We've all cooked meals that've gone completely awry in one way or another — and if you say you haven't...well, I simply don't believe you. These stories, however, go far beyond your usual kitchen snafus.
Recently, u/os-sesamoideum asked redditors to share the dish they cooked "so amazingly wrong that they still cringe about it." Now listen: Though I've never tasted any of the dishes you're about to read about, I still cringed to the point of physical exhaustion. The people who actually had to eat them, though?! Nightmares forever. These are some of the best responses.
1. "While making stir-fried noodles, I somehow forgot that water existed in this world. I kept adding soy sauce when the liquid in the pan had evaporated, instead of literally just adding splashes of water to keep things from burning. The whole experience had my wife googling, 'How much salt can kill you?'"
2. "My husband is actually a fantastic cook — he was a professional for several years as a matter of fact. But before that, in our early days together, he tried to make a lemongrass curry. Since we didn't have any lemongrass, he threw in some LOOSE LEAF TEA. When we ate it, all these little lemongrass needles got completely stuck in our gums."
3. "I tried making coffee-flavored meringues once. I'm still not sure how this happened, but since I cooked them directly on an aluminum baking tray, some sort of...chemical reaction occurred, and they went a sort of khaki green color. Truthfully, they came out looking like absolute cow 💩."
4. "When I first lived by myself, I was really craving pierogies, and the shitty grocery store that was walking distance from my house didn't have Mrs. T's. I decided I would make them from scratch instead (with zero knowledge of how to make any type of dough OR assemble anything resembling a dumpling)..."
"I spent hours making those little lumps of sadness, only to watch them all promptly fall apart in the water. I tried to eat the super-thick dough and weird boiled filling anyway, but it was unfathomably bad.
Luckily, now I am pretty good at baking, making various doughs, and I even make my own pasta and dumplings regularly...so it was a nice teaching moment. Still haven't tried pierogies since, so maybe I will have to give it a go now that I actually know what the fuck I'm doing."
5. "One time I was making Hamburger Helper...but I didn't have any regular milk. So, I used vanilla almond milk thinking that the other spices and such would cover up the vanilla. Spoiler alert: It did not. No one could even fake their way through that meal."
6. "My cousin and I once served lemonade to our extended family by mixing water with yellow paint."
7. "I own this one cookbook entirely dedicated to macaroni 'n' cheese. Most of the recipes are fantastic! However, a very long time ago, I tried one of its more...interesting recipes. It had some Turkish cheeses that were hard to find (and quite pricey), and spices that I wouldn't really associate with mac 'n' chese, but hey, I'm always down for a good food adventure! Right?!"
8. "I sifted the weevils out of Bisquick before making dumplings once. I told no one."
9. "I managed to gloriously screw up heating a frozen pizza one time. I'm honestly not quite sure how the thermodynamics of this worked (or how the following is even physically possible), but the edges were completely stuck to the tray, and the middle had risen far enough for the cheese to glue itself to the wire rack above it. Oddly enough, this wasn't long after I absolutely NAILED making a soufflé for the first time... So yeah, I'm still confused."
10. "The first time I cooked a Bolognese meat sauce, the directions told me to use 'three cloves of garlic.' I, however, thought that 'clove' meant an entire bulb of garlic. It took me hours to cut it all up, and you can only imagine what the final results were like."
11. "Back when I was 6 or 7, I woke up early and wanted to make my dad some salsa — but I didn't exactly know what was in it. I did know it was spicy, however, so I tried to get some cayenne pepper off the high-up spice shelf and ended up pouring it DIRECTLY INTO MY EYES..."
12. "I had the most delicious pumpkin ravioli in Italy one time, and I really wanted to replicate it at home. But hand-making ravioli seemed like an impossible feat to me. Instead, I mixed up a can of pumpkin with a box of rotini pasta..."
13. "Screwing up in your home kitchen is bad enough, but when you screw up at work (and the entire restaurant is aware), it's even worse. As any cook knows, kitchens are an extremely fast environment to work in, and instead of having pepper shakers and boxes of salt, they literally have bins full of sugar, salt, and other basic seasonings..."
"When I was making a large batch of coleslaw, I mixed up the salt and the sugar. I got it done quick, it looked great, but I made that stupid mistake of not tasting it before sending it out. Five minutes later, the server came back, and every single table that received the coleslaw complained. And since they served coleslaw with pretty much everything...basically every single patron got to taste my sweet slaw concoction. Embarrassing as hell, but a good lesson learned."
14. "I have a friend that attempted to make 40 Clove Chicken for his class, and since his dorm room didn't have a kitchen, he used my apartment. To be clear, 40 clove chicken already uses a WHOLE lot of garlic, but he stopped halfway through peeling all of it and told us that 'it really is a lot of garlic...'"
"I asked him how much he was using, and then I realized he was trying to put 40 BULBS OF GARLIC into this dish. I'm really glad I saved my apartment (and his poor class) from that mess."
15. "My wife once made something called Porcupine Balls. It was just rolled-up ground beef and dry rice that she then baked. The rice didn't cook. Not even a little bit. It was just unseasoned beef with crunchy bits of rice."
16. "My sister made an Indian curry once and used VANILLA yogurt instead of plain. No words can describe how absolutely horrific it was."
17. "When I was 11, my parents were at the hospital having my little sister. My dad's friend was staying with me while they were gone, and I reaaally wanted a Chef Boyardee pizza. They were my ultimate comfort food back then. I'd made them before, but always with my mom's help...so I didn't realize that it was supposed to make TWO..."
