Beef wellington… I mean the whole thing from the pastry to the mushrooms wrapped in homemade crepes…. Wife is like “ just pan sear me the tenderloin with mushrooms on the side…Im fine “… tried to show off my skills I learned in the restaurant business and she was not impressed
IMO beef wellington is a case where the result is not better than the sum of its parts. Like all the components just remain distinct, "now I'm eating a piece of meat, now im eating a chunk of pastry, now I'm eating some mushrooms", they don't combine to create anything new. And this is why her comment of "I'll just pan sear some mushrooms on the side instead" is perfect.
I would never even contemplate making my own pastry, but if you buy store bought puff pastry is it hard to make? Isn't it just seared beef tenderloin wrapped in prosciutto and/or duxelles, and then puff pastry and baked?
I make a meatloaf wrapped in puff pastry which is only a few extra minutes but doesn't have the duxelles.
Yeah im not a baker… Its come out good when Ive made it but damn it’s not worth the effort…now phyllo dough I wouldn’t even try …pizza dough is more my speed
That’s basically it.. in the restaurant I was sous chef that was one of our banquet specialties wrapped individually with just a topping of mushrooms… got a deal on a whole tenderloin and made the big version but wife wasn’t impressed
omg the PASTRY TOO?? this year my elderly dad (whose decision making is becoming… increasingly perplexing!) asked me to make him beef Wellington for his birthday. i have never known him to have beef Wellington before in his entire life. im not going to lie, I made some pretty baller beef Wellington. if he ever asks me to make beef Wellington again i might crumble.
This is also my answer. My brother and I got overly ambitious one Christmas and made Beef Wellington with homemade pastry. Nothin’ but a wooden rolling pin. It took FOREVER, we had a great time, it was delicious, and we will never do that again.
Seafood ravioli. I steamed crab legs and lobster tail, cooked the shrimp. Spent probably an hour just trying to get the dang meat out of the crab legs. Made fresh pasta sheets and the seafood filling. Assembled and boiled the ravioli, made sage brown butter sauce for them. Probably around $50 and hours later, it was really good, but not worth doing it again. I'll buy a bag of Rana lobster ravioli for $8 next time and make the sauce. I still enjoy making mushroom, cheese, or beef ravioli, on occasion, but the seafood filling was just too much extra time and money to be worth it.
One of the things about crab/lobster. People try to come up with so many preparations for it. But just eat the damn thing out of its shell. All that other stuff is like that one scene in the 40 Year Old Virgin. It's already perfect, why ruin it?
Yeah, I agree. I was trying to recreate this dish I had at a restaurant years ago, it was delicious and I had just gotten my pasta roller, so I thought I'd try it. But just regular steamed lobster tails with butter is the way to go. And fuck crab, not worth the work to me lol.
100% the opposite my friend. Lobster is an OK substitue when it's not Dungeness Crab season.Or something like Malaysian Chili Crab but with a lobstah? No thank you!
I did watch a YouTube video of a woman making some kind of crab ball soup in SE Asia that involved hundreds of small crab being parboiled & somewhat peeled. Even though you didn't need to get rid of all the shell, watching the prep just seemed incredibly tedious.
I came in here to say just plain old ravioli. You added 3 more layers of complexity and effort. Hours of effort for (in my case) mediocre ravioli that was no better than store-bought.
Yeah, one year I bought into the idea of shielding thanksgiving turkey breast with bacon weave while the thighs came up to temperature. I got bacony gravy and soggy skin on the breast.
A vacherin. I don't know if you'd call it super fancy, but it's certainly a pain in the ass: preparing the fruit, the meringue, assembling quickly, refrigerating, then glazing...
A good one will take you two days. It's super delicious, I say it pays off, but I don't like when I have to work for days on a recipe. I'm fine with hours, but days... I want to eat stuff the day I start them.
Cassoulet completely from scratch including making my own duck confit and butchering down the ducks as I got them from the Asian Supermarket and still had heads attached. It was delicious but like 3 days of work (for "peasant" food)
Beef Wellington. For the amount of effort and cost of ingredients, it's actually pretty cost-effective to get it from a good restaurant, plus I'm not wiped out by the time I'm eating it.
