These Are Alex Guarnaschelli's Least Favorite Ingredients To Work With

If you've ever watched a televised cooking competition, you know that the contestants sometimes have to work with some pretty weird ingredients. A few of the strangest ingredients featured on "Chopped" were pickled pig lips, goat brains, and Rocky Mountain oysters. And that's only a tiny fraction of the challenging ingredients that celebrity chefs face on a regular basis.

That being said, plenty of us are grossed out by ingredients that most people would consider quite normal. Guy Fieri, for example, can't stand to work with or eat eggs. Rachael Ray hates store-bought mayonnaise (which is totally fair, sorry, not sorry). And Katie Lee, a self-professed lover of spicy foods, refuses to eat wasabi.

Iron Chef Alex Guarnaschelli is no exception. Despite all her experience with both cooking and judging others' cooking, she still struggles with certain ingredients herself. That's right, even our culinary hero has an Achilles' heel. Must be something really out-there, right?

If you're thinking Alex Guarnaschelli dreads the infamously stinky durian fruit or canned spaghetti, think again. As she told Food Network, "Hot dogs are tough! Simple, but a real killer. And chicken feet."

At first, hot dogs being a tough ingredient to work with might seem laughable. The go-to American classic for baseball games and barbecue parties is easy to cook and easier to serve. However, when you really think about it, hot dogs are kind of gross. They're essentially a tube of meat paste. (Sorry.) Plus, what can you do in a cooking competition when you're given a precooked hot dog?

Guarnaschelli's second food foe probably makes a lot more sense, at least to Americans. Chicken feet can look unappealing, with their scaly texture and long talons. That being said, they are popular in other cultures: a dim sum chicken feet dish is popular in Chinese cuisine (via Foreign Fork). Because Guarnaschelli specializes mainly in French and American cuisines, we can forgive her for this one.