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Insane and crazy recipe substitutions?
So I normally don't care that much about food. But I just got introduced to r/ididnthaveeggs which is a repository of insane and ridiculous recipe substitutions from the comments sections of recipes. Even with zero knowledge of cooking, I know swapping carrot for shredded kale in a carrot cake recipe will not turn out well.
So cooks and food-eaters of Tildes, what are the most insane and ridiculous substitutions you've encountered or heard of? Especially curious if you've had the (mis)fortune of getting to try the innovative recipe for yourself.
When making box mac and cheese (Kraft Dinner for the Canadians in the room), I swap out the milk and butter with plain yogurt. Not exactly a crazy substitution, and it’s one that I genuinely recommend: the yogurt not only yields a better texture, but it also adds a flavorful tang to the dish. An overall improvement!
Except for one time.
My husband and I do grocery pickup, which means that if something’s out of stock, the picker simply substitutes the item for us.
So, one time, my regular box mac and cheese got substituted for a kids’ version. More colorful box. Different pasta shape.
I think: no big deal, right? It’s probably the same exact stuff, only I get to eat racecars instead of boring old tubes. An improvement, if anything!
So I make the meal and my husband and I sit down to eat it. We each take a bite and, well, it’s… funny tasting. Definitely not like the normal mac and cheese. It has a different tasting note entirely, and it’s… sweet?
It threw my brain for a loop, because I’ve eaten so much box mac and cheese in my life that I know the flavor intimately. This was close to it, but there was a mystery there too. Some familiar but ineffable taste hiding inside the kids’ version.
We each take another bite, this time out of confusion rather than interest. My mind immediately leaps to “wow, they must load the kids’ version up with sugar” and I start to get angry at predatory food companies adding unnecessary sweetness to products aimed at children (a well-documented phenomenon). I might have started to soapbox to him about it, right at the dinner table.
My husband is put off from the dish entirely, politely apologizing that he doesn’t want to eat what I’ve served him. Meanwhile, I’m now quizzically tasting small nibbles of it like I’m a contestant on Top Chef trying to sleuth out what, exactly, was in this dish. Why did they make it so sweet? And what’s that underlying flavor? I recognize it, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
I grab the box to the mac and cheese and start checking the label. I look at ingredients and the sugar content. Nothing seems out of the ordinary.
It’s my husband who figures out the mystery: he checked the yogurt label.
Turns out there was another substitution from the grocery store that I hadn’t noticed.
My plain yogurt got subbed out.
That tasting note I couldn’t identify? The sugar?
It was vanilla yogurt.
The swaps are why I absolutely refuse to use the grocery pick up or delivery services. Those yogurts are not the same thing. That one was egregious but there are plenty of times where I would rather not get a thing (or likely several things for the same meal) if some keystone ingredient isn't available.
As for a Kraft tangent, just last week I had a weird situation with a box, where there was an absurd amount of starch in the box. As soon as I poured it in and it came to boil, the entire pot of water turned to glue. The kid was very disappointed until we took the pot outside and dumped it into the yard as one solid clump of pasta and pasta water.
The service I use (Instacart) notifies me via my phone app when they have a substitution and I can accept, reject, or chat with the delivery person to find a better substitute. I can also preselect whether I want to accept substitutions or just refund if it isn’t available.
Does it have a way to say "if X is not available, also do not get A, B, and C"?
You can make free form notes on each item and they are very good at following them.
Walmart allows for substitute picking or a disallowal of substitutions at all.
So the only pickup we use is Walmart, because it's no charge. Any time there's a substitution, you are given the option to accept or reject. When you submit your order, you can even pick and choose what would be a valid substitute you would be happy with.
We have had the experience where they were out of some key ingredient (bell peppers seems common lately for some reason) and I had to go to another store to pick it up. But shopping in-store for 1-3 items is much faster than shopping for 40+ items, and it also removes the temptation of purchasing the colorful end-cap items.
My local grocery delivery service requires you to approve substitutions iirc, and it lets you select whether you want them to sub something or just remove it from the list if it can't be found. I'm honestly surprised this isn't something every such service does.
I am more concerned with stuff like "if you don't have the artichoke hearts in oil, we can also skip the pasta and herbs because I will make something entirely different"
Ah, fair enough. I'm rarely making anything with more than one very specific ingredient, so typically if that one thing is missing I can repurpose the other stuff for a different meal.
