There are few Food Network stars so famous and beloved as Ina Garten, who got her start
on the channel hosting her show Barefoot Contessa in 2002.
But no matter how much you love Ina Garten, there are probably a few things you don't
know about her show.
Barefoot Contessa shows Ina Garten cooking in a spacious white kitchen in the Hamptons.
But since 2007, the kitchen you see Garten cooking in on television isn't actually the
kitchen inside the house where Ina lives.
Instead, Barefoot Contessa is filmed in Garten's "barn," which is actually a combination of
office space, test kitchen, and TV studio.
Garten bought the property next door to her own home in the Hamptons and had the show's
kitchen installed.
This is where she tests recipes with her assistants for her show and for her cookbooks, and it's
also the kitchen where Barefoot Contessa is filmed, just yards away from Ina's actual
house and kitchen.
"This is where the show is shot, and this is where we test recipes."
The kitchen in the barn is almost identical to the kitchen in the main house.
Maybe this makes it easier for Garten to feel at home when she's filming, and it could be
why she seems so comfortable cooking for her many party guests and visitors on Barefoot
Contessa.
As you might expect of a professional cook, everything in the kitchen is top of the line.
Garten has two Sub-Zero refrigerators and an eight-burner Viking stove in her arsenal,
which means she can do some serious cooking.
The kitchen layout is roomy enough for her to work with her assistants, and it also allows
for 360-degree views of her cooking when Barefoot Contessa is filming.
Whether she's cooking, grilling, visiting shops in town, or entertaining a group of
friends, Ina Garten seems effortlessly comfortable on television.
So it might surprise some fans to learn that she actually hates being on camera.
She doesn't even watch her own show, and calls filming the "most frightening" thing she's
ever done.
On the rare occasion where Garten has had to watch clips of her show during the editorial
and review process, she's hated every second of it.
But it's not just Barefoot Contessa that Garten declines to watch.
In general, Garten says she doesn't watch many cooking shows.
But there is one she admits to loving: The Great British Bake Off.
Long before Ina Garten had her own television show on Food Network, she was the owner and
operator of a gourmet shop in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa.
Garten bought the shop in 1978 after seeing it advertised for sale in a newspaper.
She purchased the store after she decided that she needed a more creative outlet than
her job at the White House Office of Management and Budget was offering her.
"I hit 30 and I thought, 'I wanna do what I wanna do', and I thought 'I want to be in
the food business'."
At first, Garten was totally out of her element.
To make the transition easier, she decided to focus on what she did know, making classic
comfort foods with a gourmet twist, like baked goods and her famous roast chicken.
The shop catered events around the Hamptons, and even Martha Stewart was a fan.
The store was a huge success, and eventually it became such a large enterprise that Garten
found herself ready to move on, luckily for all of her devoted viewers.
Garten sold Barefoot Contessa to the store's manager and chef in 1996, wrote her first
Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and started filming her Food Network show of the same name in
2002.
Barefoot Contessa is obviously a name that means something to Ina Garten, who used it
as the title for her television show years after selling the store.
But where does the name Barefoot Contessa actually come from?
Actually, the meaning of the name is two-fold.
The Barefoot Contessa is a 1954 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner, but the name
also has ties to the store's original owner.
The original Barefoot Contessa owner was an Italian woman whose family referred to her
as the Barefoot Contessa when she was a girl.
Garten liked the name when she bought the store, so she stuck with it.
She felt that the mix of "elegant and earthy" that the name implied was the perfect way
to sum up her approach to food.
Ina Garten's Hamptons home has a fabulous, sprawling herb garden, and on her show she
often picks fresh herbs to use in the dishes she's cooking.
But while she often uses rosemary, parsley, chives, and dill, the one herb you'll never
see her cook with on Barefoot Contessa is cilantro.
That's because, simply put, Garten hates it.
To her, the herb tastes like soap, which suggests she's one of many people that can't enjoy
the herb because of their genetic makeup.
She's not alone in hating it, though.
Another famous TV chef, Julia Child, was also definitely not a cilantro fan.
Still, Garten doesn't ask her viewers to share her cilantro boycott.
She notes that, if you love the herb, you're welcome to add it to your version of one of
her dishes.
Have you ever noticed that random recipes you find online can often end in disaster,
but those you find in cookbooks tend to be a lot more reliable?
That's because when cooks are writing their cookbooks, they often test each recipe multiple
times.
Ina Garten is notorious for meticulously testing all of her recipes before they wind up in
her cookbooks or on the Barefoot Contessa TV show.
For example, she made her red wine-braised short ribs using different cuts of short ribs,
with meat sourced from different grocery stores, and on both gas and electric stoves until
she was confident that any cook anywhere could make the recipe flawlessly in their home kitchen.
If Garten can't get a recipe perfect, it's not featured.
She's been working on her Boston cream pie recipe for years, and she still feels like
it's not ready to be shown to the public.
All of that recipe testing probably means that Garten's house is full of tasting samples
to snack on, right?
