Rachael Ray Just Created Another Food Crime With Her Pizza-Flavored Chili

Some people may say that if Rachael Ray had a dollar for every culinary crime she committed, she would be a millionaire a hundred times over. The thing is, Ray is already a millionaire a hundred times over, per Wealthy Gorilla.

Any argument that Ray is not a chef would be redundant because the culinary television star knows that and told CBS, "I am a cook, not a chef." Martha Stewart also feels that Ray is more of an entertainer than a cooking teacher and said the same of herself, per NBC Los Angeles. Another celebrity to weigh in was Anthony Bourdain. He seemed to have positioned himself as an authority on TV personalities on Michael Ruhlman's blog (via The Millions). "Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys," he said of the unconventional cooking show host.

Food industry rivalries are not uncommon. As such, we could easily discount Bourdain and Stewart's opinions as biased, but 42% of respondents who weighed in on a recent BuzzFeed poll seem to concur that what Ray is doing in front of the cameras may not equate to cooking. You may be wondering the same when you hear about the latest concoction she made on her show.

Perhaps Rachael Ray's pizza-flavored chili is the zaniest of her contrivances. "This one is kind of a mind-blower," she says on "The Rachael Ray Show." Nobody would have raised an eyebrow if Ray had decided to make a chili-flavored pizza. Instead, she inverted the concept, which may make you wonder how chili can taste like pizza, which pizza variety it will taste like, and how she is going to emulate the flavor of the pizza dough.

The passata, herbs, cloves, olive oil, garlic, and soppressata that Ray uses in her innovation are more or less the same ingredients in pizza sauce, per Mama Cucina. The pepperoni on Ray's ingredient list could claim the type of pizza this chili represents — if it were not for the beef and nduja that she adds to the pot too. "I am going to do all of them," she says of her meaty options, and lo and behold, she does.

The end product is reddish broth covered in mozzarella and served with gas stove-toasted bread, the likes of which should stay away from Martha Stewart and — to avert myocardial infarction or an aneurysm – Gordon Ramsay.