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61 Hilarious Cooking Fails That Are Actual Kitchen Crimes
There inevitably comes a time in your life when you want to spice up your usual meals and challenge yourself with an interesting new recipe.
You open a big, glossy cookbook or find a promising food blog, gather all the ingredients, and devote hours to bringing your culinary masterpiece to life. Unfortunately, all that effort doesn’t guarantee the final result will look anything like the mouthwatering picture you were trying to recreate.
Below, we’ve rounded up some hilarious cooking disasters from people who got a little too ambitious in the kitchen and failed spectacularly. Well, at least their attempts made for some pretty funny photos. Scroll down to see them!
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#1
My failed flower turned into a pretty decent cabbage
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#2
We all need to eat every day. At the most basic level, food keeps us alive and gives us the energy to function. At its best, though, it can be almost life-changingly delicious. A really good meal can be something you look forward to all day.
The problem is, there’s a big difference between simply feeding yourself and actually knowing how to cook well.
#5
Multa Nocte (she/her 8647) 5 days ago
Looks like they made the cookies, arranged them into the tree forgetting to ice them first, and then just upended the bowl of icing on the tree. The cookies are probably a tad moist now.
Amanda Fondaumiere 5 days ago
I dont care i love it and would proudly serve it to my family. They wouldn’t care what it looks like as long as it tastes good.
Thankfully, plenty of people seem pretty confident about their abilities. A YouGov survey reported by The Independent found that 52% of people in the UK could confidently cook at least 10 dishes from scratch. Almost a third said they had 20 or more dishes in their repertoire.
Still, one in 10 admitted they couldn’t cook at all, with around five million adults apparently struggling with something as simple as boiling an egg. So why do some people find such a useful everyday skill so difficult?
#9
Becky Samuel 5 days ago
The mistake here is thinking that you can make a real platter that looks like the ai-generated image.
One explanation is that cooking has to be learned somewhere. For many of us, that starts at home, simply by watching family members prepare food and helping out along the way.
But not every child gets the chance to learn those basics, which can leave them playing catch-up later in life. A study of 1,049 adults in Ireland found that people who learned most of their cooking skills as children or teenagers generally felt more confident in the kitchen as adults.
#11
Daniel Atkins 5 days ago
My guess is that the one on the left they cooked the onions or shallots before putting it on the crust then browning it. The one on the right the put the onions on the crust raw and hoped it would turn out close to the picture. There is too much water in onions to just put them raw on the crust and get the same result.
#12
If you’re of a certain age, you might remember when learning to cook at school was just part of growing up. These days, hands-on cooking lessons are something of a lost art in many places.
Japan is one country where that kind of education is still very much alive. They have something called shokuiku, which teaches children about food and nutrition from a young age. It can also include practical cooking and learning more about where food comes from.
Of course, knowing the basics of cooking doesn’t mean every recipe will be easy to pull off. Baking is notoriously fussy. It’s basically the maths of cooking, because the measurements and conditions have to be pretty precise. Change one small thing, and the final result can go in a completely different direction.
For example, if a cake recipe calls for softened butter and you use it straight from the fridge, you can end up with a cake that barely rises. Or add too much flour to cookies, and they can come out dry and crumbly instead of soft and chewy.
#16
OneHappyPuppy 5 days ago
No, I'm not trusting a random text on a box for my dinner. That baby is going on a pan
And if that sounds dramatic, consider Kate Reid. Before opening Melbourne’s famous Lune Croissanterie, the former Formula 1 aerodynamicist spent about three months testing croissants every single day.
She changed one variable at a time and treated the pastry like an engineering problem until she got the result she wanted. So yes, even someone who went on to build a business around croissants had to spend months figuring out how to make the perfect one.
#21
Hippopotamuses 5 days ago (edited)
Most of these mistakes are probably edible, but probably not this one. I'm gagging just looking at it.
Of course, most of us have full-time jobs and plenty of other things to do, so spending months perfecting a croissant recipe probably isn’t realistic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment in the kitchen and slowly get better at it.
You just have to accept that some meals will go horribly wrong along the way. That’s part of learning, and sometimes those disasters teach you the most.
#25
Janissary35680 5 days ago
Something exactly like this happened to me when I didn't notice that the rotating lid on my XXX Aleppo pepper flakes container was in the "Spoon" rather than "Shaker" setting.
#28
Janissary35680 5 days ago
I don't care what the manufacturer says. Ceramic and glass doesn't go on flame in this house, ever. Not even with heat diffusers or simmer plates.
#36
#38
#40
Hippopotamuses 5 days ago (edited)
I guessing that this is tripe, because it doesn't look like anything else which a caring god would allow to be created.
#43
Brian Droste 5 days ago
Give them to your kids and don't tell them what they supposed to look like.
#44
Hippopotamuses 5 days ago (edited)
I don't know what these things on the right are, but I've made them myself. Though my source material may have been different.
#48
Hippopotamuses 5 days ago
I can't tell whether this is bananas and chocolate, tripe and liver, or neither.
#49
kissmychakram 5 days ago
Apart from the cream, that is exactly what the water in my paint brush cleaning glass looks like.
#50
#52
Daniel Atkins 5 days ago
Remember AI exist and before that was food photography where they would use different ingredients and items to make it look this way. For example the left picture could have glue as a substitute for sauce because it would be thicker and not liquify as easily under the lights.
#54
Three hours in the 500°f oven
Hippopotamuses 5 days ago
Fahrenheit, celcius, it makes no difference when you've reached this level.
#57
Janissary35680 5 days ago
Somebody's been putting wooden cutting boards in dishwashers again...
#58
Becky Samuel 5 days ago
Again, trying to reproduce something that's clearly ai. If a recipe can't evèn be bothered to show me an image of real food, I'm definitely not going to trust it enough to waste my time trying to cook it.
#61
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What do you think ?
Apocalyptic Excavator 5 days ago (edited)
Ok, some of them are clearly accidents, some try to reproduce AI, some show a lack of patience or dexterity, some are frat kids who left their mama for the first time and don't know how reality works, but some of them really puzzle me: a person tries to reproduce a recipe, uses different ingredients and different method, then expects the result to look like the original. Why? I would like to explore their brains to find out why, in their minds, it could work.
tori Ohno 5 days ago
Some people simply refuse to take directions, so they mess everything up, then complain about it being a bad recipe.
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Cee Cee 5 days ago
Cooked for future husband. Completely inexperienced. Bought a Vesta risotto (dry ingredients in a box.) Seen ad on TV and thought you just slung it all into a pan. Didn't realise there were instructions. Slung the contents into a pan - wa very surprised when the rice started popping. We went down to the chip shop.
Apocalyptic Excavator 5 days ago (edited)
Ok, some of them are clearly accidents, some try to reproduce AI, some show a lack of patience or dexterity, some are frat kids who left their mama for the first time and don't know how reality works, but some of them really puzzle me: a person tries to reproduce a recipe, uses different ingredients and different method, then expects the result to look like the original. Why? I would like to explore their brains to find out why, in their minds, it could work.
tori Ohno 5 days ago
Some people simply refuse to take directions, so they mess everything up, then complain about it being a bad recipe.
Load More Replies... Cee Cee 5 days ago
Cooked for future husband. Completely inexperienced. Bought a Vesta risotto (dry ingredients in a box.) Seen ad on TV and thought you just slung it all into a pan. Didn't realise there were instructions. Slung the contents into a pan - wa very surprised when the rice started popping. We went down to the chip shop.
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