"By the time the dough was baked through, all the toppings were literally incinerated. Surprise, surprise: We ended up just ordering pizza."
18. "A few years ago, I was living with a guy from the Czech Republic. One day, he started making a traditional Czech sourdough — which has caraway seeds in it. He spent a few days making a starter, and then all of a sudden, the house started to smell strongly of curry. I came home that evening to the guy looking very dejected, telling me he had 'messed up' and had to throw the bread away..."
"You see, the Czech word for 'caraway seeds' is 'kmín,' and this guy added QUITE a lot of cumin to his bread thinking they were the same thing."
19. "When I was 4 or 5 years old, I reaaaally wanted to make lemonade. So, I put lemon juice in some water, and I added some white powder to it like my grandma would..."
"It didn't taste the same. So, I added more of the white powder. Still, nope. I persisted though! After a while, my dad entered and told me I was using salt. Whoops."
20. "My friend's girlfriend once mistook 1.5 teaspoons of black pepper for...15 teaspoons. She was making a roast, and it was her first time cooking for his family. They googled strategies for reducing the taste of black pepper, and ultimately they just ordered a pizza."
21. "The first story I can think of is my Snickerdoodle Cookie Disaster. Apparently, butter can be TOO warm for baking. Who knew?! The cookies literally turned into pancakes of greasy, melted butter. Completely inedible — everything went straight into the trash."
23. "My husband and I once made homemade mac 'n' cheese, but used condensed milk instead of evaporated milk. Canned milk is all the same, right?! Yeah, no. Not at all."
24. "I was making twice-baked potatoes for a potluck one time (back when those were all the rage). Taters went into the oven, and I prepped the other ingredients and mixed them in a bowl. I needed to run out to a work event, so I left very basic instructions with my girlfriend so she could finish the job..."
"I came home to find EMPTY potato skins (more like husks) with a pile of burnt cheese at the bottom of them. The trash can was full of soft, warm potato innards.
"She locked herself in the bathroom and cried for 30 minutes, even though I'd played it off as no big deal and probably because of my 'bad' instructions."
25. "I had my parents over for our first Thanksgiving in my brand-new apartment. One of my dishes was green beans...and mint. Just mint leaves mixed with green beans. To this day, I have NO idea what I was thinking. It wasn't like mint was all I had either!! I actively bought mint with the intent of adding it to the beans."
26. "I made mulled wine this Christmas, and somehow I added cumin instead of cardamom. There's no other way to say this: It tasted like barf."
27. "I once made cookies with refrigerator baking soda. You know, the baking soda you put in the fridge to *soak up* all the bad smells. The cookies literally tasted like old food. Fifteen years ago, and I still haven't lived it down."
28. "I've cooked for as long as I can remember, so I rarely fail so badly that what I make is inedible...until I tried to make vegetarian chili. When I first met my now-fiancé, we talked about how she was vegetarian and missed her dad's chili. Since I could basically make chili with a blindfold on, I figured vegetarian chili just means 'skip the meat!' I was so wrong..."
"I underestimated just how much flavor comes from the meat itself, and when the chili tasted pretty flat, I started trying to amp up the flavor with spices and anything else I could get my hands on... Honestly, I should've just served the mediocre version. By the time I gave up, I had a chili that was simultaneously bland, bitter as hell, and inedibly spicy. It tasted like chewing on cayenne powder. I honestly can't even remember what I did to it, but it was a disaster."
29. "I made pumpkin soup once, and followed the recipe to a T. I mean, I did EVERYTHING right...but I couldn't figure out why it tasted funny..."
"Turns out I used pumpkin pie filling instead of pumpkin puree. The flavor was so, so, SO wrong."
30. "I was making a charcuterie board once, and I accidentally served a raw pork sausage to everyone. To be slightly fair, its packaging was in a different language, and I thought 'to be cooked' actually said 'was cooked.'"
31. "A random box of white rice that I bought had a recipe for rice pudding on the side, so I decided to try it out. Mind you: This was before I knew about tempering eggs, and for some reason the directions just assumed everyone knew how to do it..."
"I just cracked the eggs directly into the pot and stirred it. It was the texture of disappointment."
32. "My parents have a beautiful garden, so when my mom left town for a week to help out my sister and her new baby, I watched the house for her and helped to run the garden. There were SO many cucumbers in her garden, and I made the most delicious dill pickle brine for them. My mom left me her canning book and gave me notes on how she did it in her pressure canner. Long story short, I did ONE THING WRONG...and I ended up with 16 cans of what could've been dill pickle-flavored baby food. Every last can was mush. I've never forgiven that pressure canner."
33. "I like to cook when I get stoned — I usually turn out some really delicious stuff! One time I was making pasta salad when I got the idea to add...bananas. It was one of the very worst things I have ever done. This was over a decade ago, and my family members who I SERVED this atrocity to still bring it up."
34. "In my early 20s, I was definitely cooking every now and then, but I was certainly not very experienced. I tried to make fried chicken — no instructions or recipe! I just winged it. The results: crispy, rare chicken. Good on the outside, salmonella on the inside."
35. "The first time I tried to make chocolate chip cookies was an absolute disaster — in more ways than one. To this day, I still don't know what the hell I did wrong, but they came out the size of dinner plates (and they were just as hard)."
"Even better: My kids decided it would be 'fun' to throw them like frisbees, and they ended up breaking the front window. Yeah, that's how hard they were.
Those inedible, harder-than-rock cookies cost us about $500 in the end."
Do you have any cringeworthy cooking fails that never fail to haunt you (even years later)? Tell us about 'em in the comments.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.