Sunday, July 17, 2011

Lemon Meringue FAIL

Have you ever watched the Food Network and wondered how all of the chefs manage to make perfect dishes EVERY time?? Well. I have the answer. They don't. Their recipes come from countless attempts at perfecting a base recipe. And even when a recipe has been perfected, sometimes that recipe will still not work.
Baking is a funny thing. What every aspiring chef/baker/cook/experimentalist needs to understand is that baking is chemistry. Maybe not in the same sense of the chemistry we all took in high school (thank God!!!), but in the sense that reactions need to occur in order to get desired results. There has to be enough of ingredient "a" that when added with ingredients "b" and "c", "d" occurs. If the proportions are off, or the ingredients are too old, or the weather is too humid, or the baking gods just aren't liking you that day, the desired reaction will not occur. This will leave you with a FAIL. How many cakes have not risen? How many cookies, instead of forming soft mounds of goodness, have just spread themselves onto the cookie sheet leaving you with a crispy sweet cracker to eat? I can not count the number of times these things have happened to me. Sometimes I have figured out the reasons why, but other times, I have had no idea why a recipe that I always make and know like the back of my hand has failed me. To put it in simple terms, you are not a bad cook if things don't go right in the kitchen. Don't get discouraged. Laugh about how bad your item turned out, make sure to take a picture, and Get right back in that kitchen and bake again.
As you can tell be the title of this post, I had a recent baking fail. What had started off like any other blog entry turned into a kitchen nightmare. I was trying a lemon meringue pie recipe from Alton Brown this afternoon because for some weird reason, I thought that it was a good idea to buy 2 Kg of lemons last week and I had no idea what to do with them all. I am not a novice at making these pies. I have done so successfully every other time I have made one. Which is why, I thought that it would  make a good blog entry. I gathered all of my ingredients, took the required pictures and started.
The first thing that went wrong was the crust. For the recipe, you need a pre-baked pie shell, so I put the shell in the pie dish and baked it. When the crust had finished, I took it out and realized that it had all shrunk down and there was no longer a crust around the majority of the pie dish. Oh well. This pie was only for my husband and I, so it really wasn't that big of a deal. I continued with my pie.
The next thing that went wrong was the filling. The recipe (which you can find here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/lemon-meringue-pie-recipe/index.html ) stated that I was to use 1/3 cup of corn starch. I have a feeling that the amount should have been increased. After I had done everything I was supposed to with it (and believe me, my grade school teachers were wrong. I CAN follow directions!), the consistency was just too syrupy.
The final thing that went wrong with this hellacious pie was the baking of the meringue. In short, the meringue didn't end up with the beautiful dark brown tips fading into white. Nope. It ended up a flat brown moonscape.
I thought that perhaps, after it had been in the refrigerator for a bit, it would firm up. Wrong. I cut into it and had a river of lemon filling flowing out. The taste was good, though.
As I stated before, I had taken multiple pictures of the process, but seeing as how the end result was so dismal, I will not post them. Instead, please share a laugh with me over my latest kitchen fail!
What was your worst fail?
Alien Landscape? Nope. Just My Fail.
Sickly Brown Meringue

River of Lemon Syrup

Appetizing

2 comments:

  1. I am sure it was still delicious! I loving making meringue, but it is very tricky!

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