14 Foods And Drinks That Were Created By Accident

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We all make mistakes; it's the nature of being human. If we're unlucky, those mistakes will haunt our 3 a.m. thoughts for the rest of our lives. If we're lucky, we're forgiven with minimal fallout and walk away with a lesson learned. And if we're really lucky, we might just come to realize that our mistake led to the creation of something incredible. Unlikely? Perhaps, but it has happened, and in some cases, we're still enjoying the delicious outcomes of those mistakes.

Some products are the result of long years of careful study and experience, which all come together to create something new. Johnnie Walker's experience as a tea blender influenced the creation of his whisky, for example, and it's easy to see how he got there. But did you know Champagne was absolutely accidental? It's wild to think that something as seemingly complicated as Champagne was made by accident, but the world is weird, and here we are.

While the origin stories of many of our favorite foods might be hotly debated, let's take a look at some of the stories that history does remember. Sometimes, an accident can be turned into something wonderful with a little ingenuity and a little know-how. Hopefully, it'll also be a reminder that accidents aren't always a bad thing.

It sounds like one of those made-up stories that gets told and retold, but it's true: Popsicles were accidentally invented by an 11-year-old boy. The story goes all the way back to 1905, when Frank Epperson did what 11-year-olds everywhere always do, which is to leave his drink sitting outside through a freezing cold night. That drink was a mix of sugary soda powder and water, and of course, we know today that a sugary-sweet liquid frozen around a stick — a wooden stirrer, in that first accidental case — is perfectly refreshing on hot summer days.

Epperson realized that quickly, and tapped into his entrepreneurial side when he started selling them in his San Francisco neighborhood. Things stayed small-scale and local for a long time, and it wasn't until 1923 that he took his accidental creation to Alameda's Neptune Beach. It was, of course, a massive hit, and he applied for a patent, changed the name from Epsicle to Popsicle at his children's suggestion, then sold the rights to his invention that same decade. The sale was made out of desperation for cash, and by all accounts, Epperson regretted the decision for the rest of his life.

There's something undeniably satisfying about potstickers. They're a favorite on countless Chinese takeaway menus, but potstickers are also surprisingly easy to make at home, too. They're fun, versatile, and not only is the idea centuries old, but the story goes that these seemingly complicated little dumplings were first made completely by accident.

Potstickers are somewhere around 1,000 years old, dating back to some time in China's Song dynasty. That era ran from 960 to 1279, and it's characterized by the establishment of trade guilds and schools, along with a flourishing cultural landscape that embraced everything from poetry and sculpture to architecture and literature. The legend goes that an unnamed chef working in the kitchens of the Imperial Court accidentally burned dumplings, and faced with hungry diners, he served them with the insistence that yes, he had definitely meant to do that, and aren't they delicious? We like to think that he was pleasantly surprised when everyone agreed, and it makes sense that the Song dynasty's flourishing trade helped the idea spread. Different areas developed different versions of the dish, like the spicy Sichuan and the crispy, pan-fried Shanghai potstickers. The rest is, as they say, history.

The idea of breakfast cereals is a relatively recent one, and it's largely credited to John H. Kellogg. The story of the wellness guru is one that's just as strange as it is fascinating, but we're here to talk about accidental inventions. Kellogg believed that a proper and healthy diet was key to good health, and specifically, he thought that food needed to be as bland as possible in order to prevent indigestion and repeat forays into sin. (We did say it was weird.) Kellogg and his brother were experimenting with wheat doughs to come up with new menu items for their Battle Creek Sanitarium when they accidentally left some dough sitting out overnight. When the dough was baked, it turned into flakes — and Corn Flakes were born. 

Corn Flakes became wildly popular, and by the early 1900s, it was firmly established as the new, popular breakfast item. Other cereals followed, and in 1921, Wheaties was inspired by another, equally fortunate accident. This one was made by an unnamed employee of the company that would eventually become General Mills, and it was a simple matter of accidentally spilling wheat bran onto a stove. The bran cooked, the seed of an idea was planted, and although it took some purposeful work to finalize a commercial product, Wheaties was officially released in 1924.

Natto is a fermented soybean dish that everyone needs to try at least once. It's a staple food in Japan, and commercial producers in the city of Mito are still making it the traditional way. That involves wrapping it in straw and letting it ferment, which goes back to the perhaps legendary story of how it was accidentally created in the first place. 

The story dates back centuries, all the way to the year 1083. That's when a samurai general named Minamoto no Yoshiie and his men were ambushed and forced on the move, trying to stay ahead of their attackers. Gear was hastily packed, and that included boiled soybeans that were wrapped with rice straw. 

