We've all made mistakes in the kitchen. Sometimes they're missteps that can be fixed — like oversalting a soup and adding some water to balance things out. But other times, our cooking mistakes are simply beyond repair.
In the spirit of letting some of those "fatal" errors go, u/catsumoto recently asked redditors to share their best "food eulogies" for dishes they've cooked that juuuust didn't end up making it out alive. These are some of the best ones.
1. "RIP my salad. I was gonna eat it while bingeing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine but managed to hit the pull chain of my ceiling fan, which caught a light fixture and wrapped around it. It then smacked into the glass cover of my bowl, shattering glass all over my room and directly into my salad bowl."
2. "We had just moved into a new rental, and I was trying to make a quick pan-fried, breaded chicken for dinner. Turns out 'high' on the new-to-me stovetop was reaaaaally effing high, and I was still in the 'take recipe directions very literally' phase that new cooks tend to go through. So, after 'searing the first side on high for two minutes,' per the directions, I flipped the cutlet, and the sucker was BLACK. Like, not even pleasantly crispy. Just pure carbon. We ordered pizza."
3. "RIP to my Jell-O. One time, when I was younger and wanted to eat some Jell-O ASAP, I thought: 'Salt makes water boil faster, right?' So, yeah, I went in with that..."
4. "Here lies my homemade chicken bone broth that took four entire chicken carcasses and 16 hours to cook down. The next morning, my dad tossed it because 'it looked weird.'"
5. "RIP to my one and only duck prosciutto. Yep, basically just prosciutto...but made with duck. I watched a recipe on YouTube. I looked for fresh duck breast everywhere. I seasoned you. I washed you. I dried you and cured you. I put you in the fridge and set a reminder for three weeks, and didn't touch you despite how excited I was..."
"It was gonna be a Saturday when you were done. The weather would be perfect. Friday I looked at you, kissed you goodnight, and said 'see you tomorrow.' Saturday morning my alarm rings, and I wake up like it's Christmas. I barely have my shorts on when my phone rings and I'm needed for an urgent shift at work, so I rush there.
I come back to an empty and cleaned-out fridge because my dad decided he was in a 'cleaning mood' that morning. He said, and I quote: 'Well, I saw you didn't touch that duck for three weeks so I threw it out...'"
6. "I have fond memories of the beautiful local bay shrimp we splurged on in college when we hardly had a dollar to our names. I lovingly cared for them, battered them, and fried them to a golden crunch. Sat down to eat them, and in our horror, we realized that I left the shells on."
7. "RIP to my Alfredo sauce after I accidentally grabbed the sweetened heavy whipping cream at the store instead of regular. I didn't even know there was a sweetened version. (My awesome man ate it anyway because we had only been dating a few months.)"
8. "RIP to the pasta salad I made with feta, olives, and cucumber for our weekend away. You were just innocently sitting in the fridge — marinating — when I tried to grab you and the potato salad at the same time. Your lid came off and 3/4 of you hit the ground and landed directly in the dog dish. I’m sorry that we called your surviving noodles 'floor pasta.' You were a good pasta salad."
9. "RIP my ex-MIL's 'seven-layer' salad...her infamy in the kitchen was well known in the family. I would often be recruited in the kitchen to 'help her cook,' which just meant reading her the recipe. I wasn't allowed to touch anything. For the seven-layer salad, the layers were supposed to be lettuce, onion, tomato, boiled egg, peas, bacon, ranch, and cheese. A pretty standard, lame-ass Southern potluck recipe..."
10. "RIP to my wild-caught salmon — fresh out of the Pacific, and wrapped in brown paper by the fisherman who gifted it to me after I helped him with something a few days prior. It remained on the floor of my office when I left for home an hour later, on a Friday. It was still there when I returned on Monday."
