The recipes that made Ina Garten Famous! (2024)

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What dish is Ina Garten famous for? ›

Ina Garten's best recipes, from Beatty's Chocolate Cake to Beef Bourguignon, the lady is a master of easy delicious food we all want to make!

In 1999, Ina wrote her first book, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, which was one of the best-selling cookbooks of the year. The book invites readers into her specialty food store and shares the recipes that made it such a success. In 2001, Ina followed with best-selling Barefoot Contessa Parties!

Ina Rosenberg Garten (/ˈaɪnə/ EYE-nə; born February 2, 1948) is an American television cook and author. She is host of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa, and was a former staff member of the Office of Management and Budget.

The Barefoot Contessa's simple, meticulously tested recipes have helped drag me out of every cooking rut I've ever found myself in. Happily for all of us, Garten has shared a number of her recipes (and cooking tips) with Food & Wine.

Not just any old oatmeal will do when it comes to the Barefoot Contessa. "I've had the same thing for breakfast every single day for ten years: coffee and McCann's quick-cooking Irish oatmeal," Garten told Bon Appétit in a 2017 article. And her love of the stuff is well-documented.

The Simplest Dish In The World To Make, According To Ina Garten. After testing recipes for various projects all day, Ina Garten prefers to make something simple, quick, and ready straight out of the oven. Her favored dish is roast chicken. To make a roast chicken, preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

If it's a complicated recipe and I'm in the kitchen for most of the day, it's going to be worth the effort.” Garten meticulously crafts each recipe so even the most inexperienced of cooks can make them — perhaps the only skill set that transferred over from her budget analyst job.

In a new interview for Julia Louis-Dreyfus' podcast, Wiser Than Me, Garten admitted that it "wasn't a struggle at all" to decide against having children. "I had no interest in having children," she told Louis-Dreyfus. "I had a terrible childhood, and it was nothing I wanted to recreate.

Garten first became wealthy thanks to real estate. Before becoming famous, she purchased, renovated and flipped old homes, which gave her the funds to buy her original Barefoot Contessa shop.

Ina husband, Jeffrey, is also a financial powerhouse. According to Celebritynetworth.com, Jeffrey is worth $100 million, mostly thanks to his former jobs as managing director of Lehman Brothers and Blackstone Group.

Does Ina Garten have a college degree? ›

Ina Garten once worked in the White House and worked her way up, which eventually put her in charge of writing the nuclear budget for the United States. She also managed to earn her MBA from George Washington University at the same time. Despite her success, she decided she wanted a different life.

1. Consommé Devilish dish: A clear soup made from meat, tomato, egg whites and stock, slowly simmered to bring impurities to the surface for skimming. Techn-eeek: Even some of the most experienced chefs cannot master the complex clarification process required to make consommé.

But we'd guess that not many of us spend as much time in our kitchens as Ina Garten, the Food Network personality and cookbook author who goes to work in her kitchen all year long.

Her fame may be relatively quiet — she doesn't have a line of cookware, there isn't a namesake restaurant — but make no mistake: Ina Garten is a powerhouse celeb chef. Fans know her story well: From a White House budget analyst to specialty food-store owner, her path to stardom has been slow and steady.

She says around 40 percent of those followers are younger than the East Hampton vanilla extract — among them, millennials who crave the human connection a shared meal can provide, who find that Garten's recipes take the stress out of preparing one.

Before Ina purchased the shop in 1978, the previous owners had dubbed it the Barefoot Contessa, inspired by the 1954 Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name. Ina decided to keep the name after taking ownership, according to People.com.

Garten ran the Barefoot Contessa store for 18 years — eventually moving it from Westhampton Beach to a bigger location in East Hampton — before she sold it to two of her employees in 1996. Three years later, Garten published her first cookbook with recipes from her store. Then, Food Network came calling.

The self-taught culinary genius, colloquially known as the Barefoot Contessa, is a fan of a particular fast food chain. Unlikely as it sounds for a celeb chef who founded a store known for specialty and gourmet foods, Ina Garten stands firmly by her love for the West Coast's famed In-N-Out Burger.