We all take chances in life, especially with our cooking. Whether it’s using a sharp blade or handling scorching-hot liquids, sometimes we put ourselves at risk when whipping up a great meal.
Not only can cooking be dangerous, but it can be messy, too.
No matter how many years you went to culinary school or how obsessive-compulsive you are about cleanliness, there are some recipes that are just going to get downright messy. Like breading chicken for example, because no matter how many times you try to remember to use your right hand for dry ingredients and your left for wet, you’ll always end up with sticky and chunky gunk stuck to your fingers. Or meatballs. How else are you going to mold that ground beef into perfect, neat little balls without diving in hands first into that ground beef and getting it all over your hands and under your finger nails? And don’t get us started on mincing garlic, because the day someone figures out a cure for sticky-minced-garlic-hands syndrome is the day we are happy cooks.
Despite all of the whining, this rant isn’t meant to turn you off from cooking, especially cooking these dishes. We couldn’t live without these dishes, not only because of the way they taste when they’re done but because they’re some of the most creative and therapeutic recipes we like to work with. This is meant to celebrate these messy recipes in all of their glory, and to tell you that, hey, it’s OK to get a little messy sometimes.
1. Cake with Icing
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To get a perfectly iced cake you need to precisely spread thick, sticky icing onto a moist, pliable cake. We know, it doesn’t sound easy, and boy is it messy. Thankfully icing is good enough to lick right off your fingers.
2. Breaded Chicken
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There doesn’t need to be much of an explanation for this one, but if you’ve never made breaded chicken before (or anything breaded, for that matter), it’s done by coating the chicken in flour, then egg, and then the breadcrumbs. Just think about what happens when your fingers are coated in a few rounds of those ingredients. Enough said.
3. Puréed Soup
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If you’ve ever been able to safely and neatly transfer soup into a food processor to purée it, then we’d like to meet you and shake your hand. And yes, we’ve tried the hand blender; it still doesn’t keep the soup from getting on our hands.
4. Fried Chicken
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Similar to breaded chicken, fried chicken involves a coating of a perfect storm of ingredients: gooey, wet, and dry ones. This recipe adds a double-whammy, though, because then you’ve got to fry the chicken, and any situation with a huge vat of oil is going to get messy — trust us.
5. Pizza
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Start to finish, pizza is pretty darn messy. First there’s making the fresh dough, and next is the marinara sauce, followed by the shredded cheese. By the end of it you’ve got flour in your hair, marinara sauce on your face, and pieces of shredded cheese stuck to your fingers.
See all 10 messy meals at The Daily Meal
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