RTE star Donal Skehan has revealed the cooking nightmare that almost left him seriously harmed.
The popular Irish chef recently appeared at Bloom Festival in Dublin to put on a cooking demonstration for audience members.
However, in a live cooking nightmare, Donal was left panicked when an oven exploded in his face.
Talking about the incident on his podcast with Arthur Gourounlian, the 37-year-old said: “It was at the very start of the demo that I noticed the oven door was slightly falling off.
“I hadn’t even started cooking at this stage, I couldn’t open the oven door, because the top oven was hanging off so I shunted it up.”
The dad-of-two explained how he went ahead and put a pastry inside the oven but quickly realised that the oven door was still hanging off.
Donal added: “I just thought, ‘Grand, I’ll fix this and be a hero for everyone’.”
Arthur asked Donal if he was panicking whilst the situation unfolded but he admitted: “No, I was joking with the audience saying, ‘Oh Jesus, who put this oven together?’”
The Dubliner then recalled how he tried to fix the oven door by sliding it back into its bracket when disaster struck.
He said: “I confidently thought I had fixed it, but I think the pressure had got the glass and it just went poof.”
The glass completely exploded over Donal during the live set, thankfully without any injury.
Donal continued: “The feeling of the hot glass shattering over my head and then I could feel glass going down my shirt.
“The worst part was that I was convinced some of it had got in my eye too.”
Arthur humorously remarked: “You know that was my worry because when I saw the video I was revelling in the fact that it happened to you, I was laughing my head off.
AUDIENCE SUPPORT
“But at the same time I panicked because, you could have lost an eye.”
Donal confessed that the audience’s support really helped him to recover from the incident quickly.
He gushed: “They really got behind me. To anyone who was there, thank you so much, you made it the best craic ever.”
“I literally felt like I was doing a comedy show after that.”
Thankfully, Donal’s cooking demo went on to be a flying success as he managed to fit in a spot of karaoke too.
