing that smelled like sperm. :frowning:

4

Hi! I’m not Troy McClure, but you may remember me from such failed culinary experiments as Orange Pie and the Return of Orange Pie.

I tried to make an orange variation of Key Lime pie several times and all I ever ended up with was a chocolate graham cracker crust filled with hot orange juice and meringue. I eventually gave up the whole idea, even though it still sounds really good to me. There’s a thread around here somewhere about it but the whole thing is too depressing to link to.

5

I took French for three years in high school. When I saw a recipe in the paper for crepes, I thought, “Wow, cool! I’ll make it!” I wasn’t a horrible cook, and had the basic techniques down. I put the ingredients together, make the crepes. They look fine. Thin pancakes, nice golden brown. However… they tasted like Play-Doh (oh, admit it. You know what Play-Doh tastes like.)

I had followed the recipe to a T. I review it all… including the 12 teaspoons of salt. I squinted, looked a little closer at the recipe. I’ll be darned… that wasn’t “12”, that was “2”, with a stray ink mark in front of the “2”.

The next day, to my mother’s chagrin, I decided to try it again. This time, I wasn’t paying attention, and instead of two teaspoons of salt, I put two tablespoons of salt into the mix. That’s about the same as six tablespoons. Once again, I had Play-Doh pancakes. Not as strong, but still unmistakably salt-a-riffic.

And I’ve never tried to make crepes since that fateful weekend, nine years ago.

6

Caramel, without a candy thermometer. The Lady Vor has a thing for fresh caramel apples, and I was trying to impress.

The first attempt, I went well beyond the “soft-ball” stage to the “so burned that I had to soak the pan for a week to get it clean again” stage.

The second attempt, I made sure to go more slowly. And I also stirred frequently. With a cheap plastic version of a wooden spoon. Which melted into the caramel. Which added that lovely “burning tires” smell to the mixture.

Third attempt tasted ok, but was too runny and fell off the apple. I then gave up.

-LV

7

well, you didn’t specify if it was our mistake or not…my wife made ciopino once, but didn’t shell the crab (which is okay) but instead just kinda busted up all the shells!

the result was kinda rough, literally. it cooked too long and turned into a fishy, red mush laced with razor sharp shell fragments.

she also never turns the oven off after cooking. i wander into the kitchen at 11:30 and its about 104 degrees in there. i look at the oven, and its been jammin’ at 410 degrees since around 7 that evening.

i do most of the cooking around the ranch now.

8

When I was about ten, I mixed tea and coffee together, half-and-half, to see how it would taste. My mother told me she would write me out of the will if I ever tried that again.

I still think it’s a good idea . . .

9

I think I’m the only one I know who’s ever messed up chocolate chip cookies. I wasn’t even trying one of those faux fancy schmancy cookie recipes like: chocolate avocado chip crabmeat stuffed Tollhouse cookies or anything silly/Sunsety like that. I thought that I was such a cooking hotshot that surely I could make these plebian things without really even bothering to look at a written recipe. After all, I’ve made cookies almost a million times (if you’re hearing a snotty arrogant socialite voice in your head like: “darling. Those shoessss, really.” then good, that was me, the cooking Icarus). I ended up screwing up twice, first because like Phoebestar, I put in the wrong amount of stuff. A T is a t right? Then when I tried the do-over I mushed all ingredients together in the order I could remember them, none of that classy mixing in separate bowls and sort of folding stuff in. My fiance took over operations from there. Very embarrassing, to screw cookies up, not once but twice.
My mom once, cooking without her glasses, put red food colouring in instead of vanilla extract. The bottles really did look the same. The kicker was, she didn’t even notice 'til I ambled in and said "Ew, Mom, what kind of meat is that? Boy was her face red-- ba da boom!

10

Please remember that I was in college and drugs were involved…that said:

A friend and I decided that we really really really wanted to make rock candy. How do you make rock candy we said. Make a supersaturated solution and let it evaporate into yummy sugary crystals I said. We went to work. Remember-drugs were involved. We set a pot of water on the stove and brought it to a boil. We began to add sugar. We stirred and stirred and as the sugar disolved we added more and more. Some had the idea to add a bit of blue jello mix to give it some color. We all thought that was brilliant. Add more sugar. Stir. Add more sugar. Stir. Add more sugar. Stir. And on, and on, and on, and on. I think a whole bag of sugar went in that pot. Our arms were tired. We found a pencil and tied a string around the middle and stuck the string into our mixture. We figured as our supersaturated solution evaporated those crystals would form. It sat in the kitchen for a week…a disgusting blue sugar glob. We poked at it daily, but no luck. We will never do it again.

