Croissants and Danish pastries, getting the right amount of layers of chilled butter layers.
Most difficult that I’ve succeeded at? Vegetable lasagna. Got the marinara recipe down pat now but it’s still complicated with the marinara, ricotta, yellow and zuchini squash to get taste and texture right and no water in the bottom of the pan.
Close second? Homemade butterscotch pudding. The burnt/sweet/unami ratio perfect and sets up to be sooooo creamy . . . and I lost my recipe.
Most difficult and still failing? oven roasted soup bones => brown stock. Maybe with my new pressure cooker I’ll give it one more try.
Close second? Chicken curry. So bland. Not non-spicy bland but assload of homemade curry powder and it barely tastes like anything bland.
If you’re adding an assload of curry, I assume your problem is not enough salt. (And/or not adding the powder to oil to help dissolve the oil soluble flavors.)
OK one last try with more salt and adding oil.
There’s a few different ways of making chicken curry, but my general technique is to fry up the ginger-garlic-onion paste in oil or ghee, and, before I add any liquid ingredients, fry up the masala/curry powder in the oily paste for about a minute over low to medium low heat, until fragrant. You really do need the powder to dissolve and cook up in the oil, but be careful not to let it burn.
My issue with the way most people make stock is in the boiling - and I would place pressure cooker in this category.
When you boil bones you pull minerals out of the bones as well as convincing the flavor to come out of the marrow and attached tissues, and the minerals impart an odd flavor to the stock that gets concentrated when you evaporate off the excess water. Sort of a musty carmelly scorchy taste. A stock should never get above 180F, it should shimmer, not bubble. [also boiling tweaks proteins and can make a cloudy stock]
Sponge cake. Neither my mother nor my grandmothers nor any of my aunts bake; I got a “very simple recipe” from Rita, a friend of Mom’s.
The first attempt was what my brothers describe as “the day Nava made lembas”: it didn’t rise at all, tasted good and seemed like it could last pretty long (said brothers not having been allowed to stuff themselves on it).
The second attempt, having extracted from Rita all the information she hadn’t written down because she’d taken it for granted, was good. My family describes any situation in which critical information was missing because someone assumed everybody else knew it as “a Rita-style recipe”.
MrAru made submarine hull plating once-a chocolate cake he forgot to put leavening in. It didn’t rise, was an odd semitranslucent brown and was rubbery, about an inch thick…a chunk of it bounced 
Yeah…trying to do those from scratch is a royal pain in the ass.
I have mentioned before that Joy Of Cooking has a great recipe for Mousakka. However, it takes most of a day to make and, after making it a few times, I have “improved” the recipe but it takes even longer.
So while I do make it once in the autumn, I usually swear “never again” after doing it. But it tastes so good that I find myself going back and making another one at some point in time (after I sort of forget what a PIA it is to make.)
Thanksgiving dinner is more like a military challenge, and I have it down to an art. Yes, lots of things going on at the same time, but I have done it so often I can (and have) done it in my sleep, with perfect results every time.
I guess practice makes perfect for any dish…but sometimes that practice can be more trouble than it is worth.
Also forgot to mention the one time in Berlin where I made a pumpkin pie from scratch - using a real pumpkin! It took forever. The guests wolfed it down in 3 seconds.
Never again.
It’s always a bit tricky figuring out exactly what to leave out and what to leave in in terms of instructions in a recipe. I’m not sure what step she left out, but there are usually some assumptions made when giving a recipe, like that a person knows what “sautee” means or “to fold something in” means, etc., otherwise you can drill down to almost unlimited detail. I mean, if I know someone is new to a particular kind of cooking, I will try to be as detailed as possible, but if someone is experienced, then a basic ingredient list and very general instructions will suffice. And even if she knew you were completely noobs at this, it’s still sometimes hard to remember what actually is “common knowledge” and what isn’t.
(I’ve read nothing since the description of Nasi Lamak.
I can think of nothing else now! Curses! I want, I want, I want!
Jonesing for something not available, no way, no how! Curses again!)
my gf makes pumpkin pie when pumpkins are in season. She always uses real pumpkins, and it’s really pretty simple. I halve the pumpkin, seed, rub with some oil, and roast. When cool you remove the “meat” and proceed.
How can you go wrong with a roux? You just melt the butter and stir in the flour.
I’ve found that paying a lot of attention to the mise en place and actually thinking and planning out what and how you’re going to cook the dish pays huge dividends.
With that in mind, I’ve found that difficult != complicated. Strangely enough, some of the things I find the most difficult to do well are simple things like grilling and roasting, especially if you don’t have a leave-in oven thermometer or an accurate oven or grill.
Oh, that and cooking fish correctly is tough for me.
Oil the skin side of a nice fillet and put it on a 350 ish grill. Check periodically and when the flesh is 80% opaque, remove it from the grill (leaving the skin behind if possible) and cover with foil. In 5 minutes it will be ready to serve.
I think people try to hurry it.
There’s that window of time when you’ve got cooked flour - too little time and you have raw flour, too much time and you have burnt flour.
In Cajun cooking, you’re often doing peanut butter or chocolate rouxs. These are cooked down to the color of, you guessed it, peanut butter or chocolate. If done over a stovetop as they traditionally are, they require near-constant attention and stirring so as not to let the flour burn. If you let it burn, you’re fucked–the bitter burnt flavor will take over the dish. Start over.
Some very good and practiced cooks can take a roux to chocolate stages in 10-15 minutes over very high heat. More typically, a chocolate roux takes 30-45 minutes.
Here’s a pretty good run-down on roux (and a great Creole/Cajun recipe resource to boot.) They say 20 minutes for an experienced roux maker to do chocolate roux over high heat and up to an hour for the low heat method.
Probably the most difficult recipe I ever made was one time when I decided to make a gallon of pistachio ice cream. The recipe used several cups of pistachios and I foolishly didn’t buy unshelled pistachios. I think I spent over two hours shelling those little bastards.