I had a similar thing happen, but it was entirely my own fault. I was rushing through my weekly grocery shopping and quickly grabbing what I needed for the week. The last thing I needed to grab was a small, plain greek yogurt. The dairy aisle is the last one in the store, so I grab the yogurt and make a beeline for checkout. A couple days later, my spouse offered to make the chicken marinade for chicken korma that night, which is great because I completely forgot it needed to sit for a couple hours before cooking. I get home, cook the meal, and we sit down to dinner - but there is something off with the flavor. I have him run through the ingredients he used and everything was perfect. It didnt taste bad, so we continued eating. While cleaning up, I came across the yogurt cup that hadn't made it out to the recycle bin yet. In my rush, I had grabbed coffee flavored greek yogurt and neither of us had noticed.
I physically recoiled from the last line. But yeah racecar pasta would be amazing. (Also, my brain refuses to let "racecar is a palindrome" go unacknowledged)
Ha, that reminds me of a few months ago when I didn't have any milk or butter to use so I used the creme cheese dip that came with a fruit tray. The Mac & Cheese was almost inedible due to how sweet the dip was and it had a tangy flavor that overpowered the cheese. I tried it again a few days later, but with far less dip and it was really good. Think I'll pickup some plain, unsweetened yogurt and try that, it sounds good. :)
I think I'd jump to that conclusion too, it's so easy to see that happening. Really wish we'd make a law against using food addiction to sell food. At least clearly labeling things with excess salt, sugar or fat in some way that stands out. It's so obvious in a lot of products, like hotdogs.. why does a plain hotdog need sugar!? Worse is when it says low fat or half the fat, like yogurt, but has as much sugar as a can of soda using the lower fat aspect to trick people into thinking it's healthy.
Upon rereading this comment in this thread, I realized I actually have a relevant story:
When I was about 8, I was often cooking - for the family, but also my own lunches. I did ramen a lot - cheap, and versatile. Of course you can make soup and you can drain the noodles and use the seasoning packet to have noodles, but you can also ignore the seasoning and then you basically have quick "pasta". I would so very often take a can of tomato sauce, season it, and make "spaghetti".
I loved it when we had 'alfredo sauce' and so I could have ramen alfredo.
Well, one day, I was in a mood for ramen alfredo, but we had no alfredo. So I looked around - what do we have that's creamy?
…Mayonnaise is creamy.
no, no, wait, it gets worse
see, our default go-to on many sandwiches was mayo and yellow mustard
So, you see, when I thought "mayo", I thought - well, if I'm putting on mayo, I should put on mustard!
Yes, I put mayonnaise and yellow mustard on ramen.
Let me tell, you, friend. Growing up poor, I did not waste food. I ate many crappy crappy things.
I ate two bites of that and threw it the fuck away.
......as a non-cook, this kind of makes me want to try "ramen alfredo" and "ramen spaghetti" xD
I remember when I first tried instant ramen as a super-picky kid, I didn't like it. So for some reason, I just gradually added some of my chocolate milk at the dinner table in hopes of... Honestly I'm not even sure what my logic was. It wasn't inedible like the monstrosity you describe, but it definitely did not help and I did not finish that bowl.
Wow. That's... uh,.. that;s special. lol.
Yeah, not as bad as mine, but quite terrible. lol
Believe it or not ground flaxseed and water can act as a pretty good egg substitute in pancakes or muffins or whatnot. It's when people try to use it in omelettes or soufflé, or they try and use unground, unwetted flax that are the problem. Many such cases.
Anyway, my favourite example of "I didn't have eggs" was this comment I made on /r/shittyfoodporn a year before /r/ididnthaveeggs existed: https://old.reddit.com/r/shittyfoodporn/comments/9f6r35/we_tried_making_a_cake_for_my_moms_birthday/e5ul9nl/?context=3
ROFL
In all seriousness what IS is and why did it fail this bad?? In America one can buy box cake mixes that only require water right?
They usually need oil and eggs, though I don't think they have to need eggs because angel food doesn't and it's mostly egg whites.
If they skipped the eggs it wouldn't rise. The coloring thing could easily happen if they've never used food coloring before, they probably thought it would stay in its lanes instead of seeping together.
It's a crepe cake, apparently, which at least explains all the thin layers.
That's hilarious when this is what it's supposed to look like, or a rainbow one like this. From the finished image, it looks like they're totally unfamiliar with how food colouring works and have never made crepes before either
It's definitely a rainbow crepe cake, the one you pictured isn't as bright as some I've seen. It would have worked out ok if they had managed to stabilize the whip cream.
