What is the most ridiculous substitution you've seen somebody attempt in a recipe?

omgwolverine · 3 months

I think one of my college roommates used tartar sauce in lieu of cream of tartar. (shudder)

chuffed · 3 months

When I was in college one of my flatmates decided to cook dinner for some friends. He chose to make crispy orange chicken or something like that.

The recipe called for orange zest, he thought zest was Tang. Blergh.

moyzington · 3 months

My aunt is the queen of things like this. She has been know to substitute thinks like ketchup for tomato paste, canned tuna for fresh salmon, relish for frozen spinach. She basically will use anything that is the right "color" or the same "basic idea"

notadutchboy · 3 months

I was making scrambled eggs. I'd run out of milk so I used discount Baileys.

Pro tip: don't.

heavysteve · 3 months

I had some friends who were planning a huge dinner for like a dozen people. They couldnt cook at all, the main was a pork loin roast that they braised in white vinegar(with no salt) at 425 for 13 hours. It was terrible, the vinegar boiled off so the bottom half of the roast was concentrated acetic acid, tasted like a battery

Huellio · 3 months

Due to poor marking my mom once put powdered sugar in a bread recipe instead of flour.

Not an intentional substitution but the results were ridiculous.

Godphree · 3 months

Slightly off-topic, but what really cheeses me off is reading about other people's substitutions on recipe-sharing sites like food.com. "I didn't have bell peppers so I used carrots and broccoli, and I used cinnamon instead of the allspice. It was just okay. 2 stars."

yujisaurus · 3 months

My old roommate was making mac and cheese but didn't have any milk....he did, however, find some vanilla coffee creamer.

chickwithsticks · 3 months

As a youngster (maybe 8 or 9 years old) my friend and I were making cookies. They got in the oven and started to expand. We ran out of the kitchen screaming for her dad (parents were nearby but figured we were old enough to do it ourselves). There were these awful terrifying enormous cookies growing in her oven... turns out we'd used pancake mix instead of flour. (They were in similar containers and not labelled).

Not a true substitution but a hilarious mistake.

eerezo · 3 months

I bungled a last-minute adaptation of a Korean seafood pancake. I realized one of my guests was massively allergic to shellfish and wheat. So instead of finding something different to cook, I used artichoke hearts and sweet potato starch instead of shellfish and flour. It still vaguely resembled a pancake...

g-e-o-f-f · 3 months

When I was kid (pre-teen/early teen years) my mom was working and working on her Master's degree, and I'd cook dinner for the family about once a week. I was making some baked, cheesy pasta dish, and couldn't find the Evaporated milk. I saw some condensed milk in the pantry, and thought to myself - "condensed means the same as evaporated right? I mean, if you evaporate milk, it'd be more condensed".

My brother and sister were stoked that we got to order Pizza that night. I was sad my dish didn't work.

jusjerm · 3 months

Butter + milk = Buttermilk.... no, no it does not.

andtheodor · 3 months

I saw someone frosting a cake decide it was too thick and needed more moisture to spread evenly. She poured milk onto the partially frosted cake.

aud_nih · 3 months

Not exactly a substitution, but...

Was making milkshakes in a home economics class way back when.

Recipe called for sugar. Found sugar looking substance in jar under sink. Used substance.

Substance was actually salt.

Imagine expecting a delicious strawberry milkshake, and instead getting a mouth full of extremely salty strawberry creaminess. Feels bad man.

toaster13 · 3 months

Ooh ooh i got this!

I had two roommates insist you could substitute bloody Mary mix for oil in a deep fryer "because it has water in it". I had to call a third roommate who worked at a restaurant with fryers to convince them they were wrong.

Why did they want to do this? To save a 5 minute drive to the supermarket for oil.

hozjo · 3 months

Intentional or unintentional. My mom was making a whiskey stew and ended up pouring in homemade Kahlua that happened to be in a whiskey bottle. Kahlua stew tastes like ass, especially when a bunch of other things get dumped in there to cover up the taste.

