The 8 Dumbest Cooking Mistakes You Can Make, According To Reddit

Everyone has a cooking horror story. If you’ve ever stepped foot into a functioning kitchen, it’s almost inevitable that you’ve dropped a dish, added salt instead of sugar, or neglected to read the recipe and wing an entire meal, making something completely inedible. We hopped on the r/Cooking community on Reddit to see the dumbest cooking mistakes people have made in the kitchen.

Have a look at our picks below. 

The classic flour and icing sugar mix-up:

Reddit user tgulli shared that they once used powdered sugar instead of flour to season their salmon. With Darthsmom following suit saying they “used flour instead of powdered sugar in frosting”. To be fair, it is easy to mix up if you don’t label the containers properly. 

Forgetting the main ingredient:

It’s so easy to get caught up in the kitchen when you’re trying to do a million things at once. So much so, that when jojayp was making lemon bars, they forgot to add the lemon ingredient entirely and made “a giant shortbread cookie with sour eggs on top”. Yum.

The secret cooking ingredient…liquid detergent?

Surprisingly, a few Redditors have accidentally added liquid detergent to their meals without realising, thanks to the detergent being an eerily similar colour to oil. 

Pouring steaming hot meals into plastic containers:

The first thing on your mind after prepping a meal is making sure the food cools down before packing it into containers – at least it should be. This was not top of mind for user, souphead1 who made a vital mistake and tried to “pour a massive crock pot full of spaghetti sauce directly into a ziploc bag without letting it cool first — obviously, it immediately melted through the bag like molten lava”. Oft.

Grabbing onto a hot handle when cooking:

Petition for all handles on pots to be heat resistant because there is an abundance of Redditors who have fallen victim to accidentally grabbing the lid of a cast iron, a saucepan handle, a dutch oven lid – you name it – because they forgot how hot it was. 

Forgetting the rice when cooking:

User Roxarion had “forgotten to start rice before cooking curry, or red beans, or any other “over rice” meal”. The worst thing is making a nice hot curry, forgetting to cook the rice, letting the curry get cold while the rice cooks, and then having to reheat the curry to match the heat of your rice. A simple, but foolish mistake. 

Putting a key ingredient in the bin:

With 447 upvotes, EricBlair101 wasn’t alone in their mistake when they “Cracked eggs into the garbage and saved the shells. Did about 3 in a row before I realized what I was doing.” I mean, one time, sure… but three times? C’mon.

What spice is this?

Cumin and cinnamon powder seem to be interchangeable for user saucity who accidentally added “Tons of cinnamon added at the very last step of lovingly made hours-long tomatillo enchiladas, instead of cumin. Cinnamonchiladas. Horrible.” Bring back the cinnamon challenge I say. 

What have been your biggest cooking blunders? Let us know in the comments below.

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Lead Image Credit: Lionsgate