7 chefs tell us about their worst kitchen accidents
A dangerously slippery floor, sharp knives, hot ovens, a slicing machine and a deep fryer: all the ingredients for one disaster after another are present. Are you surprised that things regularly go seriously wrong in every restaurant kitchen? These chefs share their worst kitchen accidents.
You can recognize a chef by their hands and forearms. Those red streaks are burns from the edge of the oven, brown spots are splashes of hot oil from the pan, and those scars are of course cuts from when the knives had just been sharpened again. It’s actually strange that first aid isn’t standard in culinary school, because it’s desperately needed.
Fire? You must be joking
‘Some idiot turned on the deep fryer, but it had been cleaned the night before and there was no oil in it yet. I heard a colleague shout: fire! I thought it was another joke, so I just carried on working. Until the flames really started rising above the fryer. When I threw the fire blanket over it, the hair on my arms got singed.’
Receipt on the spike
‘My chef angrily slammed a receipt onto the spike: a wooden block with a large nail sticking out of it, where we pinned all the completed tickets. The chef missed, and impaled his hand on the nail. He had to go to the hospital with the spike, receipts and all.’
Carefully slide it into the pan
‘Culinary school—picture it: a whole row of first-year students in their brand-new chef’s jackets behind a row of stoves. They all heat oil in their fish pans, all pick up a breaded fish fillet and carefully slide it into the hot oil. All except one: the fish slips from his fingers, lands with a splash in his pan, and a wave of boiling-hot oil gushes over his neighbor’s arm. Straight to the burn center, three weeks out of action. Nice work, colleague!’
Oyster number who-knows-how-many, crack
‘I had to clean a whole batch of oysters, and after a while my thoughts started wandering. A glove? Not necessary, right? I put my knife between oyster number who-knows-how-many, the shell shattered and the knife stabbed my hand. A few stitches, so it could have been worse, but pressing my hand against the wound under cold running water to get all those oyster shell fragments out was truly painful.’
Stock in the walk-in fridge
‘Never put food on the floor in the walk-in fridge, never! I’ve heard our chef say it a thousand times. And yet it went wrong: a temp worker put a large pan of hot stock in the walk-in fridge to cool down, on the floor and more or less directly behind the door. And of all people, the chef hurries into the walk-in fridge and steps straight into that pan of stock. He slipped, ended up with soaking-wet chef’s trousers, a burn and a bump on his head. End of the temp worker.’
Mandoline-mandoline-mandoline-line
‘I want to fish something out of a sink full of soapy water and grab straight into the mandoline, that razor-sharp device you can use to cut thin slices of pretty much anything, including fingers. Blood sprayed everywhere. What kind of idiot puts that underwater in the sink?’
Just press it down
‘The trash can looks full, but it isn’t: you just have to push down hard to compact the waste a bit. It saves you one trip back and forth to the dumpster with a garbage bag, right? It only doesn’t work so well when the waitstaff throws a broken wine glass into that same trash can. On one of the busiest nights of the year, too—not nice!’
Read also:
- People share their dumbest kitchen blunders, and it’s painfully funny
- The dumbest mistakes I’ve made in the hospitality industry
- Common deep-frying mistakes
Source: Reddit