I have thrown bok choy into colcannon actually turned out pretty well.

fascfoo · 3 months

Was making potatos au grain recently. Recipe called for cream, but didn't have any on hand.

I put skim milk and some heaping spoonfuls of sour cream into a tupperware container and shook the shit out of it. Hey, it looked cream like afterwards... ಠ_ಠ

Grammar_Buddy · 3 months

Years ago, I came into work the morning after making my first Alfredo sauce. Making mention of the fact, a woman I work with said that she, too had made homemade Alfredo sauce for the first time the night before. I said how astounded I was at how good it tasted. She frowned and said hers wasn't very good at all:

ME: Well, did you use real, fresh Parmesan (Parmigiano-Reggiano)?

Her: No, I used the shaky powder stuff.

ME: Did you at least use real butter?

Her: No, I used fat-free margarine.

ME: So, how 'bout heavy cream?

Her: Nope, I used skim milk.

:O(

iLiveInSanDiego · 3 months

Not so ridiculous... but when living in Spain, next door neighbor from the States went over to my mom and asked to borrow "the yellow food dye" she used in her "arroz con pollo" dish. She wanted saffron.

She used blue.

Bridovertroublewater · 3 months

One time my friend was making brownies and, lacking butter, decided olive oil was an acceptable substitute. Regrettably, it was basil-infused olive oil...results were displeasing.

saiph · 3 months

This will get horribly buried, but it's worth sharing:

My mother was making homemade applesauce, and she read somewhere that she could use red hots instead of cinnamon (which actually sounds perfectly reasonable). She then went and substituted peppermint candy canes for the red hots. That's right, she substituted for a substitution. "But I thought red hots were minty!"

Bonus applesauce story: My sister (who is actually a wonderful cook) was making applesauce. She managed to distractedly toss in paprika instead of cinnamon. Blegh.

Bonus applesauce story #2: My grandmother wanted to spice up some store-bought applesauce (thank the gods; we had already had enough applesauce mishaps). She thought it would be a brilliant idea to make it all festive and christmas-y by using food color to dye half red and half green, and then swirling the two together. Yeahhh...It didn't taste bad, but man did come out a nasty shade of poop.

TL;DR: My family has issues with applesauce. God knows why I still love it.

ChickenTaco · 3 months

A girl I know cooked me breakfeast and was making some french toast but didn't have any toast (for some reason) so she used garlic bread instead.

cme044 · 3 months

Not really a substitution, but some of the comments reminded me of this.. My brother was making some icing for a cake. I told him to put some coffee in and he thought that meant coffee grounds. Needless to say the icing wasn't very smooth or tasty. (I also should add that my brother was around 16 at the time)

fimcotw · 3 months

How bad is peas for beans in chili?

ereandir · 3 months

1:1 butter and sugar instead of an actual shortbread pie crust. I also added sugar to the raspberry filling.

Three bites of that pie and I was seeing through time.

michiroo · 3 months

Heh, not intentional but I started frying chicken in vinegar instead of oil one time, the bottles looked the same. It took an embarrassingly long time to notice something was wrong while cooking.

In any case, my grandma was AWFUL for not putting salt in anything. "Well it's a cookie recipe, why would I need salt!??? Salt is not sweet!" Me: "...JUST ADD THE SALT!!"

She also discovered that using dark rum instead of water in cake mix is amazing. She'd been spiking my birthday cakes since birth. ಠ_ಠ

jgetto · 3 months

One of my friends was unaware that garam masala (the indian spice) and Marsala (the fortified wine) we're different things. I didn't get to see the result, but I heard it was some interesting chicken.

DeMartini · 3 months

My mother once coated pre-made biscuits from a tin in baking powder instead of flour. My neice and nephews were there to go on a trip to some place that passes for a theme park in Arkansas. The biscuits did not turn out to be edible, but that wasn't discovered until the kids had all taken a couple each.

Now, my parents are fairly strict about just about everything, but especially if you put food on your plate you will eat it. There was an ultimatum that no one would leave until every biscuit was eaten. My oldest nephew took one for the team and forced down six disgusting, blackened hockey puck biscuits.