The combination of the naturally occurring bacteria on the straw, the boiled beans, and the environmental heat started the fermentation process, and soybeans intended for the horses ended up making a tasty meal for the troops. Interestingly, an alternate story told about natto's origins also involves the accidental fermentation of beans. That one goes back to the 7th-century Buddhist scholar Prince Shotoku, who had leftover beans that were accidentally fermented after he'd wrapped them in straw to save them for later. Whichever is true, it was a mistake turned breakfast staple.

While you can definitely make a quick Worcestershire sauce substitute at home if you happen to find yourself short of this key ingredient, the real deal takes a long time. Commercially-produced Worcestershire sauce ferments for at least 18 months, and if that seems like the kind of thing that originally came about because people made something and forgot about it, you would be correct. 

We here at Tasting Table ranked Lea & Perrins the best of all Worcestershire sauces, and it makes sense: It's the original, even if it was born from a foul-tasting and terrible experiment-gone-wrong. Back in the 1830s, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins were British merchants operating a chemist's shop in Worcester. (That's a drug store, for Americans.) They were approached by a man who requested a special sauce reminiscent of one that he'd had in India, and when they tried, it was terrible. They set it aside as a failure. Fast forward 18 months, and an employee not only found it, but tasted it. Why? That part of the story is sadly lost, but we like to think it was on a dare. Whatever the reason, it turned out that the dark cellar had the perfect conditions for turning the sauce into the incredible, flavorful ingredient we know and love today, and in 1837, they started selling it to massive acclaim.

No road trip is complete without a massive cup of that deliciously sugary, mostly frozen drink that's known as the ICEE. (And yes, it's the same drink that 7-Eleven sells as the Slurpee, it's just marketed under the convenience store chain's own unique name.) We know just who to thank for making hot afternoons in the car that much cooler, and that's a World War II veteran and Dairy Queen store owner named Omar Kendlik. 

The story goes that it was a particularly hot summer in Coffeyville, Kansas, when ... well, something happened, and the stories vary. Some stories say that the Dairy Queen didn't have a cold soda fountain, while others say that it did, but it didn't work well. Whatever the story, Knedlik put bottles of Coca-Cola on ice, and when customers opened them, they turned from fizzy liquid into what we now know as the ICEE. Customers loved it, and Knedlik was also the one to take an ice cream machine and modify it into the first ICEE machine. The branding and the name came later, and today, we know that it's a wildly complicated mix of scientific principles governing the interactions between heat, ice, sugars, movement, and gases that all came together to form this tasty treat.

You may have heard the oft-told tale that it was a monk named Dom Pérignon who was behind the creation of Champagne, but that's only part of the story, and it turns out that there's a little bit of retconning going on here, too. The gist of the story is that when warm temperatures returned to the Champagne region in France in the summer, yeast in sealed wine bottles would start to release CO2, and the bottles would burst. Pérignon was a 17th-century monk who was tasked with finding a way to stop that exact thing from happening, and he actually did a pretty good job of it. So, why did Champagne become a thing?

That's actually thanks to the British. When those same monks shipped wine to England, shipments often got left on the docks. Conditions there were also perfect for the release of CO2, and carbonated wines became so popular that the English were developing ways to make them themselves as early as 1662. The French, meanwhile, recognized a good thing when they saw it, took a little creative license with Dom Pérignon's contributions, and started making Champagne on purpose.

Chimichangas might represent all that's good in our modern Tex-Mex cuisine, but it was an accidental creation — and if you're wondering what "chimichanga" actually means, it doesn't mean anything. Instead, it's a G-rated adaptation of a Spanish curse word, so it's the equivalent of saying "Oh, fudge!" when that is definitely not what you mean at all. 

The curse word was first uttered by Monica Flin, the chef and restaurateur behind El Charro in Tucson, Arizona. (And yes, you can still go there.) She reportedly dropped a burrito in the deep fryer, and when she fished it out, she found it had turned into something amazing. That story puts the accidental creation of the chimichanga at some time in the 1920s, and it's worth mentioning that although other restaurants do also claim to have been the first, that kind of makes sense: Anyone who's worked in a busy kitchen knows just how easy it is to drop something, and this might be the first time we're glad something ended up in the deep fryer when it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.

Butter is one of those things that's kind of always been around, and that's not an exaggeration. It's estimated that people have been using butter for around 10,000 years, so it makes sense that we don't know exactly who discovered it. However, food writer and pastry chef Elaine Khosrova took a crack at deciphering the story in her book "Butter: A Rich History," and her proposed origin story is a generally accepted one.

Khosrova suggests that butter was created when travelers in Africa would store milk in saddlebags. The heat and the movement of the animals turned the milk into butter, and it became a spread, a healing balm, a cosmetic, and a gift offered to the gods. 

