Everyone’s Least Favorite Parts of Cooking

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Even the most passionate and enthusiastic home cooks have some aspect of cooking they despise. It can’t be rainbows and sunshine in the kitchen all the time.

As people say, “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” Unfortunately, you also have to chop onions, grab the milk, dirty a pan, watch the omelet, and wipe the stove afterward. As much as we love making a new recipe or crafting a familiar favorite, we want to share some of our culinary complaints.

Doing Dishes

This is the obvious one. Washing the mountain of dishes that accumulated during your culinary journey is not fun. Sure, people will tell you to “clean as you go,” but that’s easier said than done when you have a lot going on.

Many home cooks find themselves so exhausted after cooking and eating the whole meal that the dishes sit until morning, making them harder to clean. We have no advice; this is just one of those necessary evils of being a human.

The Lonely Home Cook

Whether it’s Thanksgiving or a random Tuesday evening, home cooks are often left alone in the kitchen. When everyone else mingles or hangs out in the living room, the home cook can become very lonely.

This loneliness can sting extra knowing you’re pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into a meal for the people in the other room. For all the non-home cooks reading, consider hanging in the kitchen with your lonely chef.

A Crowded Kitchen

Conversely, cooking a tasty meal can be extra challenging when everyone and their mother invades your space. One or two people to chat with is nice, but it can be a nightmare when all the siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, and babies set up camp in the kitchen.

As a home cook, you have the right to ban everyone from your space, but that can be unpleasant to do. We advise limiting kitchen seating so people don’t congregate in there with you.

Touching Raw Meat

Vegans and vegetarians often comment on how gross it is people handle raw chicken and ground beef. They seem to think omnivores enjoy doing this when, in reality, it grosses us out, too.

Squishing raw ground beef between your fingers for meatballs or rubbing a slippery piece of chicken with salt and pepper is anything but enjoyable. Plus, whenever you deal with raw meat, the cleaning and handwashing doubles.

Cleaning up Oil or Grease

Wiping the counters and other surfaces in your kitchen is always a chore. However, cleaning up oil splatter or thick layers of grease is especially awful.

It’s not just about wiping the grease off the stovetop. If you deep-fried something, you also have to deal with the remaining oil. Of course, it can’t go straight down the drain or directly into the trash, so it’s always a puzzle figuring out the best way to get rid of it.

Deveining Shrimp

Touching raw shrimp isn’t quite as icky as raw beef and chicken. But deveining little shrimp is a special brand of tedious and infuriating. Removing the tiny black veins (the shrimp’s intestinal tract) takes forever if you’re not a pro.

By the end of the ordeal, your fingers smell like the bottom of the sea, and you likely mutilated a shrimp or two in the process. You can watch videos on how to devein shrimp, but it’s never as easy as they make it out to be.

Being Hungry

Keeping your tummy rumbles in check when crafting a mouthwatering meal is a test of willpower. Even if you weren’t hungry when you started cooking, your stomach might grumble when the tasty scents hit your nose.

So, your options are to fight the hunger until the food is ready, eat a snack and possibly ruin your appetite, or continuously take bites as you cook and compromise your dinner. There are no winners here, so this is just something all home cooks must endure.

Kitchen and Cookware Deficiencies

If you have your dream kitchen, congratulations! Most of us do not. Every home cook struggles with some element of their kitchen, from a small size to outdated appliances to awkward counter space.

Maybe your knives always seem dull, or cast iron is never as seasoned as you want. Perhaps your kitchen sink clogs regularly, or your oven racks are uneven. We all have our personal plights, but it’s rare to find a home cook who thinks their kitchen is “perfect.”

Chopping Onions

The fierce sting of onion air is brutal. Whether red, white, or yellow, onions will wreck even the toughest home cooks. And if you have to mince those onions, you’re done for.

There are hacks to avoid this, like using a fan, wearing goggles, cutting on a wet towel, freezing the onion, and many more. They don’t always work, and it’s easy to forget the pain of cutting an onion until you’re in the throws of the tearful burning.

Cooking Time vs. Eating Time

A great example of this struggle is lasagna. You have to prepare so many elements — most of which require cooking — carefully layer them, then bake them all in the oven. This familiar and comforting dish can take over two hours to prepare, but it takes less than 10 minutes to eat.

Many home cooks hate that they toil in the kitchen for hours only to enjoy a few minutes of yummy food. Perhaps the solution to this is eating as slowly as possible. This imbalance can make cooking seem fruitless for the chef.

Gathering Ingredients

Gathering your ingredients can be a pain. In the TikTok cooking videos, the process starts with every ingredient on the counter, but that’s not realistic.

We have to ensure we have everything we need — possibly rushing to the grocery store if we’re missing something. Then we have to take everything out, organize it on the counter, measure what we need, and put everything away. This alone takes an extra five or fifteen minutes that recipes never include in the “prep time.”

Perfect Timing

A top example of the timing struggle is Eggs Benedict. If the ham, hollandaise, toasted muffin, and poached egg aren’t all ready within a minute of one another, we lose the magic of the dish.

This is true for many meals, but ensuring your pasta is ready at the same time as your meatballs takes practice and skill. It’s always sad when your green beans taste amazing but are cold because the steak took too long.

Leftovers

For some, leftovers are a positive. It means they can relish their creation again tomorrow! Others find leftovers to be a burden. They take up space in the fridge, never taste as good, and remind you that your portioning was off.

If you can’t stand eating leftovers, our best advice is to find clever ways to incorporate the leftovers into a new meal. You could also try finding a teenage boy, as they’re usually excellent disposals for leftovers.