Oh hi.
I’m still here, turning kitchen experiments into entertaining disasters every week. Let’s walk through the year’s funniest and most humbling recipe fails.
One of my favorite annual posts is the RECIPE DISASTERS roundup. It’s honest, messy, and usually pretty funny. While 2018 didn’t produce quite as many wipeouts as some years—I wasn’t juggling an extra cookbook—it still offered plenty of culinary mishaps worth sharing.
These are only the ones I managed to photograph before losing patience (or my sense of humor). Burnt bacon, soggy crusts, and flavor failures all made the list.
This is the ninth year I’m compiling these moments. If you want to see previous years, they’re listed below.
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
I share these fails because while many beautiful and delicious dishes come from my kitchen, many attempts go sideways. I’m a self-taught cook—learned from my mom and grandma—and most of what I make comes from trial and error. I often start from scratch to invent my own recipes, which is rewarding but guarantees a steady stream of flops.
Fails have become more stressful since having kids. My time is tightly scheduled, so when a planned recipe collapses it’s particularly frustrating. I try to stay lighthearted about it, but I’ll admit: sometimes I’m not the easiest person to be around during a kitchen meltdown.
Let’s start at the beginning of the year. January kicked off the fails.
First up: the driest beef imaginable. I tested a mocha-crusted beef for a French dip recipe, made it three times in the Instant Pot, and each attempt was dry. That experience seriously dented my love for the Instant Pot. I think I finally figured out what went wrong and will share the corrected method later in the year—spoiler: it doesn’t involve the IP.
Next: mezcal margaritas gone gray. I rimmed glasses with black salt and ended up with a cocktail speckled with black flecks that turned the drink an unappetizing shade of gray. Pretty, but not tasty.
Honey mustard drumsticks were another miss. They tasted like someone dumped straight mustard on the chicken—intense and one-dimensional. I love mustard, but these were too much.
I tried to recreate a carbonara pizza I’d enjoyed on a book tour. My version had an overly fluffy crust, undercooked pancetta, a weak sauce, and cheese that actually burned onto the crust. Not the elevated comfort I was aiming for.
Midyear I attempted a farmer’s market-inspired garlic bread topped with tomatoes. Sounds promising, but it ended up limp and disappointing; the execution was lacking.
In August I tried a fig, blue cheese, and bacon pizza—only to remember I’d already published that recipe in 2013. Worse, the new batch used figs that were past their prime, I had only microgreens on hand, and the sauce was off. It was a mess.
The pumpkin protein pancakes were a lesson in persistence: the final recipe took about 32 tests to perfect. That many iterations felt endless and, frankly, not fun.
One memorable experiment paired sheet-pan salmon with butternut squash, then topped everything with pomegranate and olives. Different ingredients cooked at wildly different rates, so the result was texturally and flavor-wise wrong. It looked ambitious and tasted… confused.
Early scalloped potato tests produced a gritty, unappealing cheese texture. That one required reworking technique and timing to get smooth, creamy results.
While testing a salted chocolate stout cake, I managed to forget the sugar in the batter—not once but twice. The cakes were dense, bitter, and inedible until the mistake was caught and corrected.
And in a real-life dinner mishap, I over-salted ribs by adding about three tablespoons of salt to a rub. I knew it felt wrong as I was doing it, but I continued anyway and only realized the mistake when we took a bite. It was shockingly salty and a reminder that even experienced cooks have scatterbrained moments.
That’s just a small slice of what 2018 looked like behind the scenes. I’d love to hear about your biggest recipe fail this year—sharing the disasters makes the kitchen a little less lonely and a lot more entertaining.