Think again.
Garten is such a perfectionist that not even husband Jeffrey is allowed to taste any of
the food she makes until she considers the recipe to be perfect.
One thing that stands out about Ina Garten's recipes is that they're mostly upscale, elegant
takes on classic dishes, but without any flashy, chef-like touches that are hard to master
at home.
That makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that Garten has no professional training.
She's a completely self-taught cook.
Garten never worked in a restaurant or went to culinary school.
She didn't start cooking until after she was married.
Once she started, though, the challenge of mastering recipes kept drawing her in.
It seems like getting married and cooking for her husband, Jeffrey, became a lifelong
passion She even eventually wrote a cookbook called Cooking for Jeffrey.
After she started to cook and found she enjoyed it, Garten continued her education through
cookbooks.
She cites Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a key part of her culinary
training.
"I taught myself how to cook when I worked in Washington, using Julia Child's cookbooks."
She'd been cooking at home for awhile when she finally decided to buy the Barefoot Contessa
shop in the Hamptons.
She wasn't sure how the business side would work, but she knew she wanted to make food
her life's work, and it paid off.
The most frequent guest on Barefoot Contessa is Ina Garten's husband, Jeffrey.
Whether Garten is cooking her husband a romantic brunch, dedicating an entire cookbook to him,
or having him operate the grill during a summer barbecue, Jeffrey is often on the show enjoying
the fruits of Ina's labor.
But how long has this arrangement been going on?
Well, the duo have been married for more than 50 years.
They met when both were very young, Ina, 15, was still in high school, and met 17-year-old-Jeffrey
when visiting her brother at Dartmouth.
The two hit it off and began writing letters to one another, dated while Ina was in college
at Syracuse University, and finally married in 1968, when Ina was 20 and Jeffrey was 22.
The duo lived in Washington for a long while, while Ina worked at the White House, but Jeffrey
supported her when she saw the "for sale" ad for the Barefoot Contessa store in the
newspaper, and encouraged her to buy it.
Apparently, Jeffrey told her,
"pick something you love to do.
If you love doing it, you will be really good at it."
The advice seems to have paid off.
These days, Ina's career as a famous television cook and cookbook author is going as strong
as ever, and she and Jeffrey have been married for more than half a century.
Ina Garten works hard preparing recipes for her Barefoot Contessa show and cookbooks,
but there's more than she can do on her own.
That's why she has two loyal personal assistants, Barbara Libath and Lidey Heuck, who help her
with the behind-the-scenes work.
Barbara Libath has been helping Garten out with her Barefoot Contessa brand since 1999,
after Garten published her first successful cookbook, but before the Barefoot Contessa
television show took off.
Libath was hired when Garten, in a panic and in desperate need of help, told her to pick
the days she wanted to work and to name her salary.
Though Libath started out helping Garten to navigate the financial and legal side of becoming
a star, these days she also helps Garten test her famous recipes.
She sometimes even cooks the dishes on her own so Garten can see if her recipes are successful
when being cooked by someone else.
Garten's other assistant is Lidey Heuck, who was hired to be Garten's social media manager
at the age of 22.
Heuck is more hands-on than most social media managers.
She spends her days cooking with Garten in the kitchen, helping her create her cookbooks,
running errands, traveling to events in the name of the Barefoot Contessa brand, and encouraging
the star to keep up with her popular Instagram account.
Ina Garten has said before that she's terrified of being on camera.
You'd think that maybe having a carefully written script to follow would help calm her
nerves before each show, but it turns out that there actually isn't a script at all.
While she does work with a food stylist to time the cooking process for maximum visual
beauty, Garten has said that the rest of her show is entirely unscripted.
All of her discussion of the recipes as she makes them, all of her interactions with family
and friends, and the rest of the cooking process, is all made up on the spot.
It's impressive that even with her nerves, Garten is able to seem so effortless on screen.
She's just a natural on camera, especially when it comes to talking about cooking and
her favorite recipes.
When Garten goes into the shops in her Hamptons town to pick up flowers or pastries, and when
friends come over for dinner parties and brunches each episode, what you're hearing is actual
conversations between groups of friends.
Likewise, her adorable flirtations with husband Jeffrey are totally authentic and off-the-cuff.
It's this authenticity that makes Barefoot Contessa such a joy for so many to watch.
There have been 26 seasons of Barefoot Contessa since the show started filming in 2002.
That's a lot of hours of television, so that must mean that Garten is perpetually stuck
in front of the camera, right?
If that were the case, she might be pretty miserable with her job, considering how much
she hates being on camera.
Thankfully, Garten has found a happy balance.
She's set up her schedule so that for most of the year she can focus on her real passion,
which is testing recipes and writing cookbooks.
She only films for a few months a year.
While she keeps her attention on food year-round, Barefoot Contessa only films twice a year,
for about a month each time.
Sure, those two months are busy, but the rest of her time can be spent writing cookbooks,
perfecting new recipes, and of course spending some time traveling with Jeffrey.
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