Souffle tops list of British kitchen nightmares
The souffle has topped a list of the dinner party dishes Britons find most difficult to cook. In a survey by cooker manufacturers Stoves, the light and airy delight was found to be most Brit's kitchen nightmare, with beef Wellington and baked Alaska also falling flat.
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Stressed cooks across the country also struggled with profiteroles, puff pastry, croissants and paella.
But it wasn't just complicated recipes that left Brits stressed in the kitchen - more than 25 per cent of the 2,000 adults polled insisted perfect poached eggs and omelettes were harder to successfully pull off than tricky dishes.
Timing and temperature proved most cook's undoing, with more than half confessing to messing up the timings, and one in ten getting the oven temperature wrong.
Others had only themselves to blame for a dinner party disaster. Some 14 per cent admitted they struggled to measure the ingredients correctly - but that's hardly surprising given that 12 per cent confessed to not reading the recipe properly.
Nevertheless, despite the potential for a culinary catastrophe, many of the dishes that made the top twenty most difficult still make their way onto dinner party menus.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Chef Brian Turner pointed out: "Whilst many recipes leave scope for a bit of experimentation, classic dishes and techniques such as souffles and pastry are an exact science and can easily cause problems for the more inexperienced cook."
He did have some advice for the home cook, however, and added: "Dinner parties can be stressful, but the key to pulling off the best food for guests is all in the preparation.
"Practice makes perfect so make sure you have a few trial runs of your menu to identify any problems."
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