TDG: Burn, Baby, Burn

[Dave the Cook]

Kendra Bailey Morris cooks for a living. But behind her professional demeamor lurks an adventurous soul, a life-long student, and a pyromaniac with a purpose.

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[kendrabail]

I would be interested in hearing about any other great misshaps you guys have had in the kitchen.

Anyone have any stories to share? Exploding cakes? Gluey mashed potatoes? Burnt tenderloins??? Rock bread?

It will make me feel a lot better

The Accidental Chef

[Abra]

While it's hard to compete with Kendra, I could tell about the time I put a large gingerbread in the oven in a springform pan whose catch wasn't really caught.

The minute I set it on the hot oven rack the damned thing sprang open and batter started pouring down all over the oven. With what I thought was great presence of mind I grabbed a cookie sheet and slid the pan, with about a quarter of the batter still in it, onto the sheet. Of course, in the process I managed to drip batter into the oven door, which soon cascaded down in to the drawer below. You know the type of drawer I mean - the one with the plastic wrap, foil, matches, spare corks, and lots of other stuff that works better when not coated with gingerbread batter. In a flash of inspiration I turned on the self-clean cycle, hoping to get rid of the evidence. Soon after the oven locked irrevocably, the smoke detector went off and billows of ginger smoke filled the kitchen. You can imagine the bad language that ensued, amidst the gales of laughter.

An hour or so later, I managed to bake up the small remaining bit of batter, and it was delicious, if a bit smoky.

And yeah, I cook for a living too.

[kendrabail]

Ha! That's a good one.

Reminds me of the time when I helped teach a group of students how to make a typical buttercream cake and had them all put too much batter into their cake pans (8 cakes in 8 separate ovens) Every single last one of them exploded all over the oven, the oven door, the floors, you name it. I cleaned those 8 ovens for a week!

Not fun, and a huge mess.

Glad you got a bite or two out of your gingerbread at least!

The Accidental Chef

[Gifted Gourmet]

From my catering "career" early on:

One of my more extravagant creations resulted from a request to make a very large sheetcake with two layers separated by apricot jam (which the client insisted upon). Because it was intended to be served to a large number of people, I cheerfully tripled my recipe and, much to my surprise, found the finished cake resembled nothing less than a large, elongated tombstone, which would have received an astonished reception because it was intended for a nursing home! Even more frightening was the fact that, during delivery, the enormous cake layers shifted precariously, sliding on the apricot jam layers … ultimately, I used long barbecue skewers to anchor the shifting layers.

The cake made it for the birthday presentation but the woman for whom it was ordered, died the next week, at 95!

[hathor]

There are some very entertaining...and interesting entries on this thread!I will never again.....

You are in very good company! Fun article...thanks!

[mags]

Many years ago, in a fit of probably drug-indused hubris, I volunteered to make a wedding cake for 300. I have never baked much, had certainly never made a wedding cake, and had elected not to follow any one particular recipe, but instead to put various components together and sort of ummmm...wing it.

Because my apartment at the time was roughly the size of a sandwich, I moved for the duration to my father's apartment (he being out of town), which has an enormous kitchen that includes a molto-enormous 6-burner Viking. I had never cooked on one of them puppies before.

I made mousse-cake layers. I made a sort of concentrated raspberry sauce, strained it, and used it to tint and flavor a gigantic, bowling-ball size sphere of fondant, my first ever! (The fondant was the only success in this story.) I made dacquoise layers, the better to separate the mousse-cake layers.

Then I lost the dacquoise layers. By that point I had been up and cooking for about two and a half days straight, courtesy of some seriously potent little blue pills. It was about 4 in the morning, and I convinced myself that I had stashed the dacquoise layers under my dad's dining room chairs for......safekeeping. My father's dining room floor is covered with an old Turkish carpet, one of those ones with teeeny tiny little designs everywhere. So it's 4 in the morning and my eyes are crossing and I'm crawling around on the rug looking for the cake layers, but the little designs are sort of dancing in front of my eyes, and eventually I start smelling something funny and I get terrified that I have somehow set the rug on fire, that an ember from a cigarette had fallen on the run, and now I'm crawling around FRANTICALLY, and only after 30 minutes or so do I realize that the funny smell is coming from the oven -- which is so big that I had managed to mislay the dacquoise layers in it.

