35 Things People Cooked So ‘Amazingly Wrong’ That They Just Had To Share Their Horrible Experiences Online

Meringues, specifically coffee flavoured. I cooked them directly onto an aluminum baking tray, some sort of chemical reaction occurred and they went a sort of khaki green colour. They came out looking like a cow [poop]

I made cookies with refrigerator baking soda. That was 15+ years ago and I still haven’t lived it down

Not mine, but my husband's.

He's actually a fantastic cook and was a professional for several years. But before that, in our early days together, he tried to make a lemongrass curry, but didn't have lemongrass. So he threw in some lemongrass tea or something, and when we ate it there were these little lemongrass needles that just stuck in our gums.

I have two from when I very first moved out and started to cook for myself and my then boyfriend/now husband.
1) pumpkin pasta - I had the most delicious pumpkin ravioli in Italy one time and wanted to replicate it. But hand making ravioli seemed like an impossible feat. So I mixed up a can of pumpkin in rotini instead. It was mushy and disgusting and I gagged on the first bite. But my husband powered through no matter how many times I said I wouldn't feel bad if he didn't eat it lol.
2) hamburger helper - I didn't have any regular milk so I used vanilla almond milk thinking the spices and such would cover up the vanilla. It did not. It was disgusting. Husband couldn't even fake it through that one haha.

I was 11, my parents were in the hospital having my sister. My dad's friend was staying with me. I wanted a Chef Boyardee pizza (those were mine and my mom's comfort food back then). I had made them before, but always with my mom's help, so I didn't realize it was supposed to make TWO pizzas.

By the time the dough was baked through, all the toppings were incinerated. We ended up just ordering pizza.

The first time I made box Mac and cheese I was trying to boil the water faster so I had the burner turned as high as it could go. Went a little too high and hit a sweet spot where the light was on to signal the stove was working, but somehow was registered to the off position so no heat was coming out. After being extremely impatient that it wasn’t boiling yet I decided the water was probably hot enough and poured the noodles in. Then I realized the stove wasn’t actually on so I turned it on for real to heat up the water. When the water finally hit a boil I was so excited I drained the pasta right away, forgetting it needed to actually cook in the hot water. Happy to say I have come a really long way from that mistake

For me it was vegetarian chili. I've been cooking for as long as I can remember so I rarely duff out so badly that what I make is inedible (it's certainly not always great, just rarely a complete disaster). But I grew up in a meat heavy household and mostly knew veggie dishes as sides. When I met my now fiancee she was vegetarian and told me she missed her dad's chili. So I was like, I can make chili with a blindfold on, vegetarian chili just means skip the meat. But I totally underestimated how much depth of flavor I traditionally got from the meat and how the fat balanced out the seasoning and it was tasting pretty flat, so I started trying to amp up the flavor... I should've just served the initial, mediocre version! By the time I threw in the towel I had a chili that was somehow simultaneously bland, acrid and inedibly spicy. And we love spicy food, it just tasted like chewing on cayenne powder. I don't even remember what I did to it, but it was a disaster.

And everyone in here is talking about how their significant others put on a good face and ate their awful meals... not mine. She took one bite, turned bright red, and told me it was awful lol. We both started laughing and said screw it and made a box of pasta instead.

Now I've learned some tricks and can make a mean vegetarian chili... but shes not strictly vegetarian anymore and will eat meat from local farms so I never make it anyways.

I have a Macaroni and cheese cookbook. The definition of Mac and cheese for the purposes of this book is any combination of pasta with cheese. Most of the recipes are fantastic. However, a very long time ago I tried one of the more interesting (and consequently expensive AF) recipes. It has a couple of Greek/Turkish cheeses that are a little hard to find and are quite pricey and then spices I don’t usually associate with Mac and cheese but hey I’m always down for a food adventure, right? Pasta, garlic, olive oil, milk-so fat so good…cinnamon, cloves, oregano, V8, Kasseri cheese….this combination was awful. OMG. Like legendarily bad. Neither me or my SO could finish it. So bad.

Fried rice, for years! I've never liked fried rice but my husband loves it. So years ago I looked up a bunch of recipes. They all said that it's a good use for leftover stale/dry rice. I took from that, and from the name of the dish, that the goal was to make the rice really crispy and crunchy. So I got in the habit of frying the rice in oil until it was firm and crunchy, then added eggs, etc. I figured that was a better way of achieving the 'desired' outcome then stirring the rice into the egg. It was only after several years of this that I learned that the reason that leftover rice is recommended is because the dish brings it back to life by adding moisture. Quite the opposite of what I was doing. Oops.

My parents have a garden. I worked as a school teacher and had summers off, and my sisters first child was about to be born.

So my mom left town for a week, and I was happy to visit and help run the house/garden/handle food for them.

And I made. The most. Delicious dill pickle brine! We had so many cukes from the garden and my mom left me the ball canning jar book and gave me notes on anything she did differently. I was excited!

But my mom forgot one thing. For pickling cucumbers specifically, she used the pressure canner, but without the little weight on top. So, not knowing better, I had a little weight on there.

And that's how I ended up with 16 pints of dill baby pickle mush.

All of it. All of it was cooked to mush. I have not forgiven the pressure canner.

It's bad enough when you screw up at home but when you screw up at work and the entire restaurant is aware, it gets a little bit more. The kitchen is, as any cook knows an extremely fast place to work in. Beyond that a high volume restaurant doesn't have on Morton box of salt and the pepper shaker. They literally have bins full of sugar, salt and other things that we need to have on hand right away. Unfortunately when I was making coleslaw I mixed up the salt and the sugar. I got it done quick, it looked good but I made the stupid mistake of not tasting my food before sending it out. 5 minutes later the server comes back and every table that received the coleslaw complained. I wonder why. The funny part was that after that happened and my coleslaw was returned to the back of the house everybody had to taste it to see how salty it was including the manager and assistant manager. And to be clear, nobody was told to taste it but I don't know if it's true with all cooks but it was just this morbid curiosity to see how salty it really was and my goodness. Everybody, including me spit it out. Embarrassing but a good lesson learned.

Was feeling ambitious and going for a chicken ballotine. Got chicken brick.

I had my parents over for our first Thanksgiving in my new apartment. One of my dishes was green beans... and mint. Just chopped up mint leaves mixed with the green beans. To this day I have no idea what I was thinking. Wasn't like mint was all I had. I actively bought mint with the intent of adding them to the beans.

I skipped the whole "cooking" part and served a raw pork sausage as charcuterie!

To be slightly fair, it's packing was in another language and I thought "to be cooked" actually said "was cooked"

One time I decided to make pumpkin soup, followed the recipe & did everything right. But I couldn't figure out why it tasted funny. Turns out I I used pumpkin pie filling instead of pumpkin puree....the flavor was so wrong.

The first cake I made for my boyfriend (now husband) was lemon as it's his favorite. I was so busy making a good dinner...which turned out. I didn't realize my eggs were older & I used a cake mix. Well something went wrong & it stuck to the pan, I tried decorating it hoping it would help. He ate it & said it was really good. Soon as he left I threw it out. That was my worst baking flop ever!! Can't believe we actually ate it.