There's never been a dish that I have only made once and then didn't try again except for a wedding cake—but the reason I didn't do that again is because I hate fondant. There have been very complex dishes that I rarely make, however. Such as lamb and yogurt dumpling soup, croissants, and croquembouche (which I can't seem to get right).
I did the sushi thing once as well. It turned out ok, but honestly I'd rather just go out for it. It was a good amount of work and the quality/variety of ingredients is much better at a sushi house than what I'm willing to lay down to do it at home.
If I were to do it again, I'd just pay to take a class where they provide the equipment and ingredients, and you get an experience out of it.
What a fucking waste of time. It was good but we have so much great ramen where I live that was so much better than what I made. It took ten hours and was substantially worse. I could have gone out, gone to the gallery and bought ramen for less than two hours of my wage.
I made a "Duckenantridge" basically a multi bird roast of Duck, Chicken and a Partridge. Boned them all out, made 2 stuffings, stuffed them and sewed them up so that it looks like a giant bird shape. Carving was a breeze, just cut straight through. Well worth the effort imo.
Home made ravioli. Made it like 3 times. All by hand, rolled the dough out by hand too. It’s a labor of love and I just haven’t had the time or space in years but god damn is it good
Pasta without a pasta roller... Now I have the pasta attachment for the Kitchenaid, so I do make pasta every now and again. But rolling the sheets out by hand? Omg, never again.
Julia's Beef Bourguignon. Followed the recipe exactly. It was delicious, but took a ton of effort and I have decided that a slow braised beef stew with all the veggies etc added in to the one pot is SO much easier and tastes better. I will say it was a great learning exercise on building and layering flavors.
This was one of the first things I made when I decided to level up my cooking skills. You're right, it's a great exercise and it's absolutely delicious. I wouldn't say that I would never do it again, but I don't know that it's worth the extra effort vs something like Kenji's "really good beef stew".
However, this reminds me that I do want to make coq au vin again.
In high school I improvised potato pancakes - came out perfect. My friends' mother said she tried many times and could never replicate it - I can't even do it. Have no idea how I did that.
My mother would make anything I asked for, but not Chicken Pot Pie from scratch. She said it was too much trouble.
Should have gotten her recipe for Hazelnut cake. It was waaaay sweet but delicious!
I learned how to make bratwurst for a German themed Thanksgiving we had. Started learning a few months before, then made them the night before. Had a crappy kitchenaid attachment to do the job (grinder worked well, stuffer not so much). Turned out well, but never again.
I made Reubens from scratch once. I baked the rye bread, fermented the sauerkraut, and made the sauce. I didn’t corn the beef or make the cheese sadly. They were delicious.
Maybe not fancy, but it was a chili recipe from scratch; dehydrated peppers, dark cooking chocolate, myriad of spices, a lot of different ingredients and steps, took a long time. And the end result was almost identical to the McCormicks seasoning package that you dump into a slow cooker with meat. Didn’t see the point after that.
I did this just recently, one thing I do is use both a lot of dried peppers and a few different varieties (ancho, mulatto, papilla, guajillo, arbor, etc). Then I toast them, then soak them in hot water for a while before cooking, and use both the peppers and soaking water (though I remove the seeds otherwise it can get way too spicy).
If you have enough of them I think it brings a flavor and heat to the chili that you just can't get otherwise. Maybe when you did it you didn't use enough.
Made homemade chicken Tikka masala from scratch. Marinating the chicken, grinding the spices, etc... took hours and the result was just like, okay. I'll stick to Indian restaurants from now on.
Stuffed canneloni with seafood mousse and some kind of seafood cream sauce. This involved making seafood stock from scratch, among other things. And then making the mousse...I destroyed my kitchen and it took like four hours start to finish. Never again.
Shrimp cakes with some kind of fancy sauce (I can't really remember, it was like 20 years ago). I made my own dashi, there were a zillion steps, it took forever, and it was consumed in less than 10 minutes. Also never again.
Princess Cake. I made it one year for Father's Day. It was great but it was a pain and because we live in a hot climate it was really tricky assembling it in June.
