Celebrity Chefs Who Don't Eat What They Cook

Most celebrity chefs have at least one food they can't stand. Alton Brown hates truffle oil, and you won't likely find him utilizing the pungent ingredient in his recipes. Scott Conant famously told a Chopped contestant about his aversion to raw red onions, and when he uses them they've got to be caramelized, cooked, pickled, or otherwise tamed. Chrissy Teigen took to Twitter with her hatred of hummus, and based on her many tweets voicing her very strong dislike, it's highly unlikely that she would ever prepare a meal using the ingredient.

Then there are the chefs who have expressed their hatred for a specific food but cook with it anyway. Even though these celebrity chefs can't stand ingredients like bananas, eggs, or green bell peppers, they still use them in their recipes (and sometimes show up on cooking shows with the creations). Which celebrity chefs refuse to eat what they cook? A few of these might surprise you.

Celebrity chef Bobby Flay has been pretty outspoken about his hatred of durian — a notoriously stinky Southeast Asian fruit — but few people know how much he hates lentils. He told The New York Times that most people are "shocked" when they learn he dislikes the tiny legume. His aversion is so strong that he banned them from his restaurant Bar Americain (although, he does admit that "there are a lot of lentil fans out there," and his chefs ran lentil specials every time he went on vacation). 

Sure enough, lentils don't appear on any of his restaurant's menus, but he does have a few recipes featuring the ingredient. He cooked a warm lentil salad with roasted beets and goat cheese on The Early Show, and it must be something of a signature recipe because it also appears on the Food Network. He also published recipes for lentil and split pea dip with roasted garlic naan and veal chops with mixed peppercorns on lentils, so the lentil ban was clearly reprieved at some point.

It's rumored that this Food Network star doesn't actually eat anything she cooks. Allegedly, celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis keeps her thin appearance by spitting food out into a dump bucket after filming. Her rep denies the rumor, and we've reported that she does plenty of eating, but there are a few ingredients she can't stand. She told People that she hates green peppers so much, "no green peppers will ever be found in any of [her] recipes." That might be true, but it's not the case for her second most hated ingredient: coconut.

She might not be sipping on piña coladas, but she has made a few coconut recipes over the years, including a chocolate coconut cake, a Thai-style curry made with coconut milk, and a weird one for Halloween called coconut bones, a coconut-crusted pizza dough breadstick situation. Seeing as she's adamant about not eating coconut "...at all. In anything," we're pretty sure she utilized the dump bucket when she tested these recipes.

This Food Network star wasn't just sued for discrimination against female employees: she also discriminates against a few ingredients, too. Anne Burrell told People that she doesn't care for salmon or blue cheese. While she doesn't hate them to the point that she'll spit them out — she can "taste both of them and understand if the dish is prepared well" — she would never, ever sit down and eat a plate of salmon.

The culinary instructor in Burrell doesn't shy away from cooking with these ingredients for her viewers, though. She has plenty of salmon recipes on the Food Network's site, and she cooked salmon on her show Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. The same is true for blue cheese. She once prepared an appetizer featuring figs stuffed with gorgonzola and walnuts on the Rachel Ray Show. Ray tried the finished product at the end of the clip, but Burrell was never filmed trying the blue-cheese-stuffed bite.

There are a few foods Martha Stewart has been vocal about disliking, including everyone's favorite grilled chicken breast. She told Today that it's not her style, and she "would never have a salad with grilled chicken at [her] house." You can't exactly be a lifestyle guru without showing your fans how to make grilled chicken salads, though, and she has more than a few versions on her site, including a grilled Cobb and an avocado salad.

Chicken isn't the only ingredient that Stewart dislikes: She once called truffle oil "a hideous thing." She's not alone in this aversion — Alton Brown, Anthony Bourdain, and Gordon Ramsay have all strongly advised against using truffle oil. Despite her hatred, though, Stewart features a roasted mushrooms with Robiola and truffle oil recipe on her weddings website, and she once made herb and truffle oil popcorn with chefs David Bouley and Patrick O'Connell on her show. When O'Connell introduces the secret ingredient (white truffle oil), Stewart asks if it's the "real thing" or the "fabricated thing." He assures her it's real and it smells fabulous, to which Stewart unconvincingly responds, "Yeah, okay." No wonder we didn't see her take a bite of the popcorn when it finished.

Many airlines have partnered with first-class chefs to step up their in-flight offerings, but one of their culinary consultants refuses to eat the food he designed. In an interview with Refinery29 celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay admitted, "There's no f***ing way I eat on planes. I worked for airlines for 10 years, so I know where this food's been and where it goes, and how long it took before it got on board."

