Rachael Ray's Biggest Kitchen Fails On Her Show

Every show has its fair share of fails and bloopers, but Rachael Ray's kitchen fails are more public since she runs the show talk-show style with an audience. With so many episodes running from 2006 to 2023, you've likely missed some of the biggest and most hilarious fails. However, you've probably seen some. When an audience member once commented about how smoothly everything runs on the Rachael Ray Show and asked whether anything ever goes wrong, Ray looked at her incredulously and asked, "Are you sure you're watching this show? Our show is like 99% unscripted. I happen to think a few things go wrong in every show. Like, I find that kind of fun."

We've dug around to find some of the fails we think you'll enjoy most. They show the very human side of food television and celebrity chefs. Ray never stops smiling and laughing, and she often pokes fun at her foibles.

One of the most memorable kitchen fails on the Rachael Ray Show was the time she started a fire. True to form, she handles it with a smile and calm finesse. We guess she's used to fires. After all, she once set Emeril Lagasse's kitchen on fire, too.

Rachael Ray developed a habit of wrapping dish towels around her metal skillet handles so they're cooler to the touch. In one episode, she leaves the skillet on the stove with a towel-wrapped handle while she walks across the kitchen to grab some roasted green bean oven fries out of the oven. When she turns back around to the stove, she realizes that the towel wrapping the skillet handle is on fire.

"Note to self," she says. "Don't put your kitchen towel too close to the stove." Calmly and with a smile, she grabs the burning towel off the skillet handle and plops it into the sink. The audience erupts into shocked laughter and applause at how deftly she handles the whole situation. Ray puts the fire out with water in the sink and laughs it off. "Oh, that's awesome. I said it was one hot show. We started with LL Cool J, and I set the kitchen on fire!" (via YouTube). She then raises her hand in a triumphant rockstar power stance. These days, the cookware she sells and uses on her show has cool silicone handles, and this incident may be one reason why.

Rachael Ray isn't the only person who starts fires in her kitchen. Regis Philbin once did as well. There was a time when her friend Philbin was a guest star once a month on her show, so he made himself fairly comfortable in the kitchen with a total of 38 episodes under his belt. However, rather than cooking off the top of his head like Ray tends to do, he liked to keep a paper version of the recipe at hand. It is one of these paper recipes that gets Philbin into trouble.

Rather than setting a kitchen towel on fire, he sets his recipe on fire. It is sitting on the countertop with the paper overlapping the gas stove burner. So, when he turns on the flame to start the oil boiling for his fried meat dish, the paper inevitably catches fire.

The moment the fire starts, you can hear a voice across the room exclaiming, "Ahp. Regis just set it on fire!" Then, the camera pans to Philbin who is grabbing the flaming piece of paper and hitting it on the counter to try to put out the fire. Meanwhile, sparks are flying everywhere. "I can't read it!" Philbin exclaims as he looks down at the recipe paper with charred edges (via YouTube). If you look closely, you can see that part of the left side of the page with specific measurements is missing.

Anyone who has ever tried putting on the lid of a food processor knows that it's tricky. You have to line up the lid just right to screw it on. Then, you have to twist the handle just right to get the machine to start. It's a safety feature to prevent messy and dangerous kitchen mishaps, but it can be frustrating when you're trying to secure a lid for a cooking show.

On one specific day, when Ray is trying to use her food processor to make dip on the Rachael Ray Show, she can't manage to get the lid to fit. At first, she clumsily puts the lid on backward and says, "It's so embarrassing to be in public when this happens." When the lid seems like it's on the right way, she turns on the electrical power and helplessly squeaks, "It's not even working." Still attempting to get the lid to fit and with determination in her voice, she says, "We are not going to break until I fix this." Trying it again, she says, "It's not clicking. I swear to God I didn't break it."

Finally, she calls to her crew backstage, saying "Help! Please!" Then she says in a smaller, more helpless voice, "For real." After Sarah appears from backstage and gets it working again in a mere two seconds, Ray playfully pushes her aside and sarcastically says, "Go away!"

Adding ingredients to a recipe while mixing is always tricky, especially while using a stand mixer. Usually, Rachael Ray makes this process seem simple. As long as you have all your ingredients mise en place and time it right, everything should theoretically run smoothly. However, you have to pay attention to exactly what you're throwing in the bowl to avoid stand mixer mistakes.