Blackened salmon fish tacos with a mango pineapple salsa. Perfectly spicy with the cooling fruit heat. Husband said it was the best thing he has EVER eaten.
buttermilk fried chicken and waffles. not my cultural culinary wheelhouse, but i got obsessed with the idea, read up on how to do it, it was amazing, then never did it again
Mushroom soup with six different mushrooms from the local Korean grocery store. It was delicious and made the house smell heavenly, but I don’t know that I’ll invest $80 in a pot of soup again.
Dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) from scratch. They never fully cooked, even after double, maybe even quadruple the cooking time. They also were really labor intensive to put together. Never again.
Beef wellington… I mean the whole thing from the pastry to the mushrooms wrapped in homemade crepes…. Wife is like “ just pan sear me the tenderloin with mushrooms on the side…Im fine “… tried to show off my skills I learned in the restaurant business and she was not impressed
A joke my late father used to tell :
What does kinky sex and beef wellington have in common?
A: you rarely get either at home…
Both are best enjoyed at a fine restaurant with Gordon Ramsay.
IMO beef wellington is a case where the result is not better than the sum of its parts. Like all the components just remain distinct, "now I'm eating a piece of meat, now im eating a chunk of pastry, now I'm eating some mushrooms", they don't combine to create anything new. And this is why her comment of "I'll just pan sear some mushrooms on the side instead" is perfect.
I would never even contemplate making my own pastry, but if you buy store bought puff pastry is it hard to make? Isn't it just seared beef tenderloin wrapped in prosciutto and/or duxelles, and then puff pastry and baked?
I make a meatloaf wrapped in puff pastry which is only a few extra minutes but doesn't have the duxelles.
Yeah im not a baker… Its come out good when Ive made it but damn it’s not worth the effort…now phyllo dough I wouldn’t even try …pizza dough is more my speed
That Meatloaf sounds good though might try that
That’s basically it.. in the restaurant I was sous chef that was one of our banquet specialties wrapped individually with just a topping of mushrooms… got a deal on a whole tenderloin and made the big version but wife wasn’t impressed
omg the PASTRY TOO?? this year my elderly dad (whose decision making is becoming… increasingly perplexing!) asked me to make him beef Wellington for his birthday. i have never known him to have beef Wellington before in his entire life. im not going to lie, I made some pretty baller beef Wellington. if he ever asks me to make beef Wellington again i might crumble.
I made the pastry just to prove to myself I could do it but damn it’s easier to just buy itthese days I am trying to figure out steam bao buns
Came here to say this same thing. The tenderloin is more delicious on its own.
Literally what I came here to say. I did it for Christmas a few years ago and it was delicious but not worth it!
This is also my answer. My brother and I got overly ambitious one Christmas and made Beef Wellington with homemade pastry. Nothin’ but a wooden rolling pin. It took FOREVER, we had a great time, it was delicious, and we will never do that again.
Seafood ravioli. I steamed crab legs and lobster tail, cooked the shrimp. Spent probably an hour just trying to get the dang meat out of the crab legs. Made fresh pasta sheets and the seafood filling. Assembled and boiled the ravioli, made sage brown butter sauce for them. Probably around $50 and hours later, it was really good, but not worth doing it again. I'll buy a bag of Rana lobster ravioli for $8 next time and make the sauce. I still enjoy making mushroom, cheese, or beef ravioli, on occasion, but the seafood filling was just too much extra time and money to be worth it.
One of the things about crab/lobster. People try to come up with so many preparations for it. But just eat the damn thing out of its shell. All that other stuff is like that one scene in the 40 Year Old Virgin. It's already perfect, why ruin it?
Yeah, I agree. I was trying to recreate this dish I had at a restaurant years ago, it was delicious and I had just gotten my pasta roller, so I thought I'd try it. But just regular steamed lobster tails with butter is the way to go. And fuck crab, not worth the work to me lol.
100% the opposite my friend. Lobster is an OK substitue when it's not Dungeness Crab season.Or something like Malaysian Chili Crab but with a lobstah? No thank you!
