Epic Fail: Not-So Kitchen Confidential

Every great chef understands that the road to a perfect recipe is littered with the corpses of failed attempts that didn’t quite cut the mustard. I admit that I love cooking, but while my experimentation has created a few home runs over the years, I’ve had more than a few strike outs, too. There were three instances in particular that have gone down in history, and I would like to share them with you now.

Salty Fried Chicken: I have never owned a deep fryer, and I’m not a big fan of pan fried chicken, so I prefer a baked crust. Through the years, I have tried a variety of recipes using buttermilk, eggs, flour and many other types of ingredients and spices to create an awesome and tasty crust.

I am a huge fan of Alton Brown, and he’s always using large crystals of kosher salt in his cooking. He always tosses a pinch here and a pinch there in his recipes. I’ve always used the regular old iodized kind (found commonly with a picture of a little girl carrying an umbrella).

Wanting to emulate my mentor, I bought a big can of large kosher salt, and thought I would use it in my fried chicken. That night the chicken came out beautiful. I still don’t think I have ever had a crust come out so perfect since. I filled the plates and waited anxiously to see the looks on my family’s face when they tasted my masterpiece. The kids did their best to eat my salt bird, but after several drinks they gave up on it. My wife was a trooper and kept going, eventually scraping the crust off and just eating the chicken, but even that didn’t make the dish palatable. Note to self: When it comes to kosher salt, less is more.

String Cake: Desserts are my specialty. I spent four hours making a to-die-for homemade mocha buttercream frosting once, and next to the births of my children and wedding day, it was the proudest day of my life. On a less fortunate occasion, I was making a cake from a mix. I decided that a sweeter cake is a better cake. So, along with all the needed ingredients, I added some sugar. OK, a lot of sugar.

My poor wife, always the guinea pig of my cooking experiments, was looking forward to eating the cake, not knowing of my little addition. She cut the cake with her fork and a long string of sticky substance trailed from the cake to her mouth. It turns out large amounts of sugar melts into a stringy caramel-like substance during the baking process. Caramel in a cake sounds good on paper, but we both agreed it was a touch too much.

Chili Powder Omelet: My wife and I moved into a small apartment together in college, and it was our first chance to be real adults. We didn’t have much money, so we ate a lot of cheap food like omelets. She was the one who taught me that spices can add so much to the flavor of a dish.

I had made countless omelets and was getting tired of the same old. One day, when my wife was at work, I perused our spice selection to see what I could add to an omelet to make it a little more… unique. I learned that a little pepper or hot sauce could really give eggs a zing, so when I saw the can of chili powder, I thought, “Hey, that should work.”

My poor wife had spent the entire day slaving at a tree nursery and was looking forward to being home. We sat down and, as usual, I waited to see how she liked my newest creation. She took one bite and froze. “Did you add something to this,” she said as her face began to redden. “Yeah, chili powder.” I think after one bite she drank about three glasses of juice before she was actually able to speak again.

Every time I get a little cocky in the kitchen because I hit a culinary home run, she never fails to ground me with exploits of my not-so-proudest moments.

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