Best Dutch Oven FAIL Stories

Ever have anything go horribly, terribly wrong while cooking in your dutch ovens?

Sometimes, a recipe just isn't what you thought it was.  Sometimes, Mother Nature decides to throw everything she has at you right in the middle of a low and slow cook.  And sometimes, (heaven forbid) we make mistakes.

So share your biggest fail stories (or your "friend's" fail stories) and we promise that we'll be laughing WITH you.

I think that the best fail that I have was with the Apple-Cinnamon Pull-apart Bread. I made a double batch and put them into two different 12 inch ovens. At the end, there was this gooey sauce that came from the apples/sugar/cranberries (my addition)/cinnamon mixture. I thought, "Hey, that would be a shame to waste!" So I poured it over the top of the bread in one of the ovens.

Also - this was my first REAL attempt at bread. So I was not yet used to cooking breads. I burned the bottoms, severly. The tops turned out pretty good, but it was IMPOSSIBLE to save the bottom.

Well, in the one oven where I poured all of that yummy gooey goodness, it went beyond burning...the sugars in the stuff BONDED with the patina. It would not scrape out, and when it finally DID come off, the bottom of the oven (in patches) was shiny silver. NOT GOOD.

So that led to my very first re-seasoning ever!

There's my big fail so far...

-Darren

One of the first times I ever cooked in my Dutch Ovens for people other than my own family, I ended up with a lot of different questions about dutch ovens and dutch oven cooking.  One guy was keenly interested in how I cleaned and maintained my ovens without damaging the seasoning.

The conversation went something like this:

Other Guy:  So... how do you clean your oven?
Dutch Oven Chef:  Well, I start out by getting the leftover food out and...
OG: How do you do that without ruining the seasoning?
DOC:  Well... I'm really careful about using only plastic or nylon utensils in my ovens.  I use hot water and a scrubbing brush with natural or plastic bristles...
OG:  I always have problems with that.  One guy told me that he cleans his dutch ovens by scrubbing the food out with river rocks.
DOC:  *blink, blink*  River rocks?
OG:  Yeah.  I tried it.  It ruined the seasoning. 
DOC:  I can imagine.
OG:  I thought I had done something wrong, so when I bought another oven to replace the one I ruined, I tried it again and it ruined the seasoning again.
DOC:  *blink, blink*  You did it TWICE?
OG:  Yeah.  So I threw that oven away too.
DOC:  You threw them away??
OG:  Yeah.  Should I have done something different?
DOC:  Well, the cast iron was probably undamaged.  You could have re-seasoned them...
OG:  So that's when I decided that dutch oven cooking wasn't worth the hassle.
DOC:  *heavy sigh*

I'll not tell you the thoughts that were running through my head.  They weren't very nice.  Not nice at all.

Ouch. And, um, OUCH.

Makes me wonder how much salvagable cast iron is in landfills...