The Heartbreak of Recipe Failure During Lockdown
Messing up your food always sucks, but now — when waste seems even more wasteful than usual — it’s downright traumatic. Here’s how to cope.
Work with food enough and you’ll learn to intuitively anticipate how ingredients will behave. However, with all the practiced instinct in the world, you can still screw up. For example, once a year, Bad Pasta happens to me. No matter my ingredients or method, the result is dramatically awful, leaving me let down by a favorite food, and with a vague sense that I was cursed very specifically at birth and need to embark on a valiant quest to undo it.
Today I baked a flourless chocolate cake, making up the recipe as I went. Rich with cocoa, melted chocolate and almonds, and fluffy with whipped aquafaba, the mixture tasted delicious, rose evenly in the oven, and smelled heavenly. Then, the mixture kept rising. Billowing. Bulging. It’s going to be okay, I reasoned, surely the cake will know to stay in the tin.
By the time I gave up and turned off the oven, there was not so much a chocolate cake waiting as that scene in Alien where the creature bursts through John Hurt’s torso. Now, food waste is abhorrent at the best of times — and I always ate every bowl of Bad Pasta to prove the…
