10 expensive, complex or smelly dishes people no longer want to make at home (part 2)

Do you know that feeling when you’ve eaten at a fancy restaurant and immediately want to play chef at home? Suddenly, you want to pull out all the stops with endless side dishes and complicated techniques. I always suffer from this terribly. When it goes well, it’s wonderful to serve up a homemade dish like that. But there are also dishes you really shouldn’t attempt – I speak from experience. 

That’s why I can also get lost for hours on websites or feeds where people go all out on dishes they’ve made, often with varying degrees of success. Too difficult, too expensive, or: it smelled too bad. Like these 10 failures.

1. Dumplings

‘Just making the dough is complicated. You want to get it exactly the right thickness and then you have to cut out a huge number of circles. Then it’s time to make the filling. Once that filling is ready too, you think you’re almost done. But you’re not—it’s only just beginning. You have to fold each dumpling individually, an endless process in which you have to be incredibly careful that the dumplings don’t pop open again. It really took me hours and hours to fill them all. They were delicious, but I’ll never make them myself again!’

2. Bread

Fresh bread may well be the most delicious thing there is; even the smell makes me happy. This baker from Germany doesn’t entirely agree. ‘Baking bread at home is so much work, and I never manage to make it genuinely tastier than bread from the bakery. The bread becomes chewier and drier. I find it easy to bake better cakes and cookies, but for me bread isn’t worth all that effort.’

3. Tacos

‘For years I wondered why people made tacos themselves. You can buy them for a few euros each. Unfortunately, I recently moved to a region where they don’t sell any tasty tacos. Suddenly I started wondering whether I should make them myself again. But it’s such an incredible amount of work that I might be better off getting used to a life without tacos.’

4. Beef Wellington

As far as I’m concerned, Beef Wellington is especially popular around Christmas. This father thought it would be a good idea to request this classic for Father’s Day. He rather regrets that now. ‘On Father’s Day, I always get to choose what we eat. Since I’m an idiot of a father, I chose Beef Wellington. My partner and children spent the whole day in the kitchen, cutting, rolling, roasting and baking. The result was pretty tasty, but was it better than an ordinary steak with mushrooms on top? Actually, no…’

5. Vegetarian burgers

Who doesn’t enjoy a tasty hamburger from time to time? This chef decided to try making a vegetarian burger. ‘I started making a vegetarian burger and had to go through countless steps to make it. Chopping and preparing a huge amount of vegetables, only to eventually combine everything and fry it. The result? Extremely tasteless and disappointing.’ Maybe next time just fry a Portobello mushroom as a burger instead—I always find that incredibly delicious!

6. Tikka Masala

I’ve never attempted this dish myself because Asian dishes are often incredibly complicated if you want to make them properly. If I have to believe this home cook, that’s certainly true in this case. ‘It takes so incredibly long to roast all the spices and then grind them with a mortar and pestle. By the time you’re finally done, you haven’t even really started on the dish. Let me put it this way: your time is better spent taking a walk to your local Indian restaurant!’

7. Ravioli

I consider myself quite a good home pasta maker. My father bought a pasta machine years ago, and he taught me how to make the most delicious pasta with it. But I also prefer to order ravioli only in a restaurant, and I think this chef will do the same from now on. ‘It’s such an incredibly horrible job to make. It’s extremely fiddly to get the dough thin enough and fill it. Then you cook them and almost all of them explode in the pan. Totally worth having a pro make them for you.’

8. Heston Blumenthal recipes

Heston Blumenthal is at the helm of, among others, three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck, which was named the best restaurant in the world in 2005. He also became particularly well known for his work with molecular cooking. So it’s hardly surprising that the recipes in his cookbook are quite complicated. ‘My husband spent two days in the kitchen and destroyed our extractor hood while making an overcomplicated chili con carne recipe. The result wasn’t even worth the effort; the recipe he normally makes is much tastier!’

9. Gyros

‘Don’t even start making gyros! I made the meat, pitas, tzatziki, fries and even caramelized rice pudding for dessert completely from scratch. It was delicious! But was it as good as the one from the Greek place around the corner? Absolutely not, so save yourself the trouble.’

10. Puff pastry

Puff pastry—maybe it’s because of my personal vendetta against this product, but I would never attempt it. Although it sounds relatively simple to make—you only need flour, salt, water and butter—I still find it such a hassle, with all the endless rolling and folding. And then you also have to make sure it doesn’t get too warm, because you’ll lose the layers. It’s so much easier just to buy a packet from the supermarket and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s just as tasty.

Also read:

• 10 expensive, complex or smelly dishes you shouldn’t want to make at home (part 1)
• Why you shouldn’t fry meatballs in an egg carton (and how to do it properly)
• 10 tips for keeping your food fresh for longer

Source: BoredPanda