Probably operating off the concept or a poorly made recipe. Make crapes, stack with whip creme in between, add fruity goodness to the top. So they made colored crapes that turned out a bit thick, used a can of whip creme to add that in between and poured what I'm guessing is strawberry syrup over it. Not long after the hot crapes melted the whip cream, soaked up the liquid and you have that picture. lol
the crepe cake context make the picture way more reasonable and clearly left out for comedic effect. Because at first glance I was just like "I understand not having experience making cake. But have they never seen inside one?!"
Have you ever tried aquafaba aka chickpea water? It is a great vegan alternative for egg whites.
Yep. It's great. It's one of the only ways to make vegan meringue. It does however, still taste like beans.
Depending on the application sometimes a banana can also substitute for eggs. It just depends on the application. You can probably make a crepe using aquafaba or a muffin using flax, but they're net necessarily interchangeable.
I'm not an inventive chef, but I am also a forgetful person who is sometimes gripped with sudden desire for a particular dish for which I have no ingredients of. The following are out of necessity, not creativity
You're close to the real thing on the powdered sugar substitute! If you have just plain white sugar, the ratio is 25:1 sugar: cornstarch, yeet it all into a blender and blend until powdery (1-5 minutes depending on blender power). You could even leave the
rat fecescornstarch out if you wanted, it just helps prevent clumping.Of course, doesn't help if you don't have sugar. Or a blender... But it worked so well for us though that we don't even bother buying powdered sugar anymore. With a Vitamix it got powdery enough I think you could even use it in buttercream frosting.
Is the ratio mass or volume? (Please say mass...)
Mass! Yes, sorry lol. I forget there's those whacky volume measurements for solids sometimes
I hate that most American recipes use volume for things like flour and brown sugar... you can fluff it up or pack it down and get two very different weight measurements for the same "volume".
See also: why I don't bake.
Good to note for the future! :D if I'm using it right away I will indeed leave out the um, rat plortz.
I am filled with equal measures of fear and respect. I live a looong way from town and found myself many times crawling to the car in defeat rather than tempt the gods with a crafty substitute. I'm a baking traditionalist though and must live and die by the recipe. That might just be my ADHD though...
hah, makes sense that baking-adhd would work that way. I'm largely a cook rather than baker, so I'm often improvising and going "ehhhhh, let's see what the heck this does" to my cooking. But… I'm not baking, for the most part. heh
(My cooking-adhd says "Oh, shit, I'm out of this and that. uhhhhhhhh, IMPROVISE!" :) )
This isn't crazy at all, but I am always surprised by how few people know about this - at least up here in North East USA.
When you make scrambled eggs, skip the milk, skip the cheese, skip it all. Just whip a big spoon of mayo into the eggs before you pour them into the pan. Scramble them normally.
Then, when you make your breakfast sandwich with your amazing scrambled eggs, yep, you're going to go ahead and put some more mayo on your bread.
Black dude I used to do side jobs for makes it this way. My brother moved down south and also started doing this. My skinny, white, NY taste buds had no idea what to do with something that delicious. I got pretty hooked for a while but luckily I'm too lazy to make a nice breakfast every morning so it's now just a treat for when I have company or extra energy.
I guess it's probably more well-known in certain regions/communities?
Might be worth noting that Miracle Whip is not a substitute for mayonnaise. I don't know what else is in that horrific substance but it's not mayo by a freedom mile.
I was just reading a thread on Reddit cooking where the poster was baffled by their granny's recipe for potato salad that called for 1 cup of sugar to 1.5 c mayo. There were a few comments that Miracle Whip is basically mayo with extra sugar and vinegar.
Oh yikes that sounds disgustingly sweet!
Or maybe it's a lot of potatoes and not much mayo.
…but somehow I suspect it's sweet. lol
Welp, I will have to try that.
After living almost 50 years, I am finally happy ( in the last like decade) with my eggs - I crack them into the skillet, cook the whites almost through while keeping the yolks whole, then break them up and take the pan off the heat so I barely barely cook the yolks while having no nasty running whites - and one of my favorite things to do with that is to make an egg sandwich on bread.... with.... mayo. So damn delicious.
I think I'll scramble the mayo into the eggs the first time, but the second time, I think I'll actually pull the yolks out, scramble the mayo into the whites, then cook the whites and then add the yolk to barely-cook and see if that is 1) good and 2) worth it :)
Report back and let me know how you like it!