During one episode, Ray is taking turns with her guest adding ingredients into her bright orange KitchenAid mixer's bowl while it is running. Her guest pours a little salt from a small dish into the mixture. When Ray goes to pour in the baking powder, she accidentally throws the whole dish into the mixer with the baking powder. Luckily, it doesn't break. Once Ray realizes what she'd done, she laughs at her mistake and stands proudly beside the mixer while her guest turns it off. "So, don't do that at home," her guest says. Meanwhile, Ray puts up her fingers in the shape of an L on her forehead to indicate she just made a loser move. The audience bursts out into applause with amused looks on their faces.

As the guest digs the bowl out of the dough, Ray says, "On a professional talk show, the staff would edit that out." Then she points backstage and says, "They're laughing their butts off. And that will become the promo for this show" (via YouTube).

Since Rachael Ray's show is in talk-show format, she delves into a variety of things in her kitchen. At one point, she tries out a hack that is supposed to help stretch out too-small shoes using water. However, it doesn't turn out as planned. Being a show with a live audience, the fail doesn't end up getting edited out of the show.

To achieve the hack, you're supposed to pour two cups of water into a zipper-lock bag and then place it into the offending too-tight shoe before freezing it. The idea is that, as the water freezes and expands, it's supposed to help stretch out the shoe to make it a little bigger on your feet.

Unfortunately, Ray doesn't do a good job of zipping the zipper on the baggie. So, when she sticks the bag of water into her high-heeled shoe, it leaks. Holding up the soaking wet shoe, she says, "Before you try this hack at home, I would strongly suggest waterproofing your shoe." Luckily, there is a pre-frozen shoe in the freezer for demonstration purposes. When she unsuccessfully tries getting the frozen bag of water out of her pre-prepared shoe, she declares, "I suck at this hack" (via YouTube). Perhaps the hack just works better for tennis shoes ... and other people.

Most of us have fought with a roll of plastic wrap or foil. However, most of us haven't had that fight on a television show like Rachael Ray has. "I hate it when foil doesn't want to cooperate, "she says as she pulls the rogue foil out of the box to try to wrangle it into submission. It isn't long before she is talking directly to the foil, grunting in frustration and saying things like, "I don't like you. I am going to win."

Finally, she manages to get the upper hand and yank the amount of foil she wants off the roll. "You know, I could put a sheet pan on top of [the pan], but I wanted to teach that foil a lesson," she declares (via YouTube). If anyone has ever taught foil a lesson, it was Ray. No sheet pans were used instead of foil on this day.

You'd like to think that people who bake professionally are immune to ruining or burning their food. However, Rachael Ray and her guests show us that it can happen to anyone. All it takes is a little distraction, and the next thing you know, you're smelling burning food.

When Ray has Clinton Kelly on her show, she and her guests are all calmly sitting around talking at the table when Kelly suddenly rushes into the kitchen because of the distinct smell of burning food in the oven. He opens up the oven but realizes he needs to find a towel to help him get the pan out without burning himself. In a fit of delayed reaction, everyone suddenly rushes to his aid in the kitchen. Ray takes the pan out of the oven and smiles as she slams it down on the stovetop in defeat. With that, she waves goodbye to the camera. After all, there's not much you can do with burnt appetizers.

Getting caught without a corkscrew to open a bottle of wine can be an intimidating conundrum for some people. There are lots of ways to attempt to get the cork out of a wine bottle. If you've ever tried any of them in desperation, finding one that works in your circumstance can be tricky. Luckily, quick-thinking Rachael Ray knows exactly how to remove hers without a single tool.

When Rachael Ray is faced with a corked wine bottle and breaks her corkscrew on the floor, she starts searching for another one. Since she can't find another corkscrew, she gets a brilliant idea of what to do to open the bottle. "Don't tell my mother I did this," she says before putting the cork in her mouth, grabbing it with her molars, and pulling it out with ease.

When her audience laughs, she says, "Whatever. You don't pay my dentist!" (via YouTube). While it's not the best idea in the world (and would be a horrible idea if it were champagne), pulling the cork out with her teeth works and solves Ray's problem of not having another corkscrew. However, it's probably best not to try this cork hack at home.