There's another accidental origin story involving butter, too, and that's Irish bog butter. Even today, farmers digging turf turn up buried caches of butter that are thousands of years old, and yes, it's still edible. (Mostly.) That's because of the unique environment of Irish bogs, and it's debated whether or not it was originally buried there for preservation. Other theories suggest that the preservation was an accidental side effect of burying valuable butter as ritual offerings, or to keep it safe from thieves and raids.

First, a disclaimer: There are a few people who claim to have invented molten lava cake, the chocolate dessert with the deliciously gooey center. One — French chef Michel Bras — claimed to have created a cake with a ganache center on purpose, with the kind of precision that one might expect in French cuisine. 

The other story says that it wasn't the product of careful and brilliant experimentation, but happened just because someone took a chocolate cake out of the oven too early and cut into it without realizing it wasn't cooked all the way through. There are two people who both claim to have made this slip-up: Chocolatier Jacques Torres and chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. In some accounts, it's Vongerichten that's credited with popularizing the dessert, and it may be one of the only documented cases of professional chefs scrambling to take credit for serving a dish that's very, very undercooked.

Everyone has their favorite, go-to snacks, but we're confident in saying that no one dislikes cheese puffs. They're snacking perfection, with that lightly crunchy texture, and cheesy powder that inevitably builds up on your fingers enough to become a second snack. It might seem like they had to be the product of a lot of research and development, but the opposite is true: They happened because the cleaning processes used on animal feed production machines happened to put out a tasty byproduct. 

The company was Flakall, and the company made feed for livestock. The machines were cleaned by running a batch of wet corn through, and when that corn was heated, it turned into pleasantly puffy, textured curls. Employees knew they were pretty tasty, but it was a well-kept secret until machinist Edward Wilson decided they would be even better if they were flavored. The first cheese puff snack was called Korn Kurls, and if you're wondering why they all seem to be cheese-flavored, it's because that was the variety liked best by the friends of those Flakall employees-turned-snack-pioneers.

Oyster sauce is the briny ingredient that will liven up everything from beef stew to marinades and pretty much any vegetable dish, and you don't have to be a fan of oysters to love it. The story of how oyster sauce accidentally came to be is a little unique in that we know exactly who to thank for this flavorful sauce, and that's Lee Kum Sheung. 

Lee was the proprietor and chef at a small teahouse in Guangdong — although there is a bit of debate here, and some sources say the venue in question was a food stall. Either way, Lee was making an oyster soup on one day in 1888 when unspecified events took him away from the stove. By the time he got back, he realized the pot had been boiling the whole time he was gone, and the liquid had turned dark, thick, and full of the incredible flavor that we rely on today to add all kinds of depth and dimension to so many dishes. Lee pivoted from his food business to the sauce business, and after some monstrous hurdles — like a devastating fire in 1902 — he kept improving on the sauce recipe and was soon exporting it around the world.

If you've never had a Greek frappe but you love iced coffee, it's the drink that you need to try. It's basically made by taking instant coffee and mixing it not by stirring in hot water to dissolve it, but by either shaking it in a cocktail shaker or using a blender. It takes the coffee from ordinary to frothy, and there are a few variations: use milk or water, make it dairy-free, serve over ice, add sugar or skip the sweetener. 

It's a surprisingly recent addition to Greek cuisine, only going back to 1979. That's when a Nestle employee named Dimitris Vakondios was hankering for a cup of coffee, but had no hot water to dissolve the instant stuff. He co-opted a shaker that the company was developing for mixing chocolate, used it to incorporate cold water and instant coffee, and it was a massive hit that's enjoyed across the country now. It was largely promoted by Nestle, but has since taken on a life of its own.

It might be something of an acquired taste, but Marmite is also an essential for every home pantry. Used carefully, it's brilliant for adding a dash of umami to a number of dishes, but if you're in the camp that firmly believes it tastes something like stale beer, bread dough, and paint all mixed together and put in a jar, you're not 100% wrong. Marmite turned 100 back in 2002, and the facility where it had been discovered was still making it. The brewer's yeast also comes from one of the same sources: the Bass brewery.

The invention of Marmite is largely credited to an accidental discovery made by a chemist named Justus Liebig — who is also cited as Justus Freiherr von Liebig. Liebig, interestingly, is also the chemist we can thank for the creation of stock cubes, which are arguably similar to Marmite in that they're ultra-concentrated flavorings. It's frustratingly unclear just what he was trying to do when he concentrated brewer's yeast on the basis of what we know as Marmite today, but the oft-told history states that it was a complete accident. Marmite ended up being a very happy accident, indeed: It was a valuable source of vitamins and nutrients for British troops fighting on the front lines of World War I and II.