Hmm. I do like it. I'm not sure it's the most amazing thing - it's rather subtle. But I think it helped.
For the record, I cook my eggs on a single-burner griddle. Heat is important to me. If I'm going to scramble my eggs before I scramble them¹, I tend to butter the entire surface and spread the egg out so that it all mostly cooks quickly in a thin layer, then I stir and flip and move it about to finish cooking - total cook time is well under a minute. Managing this is important as I try not to over-cook the yolks, since to me, minimally-cooked yolk is what makes eggs tasty.
There is a little difference to the texture of the eggs. Flavor-wise it's not detectable, at least not outside of isolating it by cooking more eggs without the mayo to do a direct comparison.
But it may be that my technique was already producing good eggs, so that the improvements didn't improve them that much perhaps? Because this is a good technique that I'll use again when I choose to pre-scramble my eggs, for sure.
But I also use plenty of butter to cook them in (mayo has added fat) and usually a splash of heavy cream (a little more moisture I think helps to slow the cooking and make it more manageable); so I think the mayo may slightly enhance my cooking style, but might revolutionize some other styles perhaps?
I dunno. This is a lot to say about a simple thing I know, but I just find it interesting and so I'm babbling on about it.
I do recommend this tip, though. :)
¹ i.e. scramble them in a bowl before I "scramble" them on the griddle — as normally I crack them on the griddle and scramble them while I cook them
I got a story for this one!
I used to play a tabletop RPG with some friends every week, and we had a tradition that someone would cook dinner for the group before we started playing. The dinner was always fine...except for the one time a couple players made fettuccine alfredo.
American alfredo is usually a white cream sauce with a lot of parmesan dissolved into the cream. It's also commonly served with grilled chicken.
There were concerns as soon as the two people cooking showed up with: spaghetti, sharp cheddar, milk, and honey smoked salmon. They said they'd cooked "alfredo" before with these substitutions when they didn't have cream or parmesan at home, but the honey smoked salmon was a new addition they decided to grab while shopping.
It turned out about how you'd expect; it was spaghetti and cheese with honey smoked salmon. Most of us didn't finish our dinner, but we do remember the meal!
That reminds me of one of my most embarrassing moments. It was my turn to cook for a similar thing and I wanted to make sweet and sour beef. My idea of that: rice, unseasoned ground beef, and a bottle of pre made sweet and sour sauce.
At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but it makes me want to die of embarrassment every time I remember it, but I’ve become a muuuuuch better chef since then.
I could really go for a wet plate of cheesy salmon after that story. 🤮
My slightly less audacious version was a trying to make fried rice with mayonnaise. I got it into my head that fried rice was rice + oil + eggs, and mayo is oil + eggs, so.....
I also had awful technique - I essentially dumped mayonnaise into a cold pan with rice and turned up the heat.
The result was unpleasant.
Pretty much all Asian cooking happens after the wok is already very hot, and then add aromatics dry, then oil and optionally dump the aromatics, then ingredients. Mayo fried rice would have worked if you added mayo at the very last step.
In fact, yeah, hot wok, aromatics, oil, prawns super quick, scoop them out keep warm, oil heated up, fry thin garlic slices, put garlic to the side, do other toppings then to the side, now fry the rice properly, then add all the toppings except rice back in. To your warm prawns, add mayonnaise. Move fried rice to serving platter, top with mayo prawns, sprinkle deep fried garlic slices as garnish.
I feel like mayo should work if you do it right. My wife fries her bread with mayo instead of butter, so why not rice?
I do that, too. It's great for grilled cheese. I think my pan heat was what did it.
I generally just don't fuck around with buttermilk substitutions. Like, I don't care how many known substitutions there are like "use lemon juice and milk", "use cream of tartar and whatever the fuck."
I'm just done with it. Either use buttermilk and follow the recipe entirely, or find another recipe. You really can't mess around a lot with recipes that have like 4 ingredients.
My girlfriend introduced me to powdered buttermilk. Stays good in the refrigerator for a long time and is arguably undetectable as a substitute.
Edit: I dare you.
I will allow this, as it is substitute adjacent. It's more of a transformation, than a substitution.
Addendum, frozen tomato paste works pretty well and allows me to feel less frustrated by opening those tiny baby cans and only using 1-2 TBSP. I just freeze it flat in a ziploc bag/rubber bag, then break off pieces from that. I don't really fuck with the tubes, but to each their own.
