Yolanda Gampp Shares Her Worst Kitchen Mistakes - Exclusive
No matter who you are or how long you've been whipping up amazing meals or desserts in your kitchen, there's always something else to be learned. And it's during that learning process that so many kitchen mistakes happen. At least, it seems that's what happened to "Crime Scene Kitchen" co-judge and cake designer Yolanda Gampp.
When asked about some of her worst kitchen mistakes during an exclusive interview with Mashed, Gampp explained, "I used to bake cakes in the kitchen of my home, like in my mom's kitchen. And I can't even believe I did that because I just had a little small mixer and a regular home oven. It would take so long." But everything changed when she finally upgraded her equipment. Gampp said, "When I finally saved up enough and bit the bullet and decided to buy a professional fridge, and a professional oven, and a professional mixer — all three of them shocked me."
Each piece of equipment presented a learning curve for Gampp, which meant she made quite a few mistakes early on. "So the fridge, the first cake I put in it, the fridge was so cold that the cake looked like I had held it under a showerhead. And I had to get the fridge adjusted to remove a lot of the humidity because while cakes like the fridge, it does not like humidity," Gampp said. Then she added, "the oven was so powerful and hot that I had to figure out, when I set it to 350, it was more like 400. So I burnt the first cakes I baked in the oven." But that was just the beginning.
Yolanda Gampp compared her kitchen mess to an episode of 'I Love Lucy'
While the surprisingly forceful professional-grade fridge and oven were tough to learn to use, it was the stand mixer that Yolanda Gampp felt was really comical. Gampp said, "The mixer was so powerful that I had quadrupled my buttercream recipe based on my stand mixer [which] was four quarts and this one was 16 quarts. Four times four. Perfect. Right." But "perfect" was far from how it came out.
Gampp added, "It was like an 'I Love Lucy' episode, particularly the chocolate factory episode. Because the meringue was so voluminous because of the power on this mixer, that it was just coming out of the bowl. And I was like trying to scrape it. It's so funny because that was way before I ever thought I would do what I do on camera. And it's the one moment that I think it would be great if that was captured because it was like, I was laughing in my own nightmare. I couldn't stop laughing, but it was horrible. It was a terrible cleanup." Though there was plenty of buttercream to go around, Gampp really felt she learned a lot after that catastrophe. "I feel like I broke that mixer in, like I really broke it in hard the first time I used it," she said. So if you ever have access to an industrial-grade stand mixer, start small and build up.
You can catch Yolanda Gampp — along with Curtis Stone and host Joel McHale — judge kitchen mistakes and triumphs on new episodes of "Crime Scene Kitchen," now airing on Fox.