They got about three hours from home and he started throwing up everywhere. They never made it to the theme park.

bzjones · 3 months

Friends forgot to buy almonds while making marzipan. Instead of calling the girl who wasn't there yet and having her pick some up, they crushed up Honey Bunches of Oats cereal (the almond variety) and used that.

[deleted] · 3 months

My father, an ordained Pastor, asked me recently when it was I lost faith in God:

When I was about 10 or 11, my sister and I were staying with my grandmother her for a weekend while my parents fucked off to who knows where. For lunch, one day, we had gone to TacoBell and brought it back home to eat.

My sister and I occupied the Television most of the afternoon and started getting hungry around night fall.

Grandma, who "just wanted to watch my soaps, god dammit", decided to make spaghetti for dinner. No meat. Just noodles and sauce.

Except she didn't have any sauce.

So, she decided to make her own.

Here is my grandmother's recipe for impromptu spaghetti sauce:

Ketchup - an unkwowable amount
Water - to dilute the ketchup
Onion Flakes - because onions, duh
Yellow Mustard - hey, it's good on sandwiches
Dried Ground Ginger - why the fuck not?

But the secret ingredient, the kicker here, was:

3 TacoBell Mild Taco Sauce Packets

tl;dr - grandma was batshit crazy

w3y · 3 months

One time, I was all set to making chocolate chip cookies. I mixed everything up and put them in the oven. When I pulled them out, they were hard as a rock and didn't rise at all and tasted really salty.

Upon further inspection, I used cornstarch instead of flour. I also used salt instead of sugar.

Then I started labeling all the containers and jars.

Bloodricuted · 3 months

I substituted corn meal for mesa harina, we ended up with very dry and coarse tortillas

milleribsen · 3 months

Not me, but on my favorite podcast, when they were still a radio show, they had their sound engineer make "snickers pie" which called for marscapone cheese, which he replaced with chevre.

EricaBearica · 3 months

My friend and I were making a box of brownies around age 9 or 10, bought sprinkles and icing and got super excited to get the kitchen to ourselves for a couple hours. When assembling the materials, we couldn't find vegetable oil in the cabinets. Luckily, her grandma lived next door and was a respectable grandmother with many baking supplies. Friend comes back with oil in a measuring cup, so everything seems to be going well. After baking, icing, and sprinkling, we feasted. These things were gooey and spectacular. Shortly afterward, both of us are super energetic, bouncing off the walls and being obnoxious 9 or 10 year olds... then we both crashed and napped for about an hour or so. I asked her what she got from her grandma's house, and I remember exactly what she told me: "Well, I couldn't find vegetable oil, but I found corn syrup. Corn is like a vegetable, right?"

belfegore · 3 months

Once, by accident, I used baking soda instead of baking powder when making cornbread. Turned out flat and dense, and all you could taste was the baking soda. Ugh.

fingerflinger · 3 months

Once, at a restaurant, I was served a salad with tartar sauce instead of bleu cheese dressing.

TuckerTheCat · 3 months

Turkey bacon for bacon.

uselessdegree · 3 months

Pretty much any time someone substitutes shortening for butter. My one friend swears to god that her chocolate chip cookies using shortening are velvety delicious goodness and no one can tell she uses shortening. I took one bite that slid down my throat like a well-lubed aborted fetus finding its way home, and waited for an opportunity to throw the rest away without her noticing.

champgm · 3 months

A friend of mine's daughter tried to make us tiramisu with almond extract instead of amaretto/almond liqueur. It was horrifying.

bkarfunk · 3 months

I went to meet the girlfriend's family over Thanksgiving, to find out I probably cook the most of everyone in attendance. Her mom was doing the gravy, and called me over to see if I could give a hand. Happy to help, I came on over intent to not make a fool of myself infront of this woman I'd just met. Unfortunately we didn't have any turkey drippings as she'd picked up a pre cooked turkey breast at HEB, and so no giblets either.