Addendum to that addendum, I do not like the fad of cutting up herbs and freezing them with oil in an ice cube tray. Not for me, you basically need a dedicated ice cube tray for this as it taints the whole tray (have not tried using a metal one to reduce this). Not all recipes that use herbs also use oil, etc. etc. I also just, it's not worth the effort, IMO. But if you like it, go for it.
Lastly, I generally PREFER using crystalized coffee for things that require a coffee flavor over using regular coffee. If you must use regular coffee, I recommend overnight brewing a very concentrated version. But I still prefer crystals as they do not add to the overall volume of whatever you are trying to flavor.
Tomato paste tubes are pretty easily accessible. Ironically enough I have the opposite problem I usually need to use a whole tube and it's more work than just a can at once.
Accessible, yes. Irritatingly expensive, also yes: https://ieh.im/s/msedge_WQBYxJ8Vf1.png
It's led me to not wanting to open the cheap can of tomato paste to use part, and not keeping tubes on hand for the five times cost, and so not using tomato paste where I really should. meh.
Yeah it's not cheap. But you have to watch out for not only the quality (Cento is waaaay better) but also the concentration.
For me the large national brands (hunts, Walmart, Kroger) taste bad, I'd rather not use any at all.
My mom has a recipe she uses at thanksgiving for green bean bundles. She'll use a slice of bacon to make a bundle with 8-12 long green beans, then bake them in a tray with a mix of onions, cider vinegar, and some different herbs. I have an unhealthy kind of love of vinegar so they're always a hit with me. One time, I was visiting with my grandmother and she decided she was going to make some green bean bundles, because she knew I liked them.
In the usual recipe, the mix of stuff takes on an orange-red color, and they taste best if you're using fresh green beans and thick bacon. What I got served was a deep red. The green beans were cut exactly the same, and the bacon was that thin, pre-cooked kind you find in a frozen section. I didn't want to be impolite, so I took one with a fork and bit into it. Turns out, what I expected to be an onion-y, vinegar-y sort of taste was Russian salad dressing, with canned beans and precooked bacon. Grandma had picked out whatever sauce looked right and used it on that basis, because she'd worked up enough nervousness to stop her from asking anyone how to actually make that dish.
My dad one time got to experience this same sort of moment by way of a ham and sour cream sandwich, which is like a family legend at this point. Same sort of story, grandma done got nervous and just made something that looked like what he'd asked for, because she didn't want him to know she'd run out of mayonnaise. At the time, she lived across the street from the grocery store, and it's not like either me or my dad would have had a problem with heading over for something (it wouldn't have been more than a ten minute trip lol).
Grandma's sister got me one time with chicken parmesan, where instead of the usual breadcrumbs/herbs for breading, she'd crushed up a bunch of frosted flakes and rolled the chicken around in it with some oregano. I've actually had some chicken breaded with different cereals that I rather liked, but the key was cereal that didn't have sugar in it/wasn't flavored with sweet spices. Frosted Flake Chicken Parm is definitely not on that list. The sugar made the whole thing taste kinda like off ketchup with cheese.
One time a neighbor brought us some cookies, just as a thing she'd do for folks who had recently moved in. They looked fine, smelled good, but when I bit into one something just wasn't right. There was a distinct saltiness and aftertaste closer to a french fry than a cookie, a thick and greasy sort of taste that meant I really did not want another one. We broke the cookies apart and discovered, they'd been made with Ruffles potato chips. The cookies were just plain chocolate chip otherwise, really they tasted very good if not for the potato chips. We puzzled over this for a good bit, and settled on it having been a "that's what was in the pantry" recipe. We all have some, no biggie, but we did resolve to break one open first if she brought us more.
It could be worse. For some reason my brain skimmed over "Frosted Flakes" the first time you mentioned it, so for some reason it substituted Cap'n Crunch. Just the thought of any sugary cereal mixed with something so savory makes me want to gag though.
Also, did you ever get any other cookies from that neighbor?
The neighbor did give us cookies again if I remember correctly. At the time I moved away not long after the original story, and I do seem to remember my mom offhandedly mentioning getting some more "chocolate chip ruffles" lol.
Somewhat famously, blood (usually pig or cow) can be substituted for eggs in some baking applications - the proteins behave similarly enough.
My wife knew someone who tried it, but my wife is an excellent cook, and the friend was not, so the cupcakes didn't exactly turn out great.