I did watch a YouTube video of a woman making some kind of crab ball soup in SE Asia that involved hundreds of small crab being parboiled & somewhat peeled. Even though you didn't need to get rid of all the shell, watching the prep just seemed incredibly tedious.
That tasted like shellfish
I came in here to say just plain old ravioli. You added 3 more layers of complexity and effort. Hours of effort for (in my case) mediocre ravioli that was no better than store-bought.
SeriousEat's bacon jalapeno mac & cheese, it's not even hard to make, but I think I'm still trying to lose the pounds I put on from it today.
Wow that sounds good
Homemade marshmallows.
I’m still thinking about Stella Parks sweet potatoes with homemade sage marshmallows from thanksgiving 2024
Ramen from scratch... easy enough dish but takes ages.
Ramen broth can be made an a pressure cooker in a fraction of the time, no need to stand around while it boils for 12 hours
The bacon craze back in the early 2010's featured a lot of this.
Anyone else make a bacon weave?
Yes, on top of a meatloaf and it was worth it.
Yes I have, and multiple times including using them as plating surfaces for another dish
Yeah, one year I bought into the idea of shielding thanksgiving turkey breast with bacon weave while the thighs came up to temperature. I got bacony gravy and soggy skin on the breast.
A vacherin. I don't know if you'd call it super fancy, but it's certainly a pain in the ass: preparing the fruit, the meringue, assembling quickly, refrigerating, then glazing...
A good one will take you two days. It's super delicious, I say it pays off, but I don't like when I have to work for days on a recipe. I'm fine with hours, but days... I want to eat stuff the day I start them.
Traditional carnitas and a mole sauce.
did someone say mole?
Cassoulet completely from scratch including making my own duck confit and butchering down the ducks as I got them from the Asian Supermarket and still had heads attached. It was delicious but like 3 days of work (for "peasant" food)
Beef Wellington. For the amount of effort and cost of ingredients, it's actually pretty cost-effective to get it from a good restaurant, plus I'm not wiped out by the time I'm eating it.
By the time it was time to eat it, I had zero appetite. Never again.
Tom yum soup. It was delicious, but too much work for something that doesn't reheat well.
Have you ever tried Tom Kha Gai? It's a similar soup but it's chicken so it heats up better. And I actually like it better as a soup overall.
There's never been a dish that I have only made once and then didn't try again except for a wedding cake—but the reason I didn't do that again is because I hate fondant. There have been very complex dishes that I rarely make, however. Such as lamb and yogurt dumpling soup, croissants, and croquembouche (which I can't seem to get right).
I did the sushi thing once as well. It turned out ok, but honestly I'd rather just go out for it. It was a good amount of work and the quality/variety of ingredients is much better at a sushi house than what I'm willing to lay down to do it at home.
If I were to do it again, I'd just pay to take a class where they provide the equipment and ingredients, and you get an experience out of it.
Tonkostu ramen
What a fucking waste of time. It was good but we have so much great ramen where I live that was so much better than what I made. It took ten hours and was substantially worse. I could have gone out, gone to the gallery and bought ramen for less than two hours of my wage.
I made a "Duckenantridge" basically a multi bird roast of Duck, Chicken and a Partridge. Boned them all out, made 2 stuffings, stuffed them and sewed them up so that it looks like a giant bird shape. Carving was a breeze, just cut straight through. Well worth the effort imo.
Home made ravioli. Made it like 3 times. All by hand, rolled the dough out by hand too. It’s a labor of love and I just haven’t had the time or space in years but god damn is it good
Homemade ramen. The $0.25 one tasted better.
Gumbo
One time out of like seven or eight (total times I have made it) I made great brisket in the slow cooker. It has not been replicated
Pasta without a pasta roller... Now I have the pasta attachment for the Kitchenaid, so I do make pasta every now and again. But rolling the sheets out by hand? Omg, never again.
Julia's Beef Bourguignon. Followed the recipe exactly. It was delicious, but took a ton of effort and I have decided that a slow braised beef stew with all the veggies etc added in to the one pot is SO much easier and tastes better. I will say it was a great learning exercise on building and layering flavors.