What she did have was three cups of turkey broth simmering in a pan with a cup of flour stirred in, and two chopped hard boiled eggs. I'd never heard of hard boiled eggs in gravy but have since learned that its pretty common in southern cooking. But so are the giblets and roux. There was no saving that gravy...

uberyeti · 3 months

This one isn't too riduclous, but I was mixing a White Russian the other day and used double cream instead of milk. I thought it would be delicious, but the alcohol caused the cream to separate into curds and whey and it was disgusting.

mamacrocker · 3 months

My dad was making a traditional Slovak dish that calls for ground pork. He decided on the spur of the moment to "spice it up" with chorizo. Cue cabbage rolls floating in orange grease. It actually didn't taste bad, though.

gregdbowen · 3 months

Crushed Cheerios for baking powder.

skipytripz · 3 months

this makes me think of [this] scene from one of my favorite movies (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeRVB2XP19g)

silverbeat · 3 months

I was making chocolate chip cookies once and realized I was short on butter. But I did have bacon grease. What's the worst that could happen?

Only gargling with bleach could get the taste out.

redditiem · 3 months

mac and cheese: mayo instead of butter/milk.

tucker_baby13 · 3 months

My sister isn't the brightest. She was trying to make cookies and had to run to the store for cream of tartar. She later said she couldn't find it in the soup aisle so she used cream of chicken instead.

HerIndoors · 3 months

My husband substituted rotten potatoes for fresh ones in shepards pie. They were as soft as sponges but he didn't feel like going to the store or making something else.

ifjr · 3 months

Miracle whip for mayonnaise

girlinboots · 3 months

[deleted]

bowling4meth · 3 months

Ground brick dust for Heroin.

ladyvonkulp · 3 months

When I was a kid I wanted a bowl of cereal but we were out of milk, so I used water instead.

vonwigglesworth · 3 months

When I was a little kid, at a friend's birthday party I thought I was being super smart and told EVERYONE to use sugar instead of salt to put on their fries. Needless to say, that one haunted me for a little while, as I essentially ruined everyone's fries.

carlottavaldez · 3 months

My ex used beer in mashed potatoes because I didn't have cows milk at my house. It was gross and actually really pissed me off...

Castironqueen · 3 months

Substituted vanilla almond milk for milk, in clam chowder, yeah that went down the drain so fast.

Sacrament_of_Swords · 3 months

Olive oil instead of vegetable oil for brownies.

Yech.

Avrienne · 3 months

Link.

I mean, why wouldn't you want to use a pigeon?

ronano · 3 months

my dad put hp bbq sauce in the good christmas gravy

didnt tell anyone either

fredcai6 · 3 months

Some of my friends were making a curry once (in an extreme circumstance), and one of them decided that cayenne would be an acceptable substitution for the curry powder we had on hand. It was still good, but it had a helluva kick to it.

Astro_naut · 3 months

Rock salt for table salt... in pancakes

[deleted] · 3 months

My mother, who is usually a fantastic cook and an outstanding, if home-taught, baker. A year or so ago, she asked my brother-in-law what kind of pie he'd like for Christmas.

His favorite is blueberry and she set out to make one from scratch.

It smelled DELICIOUS and I cut into it, it was really runny. And there were little white things in it.

I took a bite and nearly broke all of my teeth.

me: Uhh... something's wrong.

her: ?

me: what are these little pebbles?

her: Tapioca ^{_^}

me: What?

Her: The recipe called for tapioca.

me: Mom, that's supposed to be... tapioca flower.

her: Well it jsut said tapioca ^{_^}

me: So you bought tapioca pearls? Did you soak them?

her: What?

me: soak... them...

My Brother-In-Law: crunchcrunchwincecrunch Don't worry... it's great

Alfdis · 3 months

My grandparents are horrific cooks. I literally have to eat before I go there and just push food around my plate while nibbling to prevent a terrible, foul evening of explosive bowel emptying. They thought I had an eating disorder for many years, but I was really trying to prevent illness.

They would do ridiculous things, the one that stands out the most was the use of sweetened, condensed milk in mashed potatoes. My grandfather mixes a whole can right in as a substitute for milk. I don't know why, but this substitution makes the potatoes taste vile and go right through you.

amadutchboy

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