11. "When I was a kid, my dad once made beer from a simple home brew kit. Everything went well until he got to the last step, which was to add sugar and bottle it. He put the powder in the bottles, added the beer, and capped everything. Fast-forward to consumption time — we realized that at the last step, he added the solution for CLEANING the tools and equipment instead of the sugar. Obviously, all the beer was wasted."
12. "My grandmother basically killed her taste buds by chain-smoking for 55 years. She decided that my bowl of mashed potatoes had 'no flavor,' so she added black pepper until they were completely gray and inedible. They looked like a pile of death."
13. "RIP to my Spanish tortilla. It's a standard recipe I've made a dozen times. I cracked four eggs directly into my garbage bin before I realized what was happening."
14. "RIP to my drunken frozen pizza. I put it in the oven after a night of drinking with friends. I fell asleep. Woke up hungover six hours later to a charcoal pizza puck smoking up my house. I turned off the oven, threw the pizza AND pan out into the snow, and went back to bed."
15. "RIP to the half a bottle of apple juice my chef-professor was reducing while we were completing a test on, IDK, herbs or whatever we took tests on in culinary school. He set it on low right before class but didn't tell us for some reason. I looked up and said, 'Is something burning?' And I watched him go from 'trying not to fall asleep while administering a test' to full 'oh, shit' mode in the blink of an eye. While I mourned the loss of that reduction, it did give us the opportunity to learn the more important culinary skill of how to get an entire inch of burned carbon off the bottom of a pan."
16. "To the beef stew I made that had so much potential: I am so, so sorry I left you unattended and got distracted, leaving you too hot for too long. You smelled great...until you were reduced to nothing. Literally nothing."
17. "RIP my first attempt at eggnog. So many eggs, so little nog. Your clumps will not be forgotten."
18. "I'll never forget the chicken broth that I had cooking in my slow cooker for 30 hours. After it had cooked, I realized that the silica gel absorbent pack from the packaging was in it the entire time."
19. "RIP the chicken noodle soup I made that I thought would be really cool with purple carrots in it. The purple carrots made the soup turn into a grayish-purple mush, and it made me gag when I ate it. I had to toss the rest."
20. "RIP to the poor chicken that gave its life so that I could make the dish that became infamously known as 'vinegar chicken.' I was shooting for a hearty chicken-and-mushrooms type dish, but may have been a liiiiittle too liberal with the 'splash' of balsamic that I added. It was…not good."
21. "A half-RIP to a very particular Thanksgiving stuffing my mom made. My mom loves to tell the story about the one Thanksgiving when she accidentally dumped the cooked pan of stuffing into the sink full of soapy dishwater. Instead of dumping it out — as she should have — she drained it, put it back in the pan, and 'cooked it off' a little more. Her dad called it the best damn stuffing he'd ever had."
22. "RIP to the 15-bean soup I cooked where I forgot to continue adding water throughout the process, resulting in 15-bean paste instead."
23. "Rest in pieces, the massive and delicious buttery chocolate cake with meringue ghosts, truffle coffins, and candied white chocolate headstones that I made for my office Halloween party back in 2010. Two days of work that would never shine ghoulish delight for my colleagues..."
"In my haste to make it to the train station for the earlier train, I tripped over my high heels going across my front doorstep, fell backward, and the cake carrier went flying down to the ground. Poor cake was completely smashed to bits, and I had a bruised ego and backside. I left the container of sorrow in the kitchen, and dejectedly made my way to work.
When I got home that night, I found that my partner and my in-laws had helped themselves to ruined cake in little bowls. It was hideous, but at least it was eaten."
24. "Rest in piece, my 18-hour homemade tonkotsu broth. It was my first time trying to make it in college. I started at about 5 p.m. and had an alarm set to check, stir, and re-top with water. Apparently, I dozed off around 3 a.m. and woke up to a different alarm — the smoke alarm. I found my beautiful broth turned into a 6-inch layer of pure charcoal, fused to the bottom of my stock pot."
What's the most tragic food-related incident you've ever experienced? Tell us about it in the comments below. 👇
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.