This was one of the first things I made when I decided to level up my cooking skills. You're right, it's a great exercise and it's absolutely delicious. I wouldn't say that I would never do it again, but I don't know that it's worth the extra effort vs something like Kenji's "really good beef stew".
However, this reminds me that I do want to make coq au vin again.
In high school I improvised potato pancakes - came out perfect. My friends' mother said she tried many times and could never replicate it - I can't even do it. Have no idea how I did that.
My mother would make anything I asked for, but not Chicken Pot Pie from scratch. She said it was too much trouble.
Should have gotten her recipe for Hazelnut cake. It was waaaay sweet but delicious!
I learned how to make bratwurst for a German themed Thanksgiving we had. Started learning a few months before, then made them the night before. Had a crappy kitchenaid attachment to do the job (grinder worked well, stuffer not so much). Turned out well, but never again.
lol sushi for me too, I’ve been planning to make it again for ages and just haven’t. maybe next week.
Hand rolls are awesome and so much easier
Croissants from scratch. Waaaay too much effort
Me too... Delicious but after 6 hours in, I had enough of butter, rolling, folding and fridge
I made Reubens from scratch once. I baked the rye bread, fermented the sauerkraut, and made the sauce. I didn’t corn the beef or make the cheese sadly. They were delicious.
Khao soi. Too much work.
Maybe not fancy, but it was a chili recipe from scratch; dehydrated peppers, dark cooking chocolate, myriad of spices, a lot of different ingredients and steps, took a long time. And the end result was almost identical to the McCormicks seasoning package that you dump into a slow cooker with meat. Didn’t see the point after that.
I did this just recently, one thing I do is use both a lot of dried peppers and a few different varieties (ancho, mulatto, papilla, guajillo, arbor, etc). Then I toast them, then soak them in hot water for a while before cooking, and use both the peppers and soaking water (though I remove the seeds otherwise it can get way too spicy).
If you have enough of them I think it brings a flavor and heat to the chili that you just can't get otherwise. Maybe when you did it you didn't use enough.
Made homemade chicken Tikka masala from scratch. Marinating the chicken, grinding the spices, etc... took hours and the result was just like, okay. I'll stick to Indian restaurants from now on.
theres a lot of shortcuts you can take to making a satisfying homemade batch and save time and money.
Two things stand out:
Stuffed canneloni with seafood mousse and some kind of seafood cream sauce. This involved making seafood stock from scratch, among other things. And then making the mousse...I destroyed my kitchen and it took like four hours start to finish. Never again.
Shrimp cakes with some kind of fancy sauce (I can't really remember, it was like 20 years ago). I made my own dashi, there were a zillion steps, it took forever, and it was consumed in less than 10 minutes. Also never again.
Pork Ramen
Cassoulet.
whaaa? it's hands -off dish!
Chocolate daquoise.
There are so many other deserts that “wow” that take far less time and effort.
Coquille St Jacques.
Recipe (link unlocked)
Beef Wellington. It came out really good too! But it was a lot of work and I felt I was just lucky so I never tried it again.
GUMBO. Took about 40 minutes of stirring to get a roux properly brown and not burnt. Loaded with several kinds of expensive seafood. Delicious.
Ziti from "The Sopranos"
Turducken
Pineapple Upside Down Cake (I’ll make it again…I just need a minute lol)
Coconut cream pie. It was so good but never again.
Princess Cake. I made it one year for Father's Day. It was great but it was a pain and because we live in a hot climate it was really tricky assembling it in June.
Confit potatoes. Such a faff and made my house smell of duck fat but wow were they incredible
I fucking hate shucking oysters but will do it for someone I love
Blackened salmon fish tacos with a mango pineapple salsa. Perfectly spicy with the cooling fruit heat. Husband said it was the best thing he has EVER eaten.
buttermilk fried chicken and waffles. not my cultural culinary wheelhouse, but i got obsessed with the idea, read up on how to do it, it was amazing, then never did it again
Mushroom soup with six different mushrooms from the local Korean grocery store. It was delicious and made the house smell heavenly, but I don’t know that I’ll invest $80 in a pot of soup again.
Dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) from scratch. They never fully cooked, even after double, maybe even quadruple the cooking time. They also were really labor intensive to put together. Never again.