Bad Smells in the Kitchen

[kayb]

How about shrimp going bad in the refrigerator.

How about coming home from a week-long vacation to find that your fridge/freezer died at some point during the week, with spoiled shrimp and shells (for stock), duck breasts, duck fat, several quail, and pork chops? And that's only the freezer.

Oh, dear God. That's horrible. I believe the only solution would be to move.

[HungryC]

I kept sniffing in the kitchen this weekend, looking for the odd, slightly bad smell. Checked the potatoes, onions, trash pail: nothing. Then my better half picked up the watermelon he'd purchased Friday afternoon and discovered it was rotting from the inside out....bleaaaawww. It was a thin, green skin covering a 15-lb, watery, rotten mass.

Though nothing will ever top the awful reek of post-hurricane-Katrina fridge cleanout....

[maggiethecat]

Rotting citrus. Strident, pungent, beyond nasty.

[rooftop1000]

Years ago I started noticing a smell in my freezer...I have no idea why it was strongest in there and not the fridge. I dug through things looking for the nasty bits but really wasn't finding anything. I knew there were oranges in the veg drawer and eventually thought that if I cut them up their lovely smell might help....of course they were what was rotten

T

[Kerry Beal]

I've been dry aging a rib primal. In a fridge that happens to be in a corner of a room that is not well supplied with electricity - so it's on an extension cord. Hubby walks into the room today, picks up the bitter end of the cord (he's been doing some wiring) and says "oh shit".

Me, I don't say "oh shit" or worse for about the first time in my life - I say "I've got about a hundred dollars worth of beef in that fridge".

We could start our own little body farm in the basement - what a smell! Fortunately it's garbage day and the compostable garbage now contains the beast - but the container is going to need a serious cleaning when it comes back in cause I'm sure the odour has impregnated the plastic - and then to figure out how to get the smell out of the crevices in the fridge!

[patris]

Bleargh - that all sounds awful!

A couple of years ago I took on the task of ensuring my family had an adequate supply of appropriately ripened Limberger for my dad's memorial celebration (we gorged ourselves on all his favorite foods - that was one of them). No matter how impermeable the packaging seemed (several layers of vacuum sealing, inside tinfoil, inside an airtight container), or often I changed it that cheese was a ...presence in my house long after the event. Unfortunately I didn't think about using a glass jar to contain it until everything was all over.

[Beth Wilson]

Funny how smells, good or bad, are what we seem to remember the most. Years ago, I lived in a house that was converted into apartments and for the most part we never had issues with smells from each others apartments, but in January there was something that just wreaked!

Someone in the house cooked up something that smelled like canned cat food being heated up, now I started to worry about the poor little old man in the basement apartment as I thought he was perhaps falling on hard times ...I asked my neighbour about the odor and she explained it.

Apparently, every Christmas the mans family sent him a package of food stuffs from his old country, I think he was Polish or Russian, and he didn't speak English. The smell was a special coffee like drink that honestly smelled awful...he only brewed it on weekends.

I was happy when he finally ran out of the stuff..no idea what it was.

[savvysearch]

Rotting shrimp peelings, rack of lamb before cooked, beef bones for beef stock.

[Kouign Aman]

Rotten potato. nasty beyond belief.

ripe guavas, which have a passing whiff just like the cat had been rude on the carpet.

[ChrisTaylor]

Offal. Near where I work, there are a lot of butchers that sell a wide variety of offal. Maybe it's the turn over or lack thereof, maybe it's the fact there's just so much of it, maybe the cleaning practices leave a lot to be desired ... but a lot of those butcher shops stink. It's a disgusting smell. It smells like wet dog times a hundred. Nothing about it makes me want to, oh, buy some liver steaks to fry up for dinner, even tho' I don't have a problem with being served the cooked product.

Tripe has a pretty dodgy smell although it was nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be--I guess all those shops in Springvale desensitised me to the smell of one lonely lump of animal gut in a stockpot.

I hate the smell of some canned fish products. That canned mackeral stuff, for example. Indeed, seafood in general is something I have a problem with. Now that I've found a purveyor of good quality, fresh fish it's okay, but the odd time I've been shopping in Springvale (where those butchers are too, incidentally) the smell can be overpowering.

Of course, even fresh seafood--fresh as in I caught it myself--can be a bit much at times. The couple times I went prawning, I came back and cleaned the prawns within 12 hours to make prawn cutlets or whatever. And the smell on my hands. Goddamn. You can wash your hands again and again with soap and hot water, even rub a lemon half over them, and it's always there. Takes a good couple days for it to go away.

[Beebs]

Rotten milk & cream; milk/cream containers that have not been properly rinsed and dried before getting tossed in the recycling pile. Ick.

Cooked broccoli that has gone off. And the water that broccoli has been cooked in and gets dumped in the sink. Reeks the next day.

Daikon pickles. But it stinks so good!

[Kouign Aman]

"Normal" stuff I cant stand the smell of: raw turkey, turkey cooking - all the way to the last minute when it switches to 'crispy poultry skin' smell.

I have to brown a lot of onions and garlic, and chop a lot of herbs, at thanksgiving, so I can stand to be in the house at all while the bird is in process.

[nickrey]

Belachan (Malaysian Shrimp paste). Even supposedly airtight containers won't contain the odour. Tastes wonderful when cooked but you'd have to wonder how brave the first person was who tried this.

[SylviaLovegren]

ripe guavas, which have a passing whiff just like the cat had been rude on the carpet.

Or really ripe armpit. The other day I accused my poor husband of bad hygiene...only to discover it was the box of guavas on the countertop.