His claim that airplane food is questionable actually carries weight. In an interview with Fortune, former LSG Sky Chefs planning manager Alf Pomells admits that most food is brought in frozen. Once you account for the storage and thawing time, the food might be two or three days old before it hits your fold-down seat table. Ramsay might have consulted with Singapore Airlines for a decade to improve the food, but that doesn't mean he's going to eat it. Ironically enough, Ramsay named his restaurant in Heathrow Plane Food, and he reportedly eats there when he flies out of terminal five.

When you think of Mexican cuisine, peppers are one of the first things to come to mind. Celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez might use certain types of bell peppers in his cooking, and his recipes are no stranger to spicy chiles of all varieties, but he hates cooking with green bell peppers. He told the Food Network, "I like red bell peppers and yellow bell peppers, but green bell peppers just don't taste like much of anything."

Sánchez never had a blow-up moment about green peppers on Chopped like co-judge Scott Conant with the raw onions, and most of his recipes indeed call for the other colorful varieties of bell peppers. We did spy a few recipes where he sneaks a few of those flavorless green peppers in, though. You'll find a sautéed green bell pepper in his recipe for huitlacoche salsa, made with a corn fungus that's considered a delicacy in Mexico. He also uses them in the sofrito for his chicken fricassee recipe, too.

It's been well-documented that celebrity chef Guy Fieri hates eggs. It's almost hard to watch the episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives where Andrew Zimmern tries to make him eat a pizza with sunny-side-up eggs. He doesn't say anything when the "liquid chicken" is cracked onto the pizza, but he looks like he might throw up when the chef takes the jiggling eggs out of the oven. As she's slicing the pizza, he screams in horror, "No, don't cut through the yolk!"

He's not quite so disgusted when he shares his recipe for Loco Moco on Guy's Big Bite, though. Somehow, we doubt this is the recipe he actually makes at home given that pizza reaction. He plates the Loco Moco, complete with two sunny-side-up eggs, but when he digs into the dish, you never see him break the yolks, and he never touches a bite with egg.

You'll also find quite a few egg items on his restaurant menus. It's more than just a hard-boiled egg on a Cobb salad, too; one of the smokehouse specialties at Guy Fieri's Smokehouse Louisville includes a sunny-side-topped grilled bone-in ribeye, and — gasp — a whole lotta eggy breakfasts at Guy's Sammitch Joint

One of the things we love about the Pioneer Woman is her open, honest, down-to-earth demeanor. She doesn't hold back, including when it comes to her least favorite food: bananas. In an interview with Today, she confessed that she won't go near "anything involving bananas," but that doesn't mean she won't cook them for her fans. Even though she is 100 percent anti-banana, she knows there are a lot of people out there who love the wretched things.

There are exactly two banana recipes written by Drummond on The Pioneer Woman website: her mother's banana bread and a hilarious recipe for bananas Foster. In true Pioneer Woman style, Drummond peppers her hatred for the fruit into every possible moment of the recipe, exclaiming, "Yuck!" and advising that readers cut the banana inside the peel so you don't have to touch it with your hands, saying, "The evil might melt your fingertips!" No wonder we love her so much. In the end, her bananas Foster smells so good and she gets the urge to take a few small bites. The verdict? She didn't die, and it wasn't half bad, but she did make sure to get only tiny pieces of banana. After that, she skipped the banana altogether and went for the ice cream and sauce sans any chunks of fruit.

Michelin-starred chef and host of Bravo's Chef Academy, Jean-Christophe Novelli, is proof that even professional chefs can be picky eaters. In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, Novelli admits that he hates ketchup, doesn't care for cakes and biscuits with cinnamon, and when it comes to vegetables, he says, "I like garlic a lot, I dislike onions." Onions! Unfortunately for Novelli, that means he can't eat most of his creations, because the tear-inducing allium makes a frequent appearance in his recipes.

Take his French onion soup, for example. He describes the soup as "streets ahead of other good, hearty soups" and says his book wouldn't be complete without it. On an episode of Saturday Cooks!, he even describes it as one of his favorite recipes. But when he talks about a way to take the bitterness out of normal, conventional onions by soaking them in milk for several hours, and the host asks if the method works, Novelli hesitantly responds, "Apparently...I mean, I'm not too sure. But, I've tried and it did make some result." Hmm, not very convincing JC...