Cooking FAIL

[jarandhel]

So, not long ago I posted about a new recipe of mine... steak and pinto bean masala casserole.

Last night, I tried a modification of this recipe.  Steak and black bean buffalo sauce casserole.  Pretty much exactly the same recipe except black beans instead of pinto and buffalo sauce instead of masala sauce.  Hooters wing sauce, to be specific.

It was, without a doubt, the absolute worst thing I have ever cooked that was still edible.

About halfway through cooking it I was already realizing it was failing badly, but it was too late to turn back... so I added cheese to the recipe to try to cut the buffalo sauce flavor.  This did not work.

Finally, today, while eating the leftovers (there was way too much food to waste, and it was still edible) I found a way to modify it to make it somewhat less tremendously disgusting.  I added garlic powder, cilantro, dill, and oregano along with some butter and lots of salt.  This is enough to make it somewhat palatable.  It is still not good, but it no longer is a struggle just to finish a bowl of it.  Or else possibly I'm just getting used to it, dunno.

But yeah... that is a massive experimental recipe fail.  Do not try this one for yourselves, folks.  Seriously.

Comments

[ignited-spark.livejournal.com]

You lost me at "Hooters wing sauce," man ;)

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

*shrugs* I really like buffalo sauce... I get the buffalo chicken pizza at CPK all the time, and it has buffalo sauce instead of tomato sauce. I thought it would work for the casserole. I was very very very wrong.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

OK, I can pretty much point out the points of failure so as to help with various changes next time:

a) Buffalo sauce addition is probably the main point of FAIL. In essence, buffalo wing sauce is cayenne pepper sauce (Frank's Louisiana Red Hot sauce being the prime example) and a bit of flour. No, seriously, that's pretty much all buffalo wing sauce is. :3

Masala sauce, on the other hand, has much more of a diversity of flavours (including tomato, lemon, garlic, and so on; here's a list here).

Hooter's seems to muck with the basic recipe just a bit (substituting Tabasco for Frank's Red Hot, and also using paprika as well as cayenne) but is still primarily pepper-based.

b) This may be just me, but there is a noticable difference in taste to me between black, pinto, and red beans. (I don't think this was as major a point of failure as the hot-wing sauce, though.)

Now, *red* beans and hot sauce (preferably something like Frank's, again, rather than an admixture like the Hooter's wing sauce) works well--especially with soup beans. Generally with that I use bacon or ham for meat flavour, though, rather than steak.

Lastly, don't kick yourself too much; we all have occasional bits of fail in cooking, that's what comes with experimenting.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Oh the buffalo sauce was DEFINITELy the point of fail... though now I'm mildly curious as to whether regular (non-hooters) buffalo sauce would have worked any better. It's really yummy on the California Pizza Kitchen Buffalo Chicken Pizzas where they use it instead of tomato sauce.

And yeah, black beans don't quite taste the same as pinto beans, but they were the only beans we had left in the house and I really don't think that made a huge difference.

Not kicking myself, this is just what happens when I decide to get creative with food... sometimes the result is awesome and win like the Masala version was. Sometimes it is very much the opposite. I'm a little impressed, actually, that despite how terrible this was it was actually still edible, even before my readjustment of the spices. Most of the massive fails I have are so bad that I can't even eat more than a couple of spoonfuls before having to throw them away.