Despite all the great advice we’ve offered to improve your cooking, no-one is perfect. Every one of us has cooked a lousy meal at some point in our lives.
We’d like to hear about yours. Share your awful meal story below!
What’s The Worst Meal You Have Ever Cooked?
Comments
7 responses to “What’s The Worst Meal You Have Ever Cooked?”
To compliment a mates cooking I offered to make a salad. The last thing to go in was grated cucumber, which I only realised after grating 90% of it over the top that it had a thin film of cling wrap covering it’s surface. I served the salad, grated cling wrap included) and to this day have never mentioned it to anyone present that day!
Most things I cook turn out at least edible, even if they’re not great, but there have been two instances where the bin was the only option.
One was a savoury mince dish I made while I was in England – I didn’t realise the jar of crushed garlic I’d bought was actually garlic in VINEGAR. The unexpected combination of flavours was so rank I had to bin most of it (which I’d been planning to freeze for later meals).
The other was when I was learning about using bicarb soda to tenderise meat, trying to recreate the texture of meat in Chinese food. I’d been warned only to use a little, but with each successive attempt I wasn’t quite getting the meat the way I wanted it, so I’d add a little more the next time.
When you add a large teaspoonful of bicarb to a dish of pork, mushrooms and broccoli, the pork goes pink (I pickled it! I think it was halfway to bacon…) and the sauce goes green because the broccoli DISSOLVES.
My poor family were very good about it, trying to wash the sauce off and see if anything in the dish was salvageable, but in the end, it was the bin or nothing. I haven’t used the stuff since.
once cooked a banana cake, read the recipe wrong and put 1/4 cup of bicarb in instead of 1/4 teaspoon. The cake exploded out of the pan and tasted like salt… have never cooked it again.
Was forced to eat disgusting smoked spinach once, which my mother later in life admitted to being burnt spinach.
I tried to saute mushrooms once. Having no experience in either mushrooms or saute, it didn’t turn out well. Not at all. My now-wife-then-girlfriend had half a bite and put her fork down, but I – with my pride at stake – forced down half a plate of the stuff before also giving up.
I tried to recreate a Jamie Oliver dish from 30-minute meals. Pork Ragout, which uses pork sausages.
We quickly found out that Australian pork sausages have a LOT more salt than the sausages Jamie must use because it was like eating forkfuls of salt!
This one wasn’t mine, but I was present for the cooking and it’s amusing.
One of my favourite dishes is a curry that my family (and my ex’s family (shared heritage)) make which is based on curry powder and soy sauce / tomato. The trick is putting in a LOT of soy sauce, which forms the liquid base and cooking from there.
So my ex was making this one night and we’re chatting in the kitchen, she grabs the bottle of soy sauce from the pantry and starts pouring… until we notice the fragrance seems… wrong somehow. Look at the bottle, she’s been pouring balsamic vinegar instead of soy sauce. To be fair, the bottles were literally next to one another.
So we talk about it and decide to press on, pour in the right quantity of soy sauce and see how it turns out.
Well… it was edible. Just. As in, you could swallow it, but it wasn’t very nice going down.
Making it the one time that leftover curry hasn’t been eaten, and ended up thrown out.
Two dishes.
Satan’s chicken: leave chick out to get warm; marinate in sweet chilli sauce. Grill, and serve on rice with cucumber garnish. Wait for the food poisoning to begin.
A moussaka I made once came out under 1cm olive oil that the fried eggplant had liberated during baking. Completely inedible.
Aside from burnt food, the worst thing I’ve ever cooked was instant noodles with diced fried SPAM. Never again..
I tried the trick of marinating blue grenadier in rice wine vinegar to get rid of the fishy smell. I added lemongrass, garlic, and a little bit of sugar to take the edge off of the vinegar.
The part I forgot to take note of was that every time a chef did this, they were cutting it into large portions. I was cutting the fish into thin strips. It started disintegrating the second I tried to put the pieces into the pan.
I ended up with a mass of tiny slivers of fish. Cooked and edible, but a total mess.
(I also once tried blue cheese with beef burgers, but I thought I’d be smart and put the piece of blue cheese inside the patty, thinking that it would get the flavor all through the meat and help bind it together. It ended with 4 very burnt tongues.)
I was cooking a chocolate cake when I was younger. I accidentally used salt instead of sugar and forgot to put eggs in. The result was interesting.