So at 5 in the morning I go out to the supermarket and get another 3 dozen eggs and start beating the whites, and I'm fine until the cat knocks something over, causing me to jump and also causing me to flick the mixer onto High, which causes the egg whites to leap out of the bowl, and I don't have any more eggs....I gave up. I collapsed on the couch, and four hours later, when my boyfriend called to ask when he should pick me up, I said "Honey, you know how all my life I've specialized in pulling rabbits out of the hat at the last minute?" He said yes. Cackling hysterically, I said, "The rabbit died!" Then I went back to the supermarket, bought about a zillion quarts of heavy cream, whipped them, and piled them into a gigantic salad bowl with raspberry sauce, raspberries, and hunks of mousse cake, and declared that I had made a wedding trifle. It was totally disgusting, but the wedding guests were so stoned that they thought it was fabulous, and ate it with their hands.

My greatest regret was that I couldn't figure out any way of incorporating my beautiful fondant. Nor could I think of anything constructive to do with it, though I did, briefly, entertain the notion of going up to the fellow sleeping on the heating grate on 72nd street and saying something like "Here, homeless person, here is a lovely ball of raspberry-flavored fondant, just for you." But ultimately, that seemed like a bad idea. So I threw it out.

[plax]

I've been baking cheesecakes since I was a teenager, and by the time I was in my late twenties I really thought I knew the recipe by heart. I was visiting friends who were sailing their motor yacht around the Abacos for the winter, and they said they'd really love one of my home-made cheesecakes. So we walked to the one grocery in Marsh Harbour-- the main town of the Abacos, the one with the traffic light-- and bought all the ingredients, including a springform pan. (Probably the only one available in the Abacos at the time.)

I thought I remembered baking powder in the recipe, so added it. Unfortunately, there was no baking powder in the recipe, and none needed. The cake blossomed in their galley oven, growing and growing like a character out of Alice in Wonderland. We finally realized and pulled it out, but by then it had gotten into the broiler element, spilled out of the pan and made a huge mess of the oven.

They told me that years later, when they prepared the boat to be sold, they were still picking cheesecake out of the element.

Neil

[Suzanne F]

I'm more likely to knock over the setup in which I'm filtering oil to reuse for deep-frying. I can't remember exactly how long ago the last occurrence was (months, not years at least), and I'm still cleaning up: just washed the kitchen rugs last week (finally) and tonight have some of the forks in the dishwasher from one of the drawers into which the oil dripped. Yuck.

Oh, wait: I just remembered: that was in early February, and it wasn't filtering oil; it was measuring it for a monster batch of vinaigrette for 60 people. Knocking-over-the-china-Melitta-cone-full-of-oil WAS a couple of years ago. And THAT was cleaned up within only a week or so. But atl ast that means that the oil I'm (still) cleaning up was clean to begin with. Whew, that's a relief.

[B33]

i asked the sous chef at my restaurant a few weeks ago how he had come to be missing the tip of his left pinky finger. He said that a few years back he was working at a meat joint and had a helpless crush on one of the female managers. One day, while being video taped by the monitor ont he wall, he is cutting filets the butcher room. The manager walks in says hi to him, and keeps walking by. He replies to her, keeps looking at her as she walks away, keeps cutting, and cuts right through the tip of his pinky.

He said that it was even more embarassing to see it again on tape, because no guy in the store ever let him live it down that he was missing the tip due to checking out the boss.

[kendrabail]

There are certain cooking utensils I consciously avoid because I KNOW disaster is looming:

#1 Mandolines of all sorts. I once sliced open my hand while making french fries. Not only was I using the mandoline guard, but I was wearing a metal glove. The blade went straight through the metal weave and into my hand.

#2 Deep fryer. For some reason, I still think it is cute to drop the food in from some sort of height, causing the oil to splash.

#3 Open flames. Fire pits, fireplaces, charcoal grills. No burned wieners for me.

#4 The garbage disposal. It just scares me.

#5 Paring knives. They are deceivingly small, but will take a finger off in a half second.

#6 Knuckle busting standing graters. They suck.

The Accidental Chef

[hathor]

There are certain cooking utensils I consciously avoid because I KNOW disaster is looming:

#1 Mandolines of all sorts. I once sliced open my hand while making french fries. Not only was I using the mandoline guard, but I was wearing a metal glove. The blade went straight through the metal weave and into my hand.

#2 Deep fryer. For some reason, I still think it is cute to drop the food in from some sort of height, causing the oil to splash.

#3 Open flames. Fire pits, fireplaces, charcoal grills. No burned wieners for me.

#4 The garbage disposal. It just scares me.

#5 Paring knives. They are deceivingly small, but will take a finger off in a half second.

#6 Knuckle busting standing graters. They suck.

The Accidental Chef

Blades and flames! Maybe you should have your horoscope analyzed!

Mandolines scare the bejezus out of me...but I like to see just how close I can come, life on the edge so to speak!

