22-03-2025
'Needless To Say, We Got Takeout That Night': People Are Sharing The Foods They Tried To Make From Scratch But Immediately Regretted
If you've been cooking for a long time, chances are you have that one disastrous recipe that still keeps you up at night. You know, the one you tried to make from scratch, only for it to end up being a complete waste of time and energy.
We've all been there. Recently, I asked the Tasty Community about their biggest DIY food fails, and rest assured, it'll make you feel better about your own cooking mishaps. People shared everything from the dishes that they could never eat again to the simple mistakes that turned into chaos.
I rounded up 25 of the best stories:
1. "BBQ Sauce. All the recipes that I looked at used ketchup. I decided to make it from scratch. I plucked tomatoes from my garden to make homemade ketchup, which turned out pretty well..."
Powerofforever / Getty Images
"I followed a recipe for Crockpot BBQ sauce with my ketchup and prepared the ribs for my smoker. The BBQ sauce recipe had the sauce cooking on high for three hours and then low for two. I checked on hour two. When I opened the lid, the smell was terrible. I took a taste, and it was one of the worst things I have ever had. So much time was wasted; it tasted like ash and vinegar. Never again."
–Heather, Wisconsin, 42
2. "I found a recipe for honey garlic chicken that involved baking the chicken tossed with flour and seasonings, tossing it with the homemade sauce, and baking it again. The picture accompanying the recipe showed the chicken having a deep golden-orange glaze, perfectly coating each piece."
"Once I took it out of the oven, I knew there was no chance of matching that picture. The chicken had turned into highly unappetizing lumpy blobs of grayish brown, resembling a particularly bad hairball rather than a remotely edible chicken dish. I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I will be avoiding that recipe from now on. 😅"
–Anonymous
3. "Baklava! By the time I was done, phyllo was on the ceiling and I was drinking a bourbon."
4. "Beignets! I love them so much. I get them every time I pass through New Orleans at Cafe Du Monde. They sell the mix in the grocery store and my mom got it for me for my birthday. THAT WAS THE HARDEST THING I HAVE EVER MADE! They came out so wrong. But I still ate them, lol."
–icjellyfish17
5. "Cauliflower crust for pizza. It took forever, burned quickly, and made the house stink like rotten cabbage for an entire weekend. I still won't eat any cauliflower crust frozen products, because that was disgusting. Carbs all day for me!!"
6. "Saw a spin on roasted cauliflower on YouTube. It said to use parchment paper. Went to take the pan out of the had caught on fire and burned my cauliflower as well. Never cooked with parchment again."
–Chanté L., Instagram
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7. "Married for a month, I invited my family for Thanksgiving dinner and my brother asked for caramelized sweet potatoes. I sliced them and sautéed them in my mother-in-law's large pan. Used maple syrup, but didn't boil the potatoes first. Oh, the horror of it. I threw the pan out. A memorable holiday."
8. "Mac 'n' cheese that required a roux. Never mind that I've never made a roux before. It came out grainy and tasted of flour. In the trash, it went. Ordered takeout instead."
–Stephanie W., Instagram
9. "I tried to make chimichurri and I used the amount of garlic recommended in the authentic Argentinian recipe. I dunno. I think my garlic was too old or something because it tasted like nothing but garlic! Nothing I did helped either; it was just too sharp. Next time!"
10. "Got ahead of myself for the culinary section of our French class. I made a cream puff tower called a 'croquembouche' from scratch. It took me from 3 p.m., when I got home from school, to almost 1 a.m. the next morning. I was exhausted, my caramel was pretty burnt, pastry dough was all over the place, the cream filling was lumpy. But hey, at least I was one of the only kids who didn't just buy something from Walmart."
11. "Croissants. You really need the laminating machines that the professional bakeries have. Waste of time and butter!"
–Michelle, 54
12. "Just moved to a different country. Made cookies for our neighbors. Only problem? I used SALT instead of sugar. I didn't try them before I handed them out. Hubby tried one later and spat it out. We joked how the neighbors just thought that was how Americans made cookies."
14. "My boyfriend will never let me live down making GUMBO from scratch at midnight. I found a recipe that said to put flour in a cast iron and wait for it to go dark brown (no oil or butter). Didn't even know it wanted me to make a roux, so after several hours of flour baking in the oven not doing a thing, I decided to continue the recipe. I put the hot flour into the stock with everything else. It was nasty flour water with shrimp and sausage. It was 3 a.m., and I was sleep-deprived, hungry, and defeated — the only thing left to do was to cry. I woke up my boyfriend sobbing, and by some miracle, he was able to fix the flour soup I had made. 10 years later, we still laugh about that night because we both now work in a fine-dining steakhouse."
– Sleepingdolphin595
15. "Pho. Lots of ingredients, long process. From now on, I'll just buy it from a restaurant."
–Halim T., Instagram
16. "The Pinterest DIY boom of the 2010s led me to believe I could make horchata and egg nog from scratch for a party. I could not. 🤦♀️🥛"
17. "I made homemade stuffing once, including dicing all the veggies by hand and measuring out the spices... only to have it taste exactly like Stovetop. All that extra work for something that would only take 10 minutes to do!"
– laughingtiger39
18. "French fries! Way too much work for a soggy result and lots of cleanup."
19. "Roasted a whole chicken. I misread the instructions and cooked at 245°F instead of 425°... Needless to say, we got takeout that night."
–Katie E., Instagram
20. "The first time I made homemade mac 'n' cheese, I was a kid and very, very wrongly assumed that I could use whole wheat flour in my roux. Very disgusting lesson learned that day. 😂"
21. "Baked beans. I bought the wrong molasses — blackstrap instead of fancy! Epic fail; tasted like tar on the first bite. Into the garbage it went!"
–Phyllis K., Instagram
22. "Candy. Any candy. I'm an excellent cook and baker and I'll never try making candy again."
23. "I tried to make an ice cream cake for my dad's birthday. I used fancy ice cream. It melted in the freezer. Such a sad birthday."
–Anonymous
24. "Crème brûlée. As soon as I made it, I was grossed out that it was just egg yolk, cream, and sugar."
25. "I made oatmeal cream pie bars from scratch using what I thought was a reliable source, but it went very wrong once the marshmallow fluff-based frosting ended up tasting like soap the next day. 😭"
–Anonymous
Do you have any dishes that belong on this list? Let me know in the comments!
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
