Worst Kitchen Accidents!

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that enjoys cooking.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

Chipotle Tom

Senior Cook
Joined
Jun 20, 2006
Messages
102
I saw this as a proposed topic, so I thought I would begin it. What's your worst kitchen accident (home or professional)?

For me, it would be when I was a cook in the Army. I had just been assigned to my permanent duty station, and I was at the fryer cooking some french fries for the short order line. Well, the metal hook at the end of the basket was pinched together a little, so it wasn't very easy to get it to latch on. I'm sure you can see what's coming next. I tried to hang the basket up using the catch, but it slid right past it and splashed down in the hot grease, which sprayed all over me.

Fortunately, I had my wits about me. I took off my apron and ran over to the sink and put all splashed areas under cold running water. My quick thinking got me away with only first degree burns. :ROFLMAO:

Okay, your turn!
 
:)My first one I was slicing meat on a meat slicer for the first time some how I managed to nick my little finger I learned then to slice using handle.Second one was at the same place I was trying to slice tomatoes with one of those big long slicing knives meant to slice roasts I ended up cutting the end of my thumb off.This also the same place I was lifting a big pot off the overhead pot rack and the giant heavy hook also came off hitting me in the head now that really hurt had a big bump my hair feel out on the bump a few days later:hammer:.I was really young at the time.I have more doozies to tell but will save for later.
 
I’ve got many! I’ve always been a bit accident prone and wonder why I’m still alive sometimes! :LOL:

This one isn't so much about injury but rather about a total flop. Many moons ago I had just moved to town for a job, and had a nice little two bedroom apartment on the second floor. I wanted to learn how to grill, so I bought a little Hibachi I could use on the front porch without taking up too much room. It was the first grill I had ever bought or even used. To christen it, I decided to grill some beef ribs. My brother and his wife were visiting, and they had recently had a son, Brian, my nephew. He was under a year old at the time. He was just learning to walk and did a lot of crawling (no, he doesn’t get hurt in this story!).

My brother and his wife had to run to the store, and the asked me to watch Brian while they were gone. I agreed. It should be obvious at this point, I knew nothing about grilling. I had one of those adjustable gates in the hallway to keep Brian from getting too close to the front door and porch where I was grilling the ribs. As you might imagine, the beef ribs were very fatty, and dripped a lot of grease on the hot (too hot) coals in the Hibachi. It was smokey at first, and then the flare ups started. I was beginning to panic and tried moving the ribs around, but there really isn’t anywhere to move them on a Hibachi. I tried holding them up one at a time till the fire subsided, and then the smoke alarm in the hallway near the front door went off.

It was LOUD, and it made Brian (my nephew) freak out and start screaming his head off. He had a powerful set of lungs. I put the ribs back on the Hibachi and tried to calm Brian down, but nope, the fire detector was too loud and he was only getting louder while the fire was getting bigger. I closed the front door and decided to ignore the ribs. I waved my arms around wildly but could not get the smoke detector to turn off. In a panic, with Brian screaming furiously, I jumped up and grabbed the smoke detector and tried to rip it from the ceiling. It came down, but turns out that it was a wired unit (not battery operated). So it just hung there from the ceiling and was STILL going off.

Frantic, I jumped up and swatted it once more, this time it came free of the wires holding it and became silent. But the force of the blow sent it flying into the nearby wall where it bounced back and hit me square in the forehead. It cut me, but I didn’t know it had. So I go to Brian, and am trying to calm him down. The apartment is still smokey and Brian is still screaming. As I’m leaning over him to pick him up, I drip blood from my forehead onto his forehead. That freaked me out, so I touched my forehead and came back with blood on my hand. I picked up Brian and began walking to the bathroom when the front door opened and a new blast of smoke entered the room along with my brother and his wife.

So there I was standing in smoke with a destroyed detector at my feet, wires hanging from the ceiling, the front porch glowing with the light of the flaming ribs, as I held my screaming nephew and both of us with bloody foreheads. It was a sight that caused my brother’s wife to nearly faint.

Needless to the say, the ribs went in the trash and we ordered pizza.
 
Last edited:
How long before your brother and his wife "allowed" you to be left alone again with Brian?:LOL:

Actually, it was quite a while. Somehow saying, “Oh don’t worry, it’s just my blood” in the middle of that flaming turmoil didn’t make her feel a lot better. :ermm::LOL:
 
For me, everytime I cook, something falls, my doing or not, it just falls. Knives, something hot or cold, clean or dirty. Usually some food hits the ground and my dog has a feast, unless it's bad for him so I chuck it out. Anyways, they're ordinary. So, now knowing me and keltin are well klutzes lol (no offence keltin), here's my story. No, nothing got burned. I was grating cheese, using a manual cheese grater, found at any ordinary dollar shop or kitchen store or even Sears or Walmart. As I was grating I way, I knicked myself a few times, nothing drastic, just a cut or two, sizes of a paper cut. I ignored the knicks as I grated the cheese. It was getting fairly small, but too large to toss to my dog, so I kept grating it. Being rather annoyed by the knicks, I grated with more force and felt a sharp pain, grated it a few more times then the pain was rather immense. I dropped the cheese so my dog could have it and be happy. I looked and was horrified. As you all can probably guess, the grater did a number on my hand. My finger was grated and what I think was the bone could be seen.

Now I know to be careful with graters...

Another, rather common one is for a cooking tool to take a plunge to the floor. This case, it was a butcher's knife. I just finished chopping up some celery to go in with a saucepan with some onions, so I gently tossed the knife. Well, apparently I didn't toss it well enough. Just before I could take the celery into the saucepan, the knife went straight down to my foot. For the record, I was wearing sandals, so I had no socks on. The knife went to my foot. It wasn't as bad as the cheese grater but while complaining, the onions got nicely crisp, still usable.