[kendrabail]

I am a Taurus

The mandoline is to be feared. No matter how expensive it is, your hand can always slip. I prefer the plastic ones now (the cheapo ones that are about 15 dollars). They seem less intimidating--maybe because they are under $150)

I think the problem with most mandolines is that the guard never penetrates the food item to a proper depth and has a tendency to slide off during the cutting process. I have never used a mandoline with a good, solid guard and I have used many (both expensive and not).

This is why I fear them because I am forced to use my hand

[hathor]

I totally agree, mandoline guards cause as many problems as they cure. I've used both cheap and expensive and they cut fingers equally well!

What about overflowing blender/food processor disasters?? I'm exceptionally good at spewing deeply colored, spicy, oily bends all over the place.

[kendrabail]

Pouring hot soup to be pureed in the blender is asking for it.

Made a roasted butternut squash soup once. Poured it into the blender, fired it up and, of course, underestimated what my blender could hold. Soup was all over me, the counter, the floor...you name it.

My dog was quite happy though :)

[bloviatrix]

I set myself on fire about 18 months ago.

I reaching up into a cabinet about the stove forgetting the fact that I had the front burner on. A couple of moments later I smelled fire and noticed flames coming from the bottom of my shirt.

Furtunately, my sink is about 18 inches to the left of my stove. I kept the shirt as a momento.

[mags]

Ohhh, I forgot an old favorite. I was making a gigantic wok full of stir-fry, in preparation for packing up a week's worth of brown-bag lunches, and it was time to mix in the cornstach to thicken it up. I duly reached for the familiar yellow box, stirred a big spoonfull of the powder into a slurry with some water, stirred the slurry into the wok-o-veggies....and watched, in horrified fascination, as the mixture began to burp and bubble to the rim of the pan, over the rim, flowing like lava (mixed with broccoli and snow pears) across the stovetop, down the front, across the floor....I had grabbed the wrong yellow box. Bicarbonate.

[Lady T]

That one reminds me of the way I learned to do the stir-the-food-by flipping-the-pan move: not the way a sane or wise person would, with a dry pan full of uncooked lima beans or such, but instead with a hot saute of shallots, garlic, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, herbs, and asparagus cut into 1" lengths, in a mix of butter and olive oil. The dish, finished and tossed with penne pasta and cheese, tasted fine, whatever of it I wasn't wearing, or washing out of my hair, or sponging off the stove, or mopping off the floor...

[chromedome]

Oh my, where to begin...

I'm fairly talented at cutting myself on odd things. I haven't cut myself with a knife for a year or so (jinxed myself by saying that, mind you), but in recent months I've drawn blood with my tongs, a piping-bag tip, and a counter I was wiping down.

I have a bad habit of absent-mindedly reaching for things on the rear burner without heeding the proximity of the front burner, leading to frequent bare patches on my otherwise-hairy forearms. I am also prone to picking up pots and pans with my bare hand, even though some other portion of my brain (which has presumably sloped off for a coffee or something) knows that it's just come off the burner. That split-second of loud sizzling is always high comedy. And then there are those random unnoticed burns, the ones that I don't even notice until I wash my hands or juice a lemon or something.

My first week in pastry shop afforded me a moment of kitchen-klutz glory. I'd been speaking with my boss the night before about how I was looking forward to doing sugar work. She said she avoided sugar, since it involved an unnecessarily high risk of blisters. The next day I was re-heating a ball of sugar and went to tip it from one silpat to the other with (wait for it) my bare hand, which of course broke through the thin crust of congealed sugar and into the lava beneath. I broke all known records for crossing the lab to the nearest sink.

My classmates said the only way it could have been better is if I'd trampled a small child or elderly woman on my way through. They're sick puppies, every one (gonna miss 'em after I graduate).

In the lack of attention category I've frequently left a bowl of bread dough to rise on the stovetop and subsequently forgotten about it for hours (overnight, once). Dried-on bread dough is lovely stuff to get out of the burners. In the colder months I've also put bread dough in the oven to rise by the gentle warmth of the oven light, and then forgotten it was there. On one occasion I at least stayed with the program well enough to remember when it was time to pre-heat the oven...unfortunately I forgot that the dough was still in there. That took a while to clean up, too.

Then there was my developmentally-challenged classmate last year, who had the disconcerting habit of silently taking up a post just immediately behind my right shoulder, the better to see what I was doing. I couldn't count how many times I ran him over (and scattered two hours' work all over the kitchen floor) as I turned to put something on/take something from the stove/oven/whatever.

I know that last is a whole different category, but in my mental file of memorable kitchen moments it fits right in with the rest.

(Current tally, for the morbidly curious, is two nearly-healed burns of less than an inch in length; no blisters or cuts worth mentioning; and only one bare patch above my wrist from today's rosti potato-making)