I think that as a food blogger, it’s important to share the truth about my recipe development. It might seem like all of my recipes turn out perfectly, not that you can tell by my photos. (Getting good quality photos of food is still a challenge.) I want to take this opportunity to tell you that’s not the case. Often, my recipe ideas don’t turn out like I intended. Fortunately, most of the time, they are still good. Occasionally, they are barely edible. This story is about once such recipe–The Foil Pouch Fail.
During the Summer months, I love to use my grill, and I love to create foil pouch meals as an alternative to the usual grilled burgers, sausages, dogs, chicken, and steaks. I actually have some delicious foil pouch meals on this site that turned out perfect. They are:
We were looking forward to another delicious foil pouch dinner.
Obviously, I was on a roll with these recipes, so I decided to try and make a different type of foil pouch. My inspiration for the foil pouch that failed was one of the more popular recipes on my site–Roasted Bratwurst and Potatoes. I decided that I would use a smoked sausage and potatoes as the basis of my new foil pouch.
I sliced smoked sausages in half to make them fit better in the foil pouches and then sliced up potatoes and diced some onions to add a little more flavor. If I had stopped there, things might have turned out differently, but I didn’t. I had the brilliant idea to make something like scalloped potatoes in the foil pouch, so I tossed the potatoes and onions with some milk and cheese, and added some spices, before topping them with a piece of sausage.
It seemed like everything was going to be perfect, and I had my mouth all set for my smoked sausage and scalloped potato foil pouch. What could possibly go wrong? I sealed my pouches and put them on the grill.
This time, something went terribly wrong.
All of our other foil pouches turned out perfectly when grilled over a low to medium heat for 10 minutes on each side, so I had no reason to expect anything different from this one. Unfortunately, this time, the foil pouch recipe was a complete failure.
When we opened the foil pouch, everything was burned. Baker’s Man joked that I should call this the “Blackened Sausage and Potato Foil Pouch Dinner.”
We were able to pull the black of of the outside of the sausage, and we were able to pick pieces of the potatoes off of the foil, but the whole thing was a disaster. Thank goodness we had some pea salad as a side and banana pudding for dessert, or there would have been a mutiny.
Only one of the foil pouches that I made for dinner that night avoided being burned to a crisp. That was because it was sitting on a spot where the burner on our gas grill doesn’t work properly, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the sausage is still burned, it was just flipped over before I took the picture. It’s hard to see, but the potatoes are also slightly charred on the front end. These potatoes were also slightly under cooked.
What went wrong?
I think that the problem was two fold. I think that milk in a foil pouch is a bad idea. It’s easy to overheat milk on the stove, so it serves to reason that having the milk on the grill was a recipe for disaster. The other reason that I think this failed was because our propane grill doesn’t have the ability to be set up so that the foil pouches are cooked over indirect heat.
I think that if I try this again, I would just add onions, potatoes, and sausages to the foil pouch and forget about creating a scalloped type potato in the foil pouch. Perhaps, I’ll try this again. Hopefully, the next time, I will have a recipe I can publish.
Have you ever had any horrible recipe failures? Do you know what went wrong, or was it just a bad recipe. Someday, I will have to tell you the story of Trout Chowder. It’s a tragic tale of a recipe gone wrong, and of family and friends who were forever scarred, but that’s a story for another post.
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This post was completed in collaboration with our friend, Angie, from Kitchen Southern Hospitality. Check out her post “Funny Stories about Kitchen Failures.” The funniest thing about her story is that I did the exact same thing with a chicken once. Fortunately, we didn’t have company that night.
Thanks for visiting Patty Cake’s Pantry.
Trout and chowder just don’t mix! I’d rather burnt bratwursts any day! But, I cannot scoff, I have thrown many a meal failures away! I think the worst was when I used a tablespoon vs a teaspoon of salt in my beef stroganoff… no amount of rice was able to reduce that salinity!
That’s awful. My mother once used 1/2 cup of salt in a dessert recipe because she had salt and sugar in similar canisters on the counter and she just grabbed the wrong one. After that, she switched from regular iodized salt to kosher salt because it was coarser. and she was able to tell the difference visually when she looked at it. That was one nasty dessert. Regarding your stroganoff…They say that adding potatoes to something you’ve over salted is supposed to help absorb the salt from the recipe. I wonder if that would’ve worked with the stroganoff. You would’ve needed to add water and then some cut up potatoes, but that tablespoon of salt might have been too much for even the potato trick.