Many others with stuff falling. As a fellow employee at a restaurant where I work says, who is also rather clumsy, "**** falls, so let the **** fall. Don't make a fuss. If it isn't in you, then it doesn't matter." That's about the time where it is kicked somewhere.
 
Back in 2005, I was using a sharp knife to cut butter...and managed to cut a good size chunk of my finger off.

It was about 1/2 the size of a dime. 7 stitches later, it is back on and doesn't have much feeling in it. It feels as if I stuck my finger in wax!!
 
This didn't happen to me, but a dear friend. We were invited to have dinner with her and her dh. When we arrived she came to the door crying. Just before we arrived she turned the wrong unit on her stove and blew up a pecan pie she had placed on a back burner. The pieces flew all over the kitchen burning places in her floor, into the food she had already prepared, and even some pieces on her - only minor to her, thank goodness. I helped her clean up and suggested we just order pizza, but she quickly prepared salmon patties and baked potatoes. The salad was safe, it was in the fridge. This was the first time she had cooked for company in her new home.
 
Oh, too funny. My worst happened last week. It's still too fresh and embarrassing to share. I'm afraid you'd all worry about my state of mind.
 
Oh, too funny. My worst happened last week. It's still too fresh and embarrassing to share. I'm afraid you'd all worry about my state of mind.

Oh come on! Share please! I confessed I'm a klutz that has used beef ribs for firewood to smoke small children, so it can't be that bad for you! :LOL:
 
Well, I've got a few, and not all of them are mine. Heck, one is word-of-mouth from a former co-worker.

My co-worker had just completed AIT (?) for the US Army, and had reported to his first duty station, as a cook for an Artillery unit in Kansas. The Mess Sergeant told him to grease up the flat-top to get ready to start cooking breakfast. As he's doing this, he's watching a couple other cooks, one of whom is slicing ham on a rotary slicer (think Arby's). The other cook is standing there talking to the guy. This guy isn't using a guard, just running the ham across the slicer with his hand. As the third guy is watching, the guy slicing manages to slice off his fingertips.

At the country club I work at, about 6 years ago, we were getting ready for the usual Sunday Brunch, which included a mess of fried chicken. One of the cooks was pouring grease (those big 5-gallon plastic containers in a cardboard box) into the tilt skillet. He used two of those containers of grease, so there was 10 gallons. The only problem is, one of those containers was actually half water, half grease! How the heck did the water get in there???? To make matters worse, the cook actually turned the skillet ON! Ever seen a steam bubble so big that it fountains hot grease up 2' from the skillet/fryer? Luckily, we were able to close the lid on the tilt skillet and turn it off before anyone got hurt. We had to cordon off the area to prevent in future injuries, and just took twice as long to fry the chicken by cooking it in the two fryers on the line.

About 8 years ago, I was cutting some bread for croutons, using a serrated knife. I obviously wasn't paying very good attention to where my fingers were, as I managed to nearly remove my thumbtip from my thumb. Three stitches later, it's all healed up. Boy, did it throb for a couple days!

Don't ever drop a saucepan with a bunch of hot gravy in it. It will fountain up and fly quite a distance. I know, because I got hit in the face. It's hot and thick, so it sticks. I had some nice first-degree burns from that one. I did that when I was much younger, like 21 - 22, long before I decided to go pro.
 
Oh, too funny. My worst happened last week. It's still too fresh and embarrassing to share. I'm afraid you'd all worry about my state of mind.
:)
Aw come on Ive got more also after all we are only human Ive done some really dumb things myself.Once I accidently stuck my whole hand in a deep fryer at work that one hurt for weeks whenever I got warm water on it it.It was soo stupid I didn't even tell anyone at work.Believe me I have more some from me and some Ive seen other people do.:wacko::wacko:
 
Some of you have already heard about my " Bad Luck of the Irish" Thanksgiving Turkey Disaster. We were living in Egypt where they were no Butterball turkeys to buy. The year before I had made a local "runway model" turkey using a recipe that called for soaking a kitchen towel in olive oil and laying it over the marinated turkey. Well, it was absolutely so tender, moist and delicious. Of course you know what happens next--you are then made the cook for all the Thanksgiving dinners thereafter. So the following year, I layed a towel (washed many times, I might add, but was green checkered) over the turkey. After the first hour of baking I checked on Mr. Tom and was horrified to find the turkey swimming in the Emerald Sea. The turkey and the juices were completely green!!!!!!!! I couldn't believe it especially since the towel had been through the wash so many times. Maybe it was the soaking in the olive oil. All I could do was siphon off the green juices and blot dry the turkey. Incredibly it was still delicious and everyone had a good laugh over it even though Mr. Tom still looked a bit green around the gills. What a disaster!
 
oh man, expatty, that's a great idea for a st. patrick's day feast. thanks! :chef:

2 of the worst kitchen ackies i've seen were from when i was a kid and worked the night shift in a burger king.

once, a bit of hazing was going on and some kid's wallet was being tossed around like monkey in the middle. the kid almost got it, when it bounced and fell into the deep fryer. without thinking, the kid thrust his hand into the hot oil to retrieve the wallet, burning himself badly half way up his arm.

the other time, a grease pencil somehow :angel: got into a microwave that was defrosting patties, and it turned into a grease rocket inside the nuker after a minute or so. the smoke that came out was disgusting, setting off the smoke alarms and the microwave had to be thrown out. the manager and the fire dept. weren't too happy about it.
 
Back
Top Bottom