The Cooking Lessons Redditors Learned The Hard Way

There are certain laws of cooking that you just know about, perhaps by observing your family cook in the kitchen, from reading a cookbook or two, or even from watching a few seasons of your favorite cooking competition show. Other lessons, as Redditors share, are not so easily learned. A Reddit thread has users sharing lessons that they've learned after painful firsthand experiences of kitchen mishaps and it's a discussion all of us can take away a thing or two from.

"I know for me it was you must FULLY dry out that pan before heating oil in it," wrote one enlightened cook on the platform, and other users quickly jumped in to share their own hard-learned lessons. From melted frostings and crumbled cakes, one user learned that cakes must always be cold before they are decorated — "like cold cold," they stress. Boiling spaghetti sauce can lead to the entire kitchen being painted with red splotches, over seasoning a cast iron skillet can cause a build-up of oil, assuming those oven gloves will always protect your hands from the oven's heat, and the perils of using blunt knives are only a few of the supreme life lessons that Redditors seem to have learned the hard way. But of all the many goof-ups in the kitchen, it's the mandoline that still gives most nightmares!

While we recommend the use of the mandoline in recipes such as homemade potato chips, safety is paramount, as stressed by the website dedicated to the vegetable slicing device. Since a mandoline makes no discrimination in its job to slice things with a sharp blade — vegetables and fingers alike — most mandolines come with hand guards or a food holder that protect your fingers from ever coming too close to the blade. The site also highly recommends using cut-resistant gloves as an extra measure. The gloves may not completely protect you from the risk of a cut but the damage may be greatly lessened.

It turns out, many Redditors have learned of these safety measures the hard way. "Safety devices come with the mandoline for a reason," points out one Reddit user. Many vehemently agree with the dangers of a mandolin, recounting their own bloody experiences with the dangerous kitchen gadget that has caused minor cuts at the very least and entire fingertips shaved off at worst.

This is why many attest to the wisdom of wearing cut-resistant gloves when using a mandoline and shiver at the thought of just how many fingers they'd have left without it. Or, as one ingenious Redditor admits, "I just know that I would forget about the safety devices. That's why I'll never buy a mandoline, aka the Blood God." 'Blood God' sounds a bit extreme, but we can certainly understand the sentiment.