Despite all her accomplishments as a TV host and cookbook author,
Rachael Ray has led her fans astray more than once. While much of her advice is absolutely
useful in the kitchen, here are some of the lies about cooking she's told her fans in the past.
We're not above a diced hot dog, but it's safe to say that Rachael Ray takes the diced hot dog
past the point of reasonable. Let's take a look at her Chili Dog Bacon Cheeseburgers recipe,
in which she mixes diced hot dogs into hamburger patties.
If you've ever made hamburgers, you know that concocting a hamburger patty that cooks well,
doesn't fall apart, and tastes good is a tricky balance to strike. Mixing in big chunks of diced
hot dogs is a great way to get a hamburger that will fall apart and not cook evenly.
But wait, there are more diced hot dog lies in the Rachael Ray canon.
Her Mac and Cheese Dog Casserole mixes beer, mustard, ketchup, and diced hot dogs into a
mac and cheese casserole. What did a mac and cheese casserole do to deserve this?
"I'm gonna keep making my hot dogs this way and mixing them with pasta in protest
until they get the bun thing together and they can agree on one number."
Furthermore, Rachael Ray's Chicago Dog Salad is a crime against
salad. Cooked hot dogs are greasy and delicious, but cooked,
greasy hot dogs in a salad leaves you with a greasy salad. No thanks, Rachael Ray!
In theory, rice made with wine sounds nice, like when you use chicken broth instead of
water to make rice pilaf. In practice, anyone who's ever been a little too heavy-handed with
the wine while making a risotto knows this is definitely a bad idea. Too much wine in
any dish is going to overpower any other flavor and leave only the taste of warm,
sour wine. Rachael Ray's "Red Wine Rice with Grapes" recipe
is a culinary disaster waiting to happen, and it's a total lie that it tastes good.
Don't just take our word for it. Blogger Cate O'Malley described this recipe as, quote,
"inedible," and described the experience as something akin to finding bits of rice
in your wine glass. Gross. We're also skeptical of the inclusion of grapes in this recipe,
as we don't think anyone has ever thought warm grapes would be a good idea.
Rachael Ray loves to shorten or jazz up common culinary terms.
Some people think it's endearing. Some people think it's annoying. For a while, Rachael Ray
was really working hard to make "EVOO" a part of the cooking lexicon. Extra virgin olive oil,
a cooking staple that had existed for thousands of years, suddenly needed a nickname. She even
came out with her own brand of extra virgin olive oil that, of course, was labeled EVOO.
Extra virgin olive oil is made by pressing and grinding olives without any chemicals,
heat, or other processes, but it turns out that Rachael Ray's "EVOO" was most likely just "OO"
minus the "EV." According to a study by the University of California Davis Olive Center,
more than two-thirds of random samples of imported extra virgin olive oil tested were
shown to be diluted, adulterated, or otherwise fail to meet the standard of "extra virgin."
Along the lines of "EVOO," "sammies," and "delish" comes another Rachael-ism: the garbage bowl,
a large bowl used to collect scraps, odd ends, and other waste to save a home cook from running back
and forth to a trash can. In theory, we have no problem with this. We've all used bowls to collect
bits and pieces while cooking. That having been said, Rachael Ray's garbage bowls are enormous.
"Big cutting board and a garbage bowl, two best tricks I know for fast dinners."
The idea of just piling up scraps in a huge bowl and not taking it to the trash at any
point strikes us as pretty gross. How much time does it really save you? How
big is your kitchen that running over the trash can to dump vegetable scraps
off of a cutting board is a massive time suck? The fact that Ray then launched her
own "garbage bowl" as part of her cookware line just made it all the more ridiculous.
We're not saying you can never mix fish and cheese,
but Italians do not take mixing fish and cheese lightly, and this is why Rachael
Ray's "Anti-pachos Italian Nachos and Fish Stick Parm" is an unholy mess of ingredients.
Antipasto means "before the meal," and it usually consists of cured meat, cheese, and olives.
Nachos are a big plate of corn chips with cheese, meat, and pico de gallo. Both are awesome,
but why the fusion? Why two and a half cups of shredded cheese on top of fish sticks,
Rachael Ray? If you want to smother frozen fish sticks with cheese, fine, but please don't call
it antipasto or "antip-achos." It's a flat-out lie that many Italians out there would stand for this.
Rachael Ray, queen of quick dinners, is all about efficiency in the kitchen,
and accessible, easy weeknight dinners are her brand. Making caramelized onions properly does
not fit into a quick, easy dinner, but if you let onions simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes and
call them "caramelized," then we guess it can. In Rachael Ray's defense, she is not the only
cookbook author to fudge the amount of time it takes to truly, properly caramelize onions. Truly
caramelized onions take at least 45 minutes, not the 20 or 30 that many of Rachael's recipes claim.
If you don't believe us, you're probably eating sautéed onions and calling them caramelized.
We totally get the urge to buy pre-cut vegetables. They seem like a great way to save time in the
kitchen. Unfortunately, they lead to unnecessary packaging and waste. A bell pepper, unchopped,
is its own container. Chop it up, and now you need styrofoam and plastic wrap to sell it.
Moreover, sliced vegetables and fruit spoil faster and are generally not as fresh.
It's just not that hard to chop up an onion, a head of cauliflower, or almost any other
vegetable by yourself at home. Pre-cut vegetables are also much more expensive than whole produce.
Rachael Ray, the efficiency and convenience queen, included pre-cut vegetables on a list of
otherwise very good kitchen shortcuts, alongside stuff like pre-shredded cheese. Shredding a ball
of mozzarella does take quite a while, but the downsides of buying packaged, pre-cut vegetables
for the planet, your wallet, and your taste buds outweigh the very small amount of time they might
save you in the kitchen. It's simply a lie that you can't manage to chop your veggies yourself.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Mashed videos about your favorite TV chefs are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.