I wanted to make hummus but the store I was in didn’t carry tahini. They did have cashew butter so I used that instead; worked out really well and now I use both if I can get both.
Another time, I decided to experiment with beans other than the garbanzos. I decided to try black beans; the result was … edible.
I’d been making rib-meat “tacos” for a while, and, around the same time, I was experimenting with pizza dough. One day, I swapped out the corn tortilla for a thick base of that pizza dough, changed the rib seasoning a little and made tsatziki sauce. It turned out to be an outstanding gyro workaround. Certainly not genius (per OP), although I did feel proud of myself for about a week. What happened? I tried making it again. 
I was making pasta with a tomato-cream sauce. Except I didn’t have any cream, so I tried using milk. It was edible, but it resulted in a really thin, watery sauce that didn’t really stick to the pasta.
I was halfway through making goulash (Just beef, beans, pasta, and sauce) when I realized I I didn’t have any tomato sauce.
So I used Campbell’s Tomato soup instead. Now I won’t make goulash any other way.
I can assure everyone that you can not substitute powdered sugar for flour when making pancakes.
Joey, that’s exactly the kinda substitution my sister routinely does in her kitchen. White powder subbed for white powder. She’s the most awful cook ever.
To be fair, I didn’t do it on purpose. I was trying to make pancakes and it just wasn’t working. Eventually, after multiple batches, I realized I grabbed the powdered sugar instead of the flour (they were in identical jars) and I didn’t know enough about cooking at the time to be able to tell the difference just by looking at them.
Speaking of pancakes, I learned you can’t simply substitute buttermilk into a pancake recipe that isn’t meant for buttermilk. I had some leftover from another recipe, and pancakes seemed like the obvious way to use it up. But I was too lazy to look up a proper recipe for buttermilk pancakes and just used my usual recipe, but with buttermilk.
The first think I found was that since buttermilk is thicker than regular milk, if you don’t adjust the amount of flour you get batter that’s way too thick. I tried to fix that by adding more, and just kind of eyeballing it but probably added too much and got batter that was too thin. Also, I have since learned that the key to buttermilk pancakes is to add baking soda in addition to baking powder, since buttermilk is acidic. Anyway, probably because of both the too think batter and lack of baking soda, I ended up with thin, rubbery pancakes that were, well, edible, but unspectacular.
To me it was just …off. This was 25 years ago so my memory isn’t what it was but I remember a,distinctly chickeny taste to the ground beef.
I suspect the ‘success’ of the Scotch was partly due to letting the whole bolognese simmer for longer than usual, which might have evaporated more of the alcohol as well.
The vermouth substitution for wine would have been my preference, had I any on hand. It was either the Scotch, Malibu or Cointreau: not the hardest decision I’ve needed to make in the kitchen!
Many years ago, as a poor dude just out of high school, I was baking bread but I ran out of flour, and the only other grain I had that was remotely plausible was yellow grits, so I threw a bunch of those in with my molasses dough. Turns out that’s pretty close to anadama bread, only with a little more crunch from the grits. It was great, and I still make anadama bread to this day.
Around the same time a friend of mine was making mushroom stroganoff for dinner but couldn’t find the sour cream he’d just bought. “Oh,” his roommate said, “Sorry, I ate it.” Like, with a spoon, straight from the tub.
My friend was freaking out, and I was like, “Hey, substitutions work fine. Sour cream is just a tart creamy fatty spread. Mayonnaise would probably work pretty well.” He was deeply skeptical but took my advice.
Mayonnaise did not work pretty well.
The only good thing that came out of that was a chance for my friend to make fun of me for years.
It’s no brainer but I’ve substituted fish sauce for salt in almost everything with good results. Not tried it in bread dough though. Maybe next time.
One disaster I remeber for the rest of my life was when I was twenty something and a friend of mine was gave me the keys to look after his apartment. We went there and noticed that we were hungry. Everything except the freeze was shipped out to their vacation place. So we found this frozen ground beef in the freezer and decided to make some burgers. No fat anywhere to use on the pan so we figured out that a glyserol soap was mainly fat and it actually lubricated the pan. So we fried the burgers in glyserol soap and they had this sickly perfurmly taste in them.
I was making a batch of chicken tikka masala a few years ago, and while I’d normally oven-broil the marinated chicken, it was too hot at that time of year to turn the broiler on so I cooked it on the stovetop instead. That was when I realized I was going to have to deglaze the pan, and I didn’t have any broth or wine on hand. I did however have some white vinegar - and what is vinegar if not old wine? - and figured I could use that instead.
It actually worked pretty well and added a bit of sour flavor to the finished curry.
As a kid I had a hankering for a root beer float. All we had in the house was some generic cola and chocolate ice cream.
I still, 5+ decades later, remember that taste.
Hint: This does not fall into the Genius category.
mmm
Were you high? You were high, you must have been high. I can’t imagine anyone being so hungry that they’d be willing to eat a burger cooked with soap other than a high 20 something year old.
My wife’s from Japan. She thinks that in Western food, all ingredients in a specific category are interchangeable.
Most notably, cheese.
I once watched her make an omelette, and halfway through she realizes we’re out of cheddar, and she throws in a chunk of stilton instead. The taste was very… special… let’s put it like that.
Same woman will be horrified if I make curry udon with ramen instead of udon. But all cheeses are the same to her.
Um, burgers provide their own fat for the frying process.
No, we were broke. No money honey. So the only food we had was what was there.
Not when you have lean grounded beef. There’s not enough fat to fry they burn. You can use grill to cook them but on pan it just does not work.
Lean beef? This exists? <<shudder.>>
Must have been an electric skillet if your beef needed grounding.
