Have you ever tried a recipe that turned out to go horribly wrong, or maybe the end product, despite being good, just wasn’t worth the effort? What was that recipe, and what about it made you say “NEVER AGAIN”?
I ask this as I am actively trying to remove the stench of onions from my Instapot lid’s silicone ring after making French Onion Soup in it (so far steaming it with white vinegar on the steam setting, soaking the ring in a water/baking soda bath overnight, and baking it at 250 degrees F for 20 minutes have all done nothing, so I ordered a new one, I give up). And I realized that cutting all the onions and waiting hours for them to caramelize and now this damn smell issue just isn’t worth it. Plus I still have frozen soup in the freezer because I can only eat French Onion soup so many days in a row.
NEVER AGAIN.
Homemade Soup Dumplings (Xiao Long Bao), made from scratch. So much work. It became quickly evident doing it properly required skill you couldn’t learn from a video or a recipe book and would take a really long time to master.
The whole thing ended up kinda thick and clumpy. Definitely one of those things better left to people who know what they’re doing.
Agreed.
There’s so much skill that goes into making a good dough and then rolling it out. Too thick and it’s gooey and pasty, too thin and it breaks during cooking or when you try to remove it from the steamer. Even among restaurant that serve soup dumplings, not all can make a good dumpling, that told me all I needed to know about attempting it.
Weird, we make Xiao long bao all the time and it’s super simple meal prep food for us. Well spend a couple hours making like 100 of them on a rainy day and then eat them for months. The trick to making them like the restaurant is to clip off the top so you don’t end up with a giant dough lump.
If you make it all the time, that basically means you have a lot of practice.