Dropped utensils can be a problem both at home and for a live cooking program. So, when Rachael Ray drops a whisk on the floor and needs another, it turns into a whole whisk debacle.

As she frantically searches through her drawers for another whisk, Ray says, "Eight drawers of utensils, but only one whisk apparently." After rummaging a bit more, she says, "Yep. No more whisks." Then, she raises her voice and yells to her helpers backstage, "Can I have another whisk?" When nobody responds, she starts searching more fervently through the drawers and yells again more loudly, "I need a whisk!" (via YouTube).

Finally, Kim comes from backstage to pick up the dirty whisk and bring her an extra one. "Don't you have a Kim at your house?" she asks (via YouTube). Ah, that's what we've all been missing. When we can't find our kitchen utensils, we all need a Kim.

Rachael Ray was once asked during a Q&A (or Q&Ray) session if she had ever had any type of accident while cooking. In response to the question, she says, "Please. Anyone who works in a kitchen for, in my case, 40 years — of course. You cut yourself. You burn yourself." However, some injuries are a tad bit more intense than others.

She tells about her first accidental self-wounding incident on Food Network, saying, "I wasn't even chopping. I was talking with my hands." She gesticulates with her hands to demonstrate talking while holding a knife. Then, she points to her left index finger and says she "sliced the tip of this finger off." Yeah, that's not how most of us get kitchen injuries. Luckily, a sliced fingertip can grow back, so she wasn't left maimed. 

Then, she goes on to explain that kitchen injuries are a given and that "It's just one of the laws of averages" (via YouTube). So, the longer you work in a kitchen, the more likely you are to hurt yourself, but hopefully not while gesticulating with a knife as Ray did.

Our favorite Rachael Ray kitchen fail is when she knocks over a bottle of extra virgin olive oil — or "EVOO" as she famously likes to call it. We love how she optimistically turned this fail into a win. It happens so fast that you could blink and easily miss the moment she knocks her EVOO bottle on the floor with a flick of her fingertips. She puts her hand on her hip and sassily says, "I just shattered my best friend — my olive oil cruet." The camera then pans to the mess on the floor. When the audience lets out a collective "Aw" she tells them, "Don't worry because there's an upside. I've just moisturized the callouses on my heels." Then, she lifts her leg and begins to rub in some of the olive oil that has splashed onto her leg to demonstrate how moisturized she has become. "And, I might add that my shoes are getting a lovely conditioning."

After one of her guests mentions how much grief her crew tends to give her for spilling salt on the floor, she grabs a whole bowl of salt and pours it over the spilled EVOO. "Good thing I have lots of salt on my floor to keep me from slipping," she says with a good-natured tinge of sarcasm (via the Rachael Ray Show).

The Rachael Ray show is full of moments when she can't get her machines to do what they're supposed to do. Being on the spot isn't helpful, especially when you've only got a short amount of time to put together recipes while entertaining guests.

She often has small battles with machines like blenders and food processors. She sometimes can't get her food processor to work for more than a few microseconds at a time or at all. It's especially hilarious when she gets someone from backstage to fix a machine for her. It works for a brief moment. However, when they walk away, the machine suddenly doesn't work again. "It hates me," he says of her food processor one time when she has to call someone from backstage again for help.

She's even had all the contents from a blender spew all over the kitchen when she couldn't get the lid to fit right. Still, the pesto must be tasted, even if it's tasted off each other's clothing and hair. "You know the old adage," Ray says with defeated glee. "It's not a party until you've puked pesto" (via YouTube).

Spilled coffee happens to all of us. Of course, if you're hitting your guest on the elbow while they're trying to get a cup of coffee to their mouth, it's a bigger possibility. Luckily for Rachael Ray, it didn't make a huge mess, but it still had to be cleaned. Co-host Regis Philbin observes what had happened and says, "This is bedlam here." Then, Ray gets up to get a towel to wipe up the mess, saying "Hold, please" (via the Rachael Ray Show). 

Meanwhile, everyone goes on talking as if nothing happened. When she returns, Ray has to squat down and slip the towel under her guest's arm to wipe up the mess in a way that is meant to be low-key and undisturbing to the conversation. But who can ignore an impishly grinning Rachael Ray when she's squatting around a table and wiping up the results of her own personal mayhem? We can't.