Have you ever tried a recipe that turned out to go horribly wrong, or maybe the end product, despite being good, just wasn’t worth the effort? What was that recipe, and what about it made you say “NEVER AGAIN”?
I ask this as I am actively trying to remove the stench of onions from my Instapot lid’s silicone ring after making French Onion Soup in it (so far steaming it with white vinegar on the steam setting, soaking the ring in a water/baking soda bath overnight, and baking it at 250 degrees F for 20 minutes have all done nothing, so I ordered a new one, I give up). And I realized that cutting all the onions and waiting hours for them to caramelize and now this damn smell issue just isn’t worth it. Plus I still have frozen soup in the freezer because I can only eat French Onion soup so many days in a row.
NEVER AGAIN.
Homemade Soup Dumplings (Xiao Long Bao), made from scratch. So much work. It became quickly evident doing it properly required skill you couldn’t learn from a video or a recipe book and would take a really long time to master.
The whole thing ended up kinda thick and clumpy. Definitely one of those things better left to people who know what they’re doing.
Weird, we make Xiao long bao all the time and it’s super simple meal prep food for us. Well spend a couple hours making like 100 of them on a rainy day and then eat them for months. The trick to making them like the restaurant is to clip off the top so you don’t end up with a giant dough lump.
Puff pastry! The constant fear the butter getting too soft, the (seeming) hours of rolling then resting in the freezer, the failure of witnessing the butter melt out in the oven was just too much for me, especially when the pre made frozen stuff is quite good.
That said, I love a challenge and have been thinking of trying it again.
Yeah. I tried it once, just to see if I could do it. Now I know I can, I never need to do it again. I buy the frozen stuff.
Traditional ramen. I tried doing it when Covid hit and no one could go out to restaurants and I really missed ramen.
So I set out to do it. Takes two days to make. Which was ridiculous so I adapted it to be made with a slow cooker in a day so I could still enjoy it . It might not be ‘as good’ but it is way more healthier (less salt and sugar). I do that often with recipes. I’ll try the traditional way and then tweak it to be healthier cuz so many old styles are heavy on the fat, salt and sugar but also needlessly lengthy processes when we have all these new style cookers to make life easier.