There was also the time we tried to make our own microwave popcorn in a tupperware bowl…good times…good times.

I’m a good cook. Really I am. I just shouldn’t be allowed into a kitchen if I’m not sober. :o

11

Many years ago, my lovely bride got the bright idea that the way to make absolutely lump-free mashed potatoes would be to put them in the blender. In went the boiled spuds, the milk , and the butter. Hit “Puree”.

My degree is in chemistry, but I’m not enough of a chemist to explain what happened next. The potatoes were a nicely-homogenized mass, all right. But then they started to set up. I put a spoon in them, then tried to pull it out after a while. The wad of potatoes had reached the consistency and stickiness of caulk. I pulled up the spoon, wad of potatoes, and bowl as a single unit, and I was sure that if any had dribbled out of the bowl, the table would have come up as well.

Later, I read that NASA was having trouble getting the ceramic tiles to adhere to the Shuttle. I thought they should try blended potatoes.

12

My best friend was not a very good cook. She grew up in a bad home and never really had family dinners. After she got married she wanted to start learning how to cook. She decided to ask a few couples over for dinner.

She served mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, scalloped potatoes, some sort of alfredo pasta and french bread. She burst into tears when her husband asked her why she only cooked starches. She was mad because he called her food “starch”.

Of course, being good friends we ate it all. :slight_smile:

13

I’m a pretty good cook, and the reason I can say this is because I’ve had a few good tries go horribly bad for comparison’s sake. Let me just say that if you ever come across a certain chicken spinach pizza that calls for prepackagedhoney wheat bread dough, and no stores nearby carry it, do NOT buy wheat bread and attempt to just knead a few tbs of honey into it instead. YUCK YUCK YUCK.

14

Chuckling at your story, dono…

My mom did not bake a lot when I was child…I can remember once she baked a cherry pie from scratch. Boy, it looked so appetizing, but you only needed one bite to realize that this pie had pits. She had apparently bought the canned cheeries that still had pits in them, not thinking to observe this detail. :eek:

15

Brussels sprouts with lemon.

Now I hear a number of you groaning b/c you don’t like brussels sprouts at all, but Mr. Neuse and I do. I thought lemon would be good on them. I used a lot of lemon. I did not cut it with any sugar or anything. I wanted really lemony brussels sprouts. I succeeded. They were so sour they made your nose hairs curl. My mother-in-law, [sub]of course I chose to do this one Thanksgiving[/sub]who is the most polite woman on the planet, choked down more than the rest of us, but even she called it quits after a while. So for those of you who don’t like brussels sprouts but do like lemons–here’s your chance–couldn’t even taste the sprouts.

16

Not really from the experiment category, more of the distracted mess up category.
Chili Powder looks alot like Cinnamon, but Chili Powder Coffee-Cake leaves a lot to be desired.
Also keep Comet and Kraft Parmesian cans well away from each other. While being quite aromatic and possesing a distinctinve taste. Comet does not go that well with spaghetti.

17

Not really something I did, but my former mother-in-law… a sweet, wonderful woman who cooks as well as Pamela Anderson does Shakespeare.

Thanksgiving dinner. She’s making candied sweet potatoes. The recipe called for walnuts, which she did not have. It mentioned that some cooks preferred chestnuts, which she also did not have. Fortunately, she found what seemed a suitable item… beer nuts.

Ick. And as a bonus, the combination of flavors coated the back of your tongue for several days. Ick ick.

18

We still get a kick out of it, too.

At least one of us does! :smiley:

19

I decided to try a variation on my meatloaf recipe - using cornflakes instead of bread crumbs. ick ick ick ick ick ick and ick

20

My friend works as a desk clerk at a hotel. His employers take pity on his poor-college-student status, and often give him leftover food. One day they gave him about seven boxes of hummus mix.

He ate nothing but hummus for weeks.

One day, while I was over, he decided to try a hummus variation. Figureing that hummus mix isn’t all that different from falafel mix, he tried to deep fry hummus to make hummus patties of some sort.

Do not do this! The hummus disintergrated into crubly bits of ick. We tried to make a sandwich of the resulting oily mess and lord it